If a court system were developed using crowdsourcing to form its jury decisions, what things would have to change?
If pets can have positive effects on their owners emotions would a robot pet be able to do the same?
But for now, users of the robo-bunny need to be wired up to biometric sensors for the rabbit to sense the user s emotional state
You can t seriously expect kids to be wired up with sensors while they re using this,
Developed by graduate student Anna Flagg, the sensor#right now just a square blob a few inches long,
The one thing a robot can do that s different from an animal is truly be in the service of its owner
You can t always expect that from a robot.##The wired version of the Haptic Creature#robot rabbit began as a theoretical experiment by Ph d. student Steve Yohannon,
who was interested in learning whether the language of touch was universal. That is, whether everyone expresses emotion through touch
There s no way the sensor will be able to learn a pattern here, #she said. The seven volunteers recruited to scratch
and pet the fur sensor all had their own ways of interacting with the blob,
The wired robot rabbit has already proved popular among its test subjects, though: children with anxiety disorders and children on the autism spectrum.
#Integrating the fur sensor into the robot is a first step.##ore tests are planned#Maclean is planning a study at the children s hospital in Vancouver to see
if the robot is useful for kids about to undergo surgery. We have ideas for adults.
Probably not a 20-pound robot, but your cellphone could do this. It would be interesting to have a little companion with
#Edible silk sensors let you know if your food is spoiled Sensors pick up the change when a fruit ripens or rots.
have taken you ever a big gulp of milk only to find out then that the milk is sour.?
Scientists at Tufts University have engineered now the multitalented material into fully chewable food sensors. Pasted onto eggs,
People are always looking forward to some kind of sensor that s easy to use and gives you information about spoilage.#
#The flexible sensors are made of gold antennae embedded in a purified silk film support (that Tao and his collaborators first prototyped in 2010.
The whole sensor is flexible, and can curve according to the shape of the fruit it s being stuck on.
The silk film doubles up as the sensor s glue, turning sticky when exposed to water.
The sensor is pasted then directly onto the food that needs tracking, eliminating the need for an additional glue to keep it clinging on.
tested the sensors on bananas, eggs, apples, cheese, and milk, and published the results in Advanced Materials.
Tao s gold sensors pick up on that change, and emit a different electromagnetic signal when monitored with a reader.
We can tailor our sensor to be extremely sensitive to the change of the dielectric property,
Sensors for bananas, for example, are slightly bigger than sensors for milk. The working principles behind the sensors are based on existing RFID techthe difference here is that the sensors aren t hard electronics
they re flexible, edible stickers. In August last year, Tao was part of a collaboration, headed up by John Rogers at the University of Illinois,
but a silk-based approach like those employed on food sensors could also work, says Tao.
The Silent Herdsman collar will track the movements of the cow using the same type of sensors found in Wii devices.
Researchers also hope to determine which movements the sensor will pick up to determine when cows are in heat The collar is being developed by researchers from the University of Strathclyde, Morrisons, Scottish Agricultural College, Harbro, Well Cow, National Milk Records (NMR) and Embedded Technology Solutions.
damage, theft, hacking, misuse. Schools would have to be ready to buy a lot of spare units. Textbook Replacements Of course, all of the hardware and maintenance costs of the ipad don t include the price of buying a fresh textbook for every student in every class, every year.
and flexible data-capture sensors built-in. The fashion options here will be incredible. 3.)Self-moving Fabrics It will no longer be good enough for smart fabrics to merely collect
And they jumped on the cloud computing bandwagon with the new Evos Concept Car. But behind the flashy surfaces
and tech trimming lies some far bigger opportunities. 5.)Driverless cars The next revolution in transportation will be self-driving cars,
Google s self-driving car project has racked already up over 200,000 driverless miles on highways. 6.)Ground-Based Delivery Drones Before we have sold driverless passenger cars in any sizable quantities
we will see ground-based delivery drones hauling point-to-point cargo. Better to practice without passengers onboard to perfect the technology.
Parrot officially unveiled the follow-up to its popular quadrocopter at CES AR Drone 2. 0 Flying Drones
and already own an AR Drone. Unveiled at CES, the new Drone 2. 0 features a 720p front-facing camera
so that you can capture your flights in HD. There s also a whole raft of new sensors
including an onboard magnetometer so that it can always tell where the pilot is in relation to its flight path,
and a new air pressure sensor that allows it to be more stable when hovering. That said, these drones have very short battery life (10 min max),
and so far have little application outside of the hobbyist community. The world of flying drones will become infinitely more useful
when some of the following begin to appear: 7.)Flying-Hovering Monitor Drones Whenever an accident or disaster happens,
the initial first-step should be to get eyes on the scene.##Dispatching a flying drone with video cameras that transmits a live feed back to a central command center will give first responders critical information to formulate an action plan before they arrive. 8.)Video Projector Drones Once a video projector is added to a flying drone,
you suddenly have a marketer s dream tool with the ability to project images on the sides of buildings, on sidewalks,
or even on the side of a moving vehicle. 9.)Lighting Drones We ve been trapped into thinking that lighting can only be managed from stationary positions,
Audio Drones Drones outfitted with speakers are already being experimented with. Long Range Acoustic devices (LRAD) are being used as loud hailers to emit warning signals.
Audio drones, however, have far more potential in the marketing and entertainment fields. Floating and flying sounds create a far different sensation than stationary speakers.
Delivery Drones-Can you imagine a flying drone with UPS or Fedex on its side? Thinking beyond traditional delivery systems, flying drones could be used to deliver food, packages, water,
change out the batteries in your home, remove trash and sewage, and even vacuum the leaves from your front lawn.
Miscellaneous Technologies As with many new technologies, not all of them fit into easily definable categories.
Smart Dustin its simplest form, smart dust consists of a sensor combined with a wireless transmitter and some kind of power source.
But contact lenses are also being developed that use embedded sensors and electronics to monitor disease and dispense drugs.
to 3d printing of parts and objects, to next generation food printers. These aren t the artificial food devices that science fiction movies have been promising.
) Disposable Batteries for Smartphones At CES there was no shortage of battery companies. Virtually any object that needs power has a battery vendor exhibiting several different options.
But as of yet, there are no cheap disposable batteries for Smartphones. Yes, it is indeed a bad idea to fill landfills with more batteries,
but when the only option is either a $50 rechargeable battery or nothing at all, there is a huge need not currently being filled. 23.)
Accomplishment-Based Educational Apps-Much of what happens in today s colleges and universities is based on symbols of achievement,#not actual accomplishments.
Students that enter a classroom will typically find themselves immersed in an academic competition, a competition that pits students against each other to produce results that best match the teacher s expectations.
Swarm-Bots-Swarm robotics involves the design and operation of multiple robots, or swarms, inspired by the behavior observed in social insects, called swarm intelligence.
when on November 1st in 2008 a mysterious paper appeared on an obscure cryptography listserv describing details for a new digital currency called bitcoin.
to 3d printing of parts and objects, to next generation food printers. These aren t the artificial food devices that science fiction movies have been promising.
or via tiny sensors built into their eyewear, clothes, watch, ring or bracelet. Full immersion video gaming is a hit pastime.
and robots cultivate fruit and vegetables for home and overseas markets. In a world where technology has replaced people in many roles,
Effective language technologies (natural language processing, speech recognition and speech synthesis) are in common use. According to Android vice president Hugo Barra, these were near-perfect for some languages in 2013.
and from Google glass. Innovega led the early work here, eventually collaborating with a number of Qatari start-ups.
The search engine giant wanted them on the roads by 2020 but safety experts warned as early as 2012 that the failure of governments to agree on objective performance standards would delay their arrival significantly.
altering the economy as products (from micro-batteries to phones and medical implants) can be produced for a fraction of their traditional manufacture costs.
With the national obesity and diabetes epidemics of the 2010s a distant memory, fastfood chains are a thing of the past.
By the early 2020s we will print out a significant fraction of the products we use including clothing as well as replacement organs. 3d printing is getting a lot of attention.
We re in the early boom phase of 3d printing enthusiasm and hopefully we ve learned enough to avoid a period of undue disillusionment,
but I do see the early 2020s as the golden era of 3d printing. For example, in the early 2020s, you ll have a choice of many thousands of cool clothing designs that are open source
and that can be printed out for pennies a pound. But that will not mean the end of the fashion industry.
Despite enormous changes in business models (and the availability of many free open source products) the overall revenues for proprietary forms of these products remains strong.
and then populating it with a patient s own stem cells, all with a 3d printer.
Within five years, search engines will be based on an understanding of natural language. Consider that IBM s Watson got a higher score on the American television game of Jeopardy than the best two human players combined.
we will add the tactile sense to full immersion virtual reality. The telephone is virtual reality in that you can meet with someone
as if you are together, at least for the auditory sense. We ve now added the visual sense with video conferencing#although not yet 3d and full immersion.
We ll be able to do that in the 2030s with nanobots traveling noninvasively into the brain through the capillaries
In 1949, fearful of a Soviet nuclear attack, President Harry Truman issued an order to stop the clustering of major buildings in Washington,
It s surmounted by a spinning laser turret and knobbed with cameras, radar, antennas, and G. P. S. It looks a little like an ice-cream truck, lightly weaponized for inner-city work.
recording their maneuvers in his car s sensor logs, analyzing traffic flow, and flagging any problems for future review.
#oei m a robot.##What separates Levandowski from the nerds I knew is this: his wacky ideas tend to come true.#
As a sophomore, he won a national robotics competition with a machine made out of Legos that could sort Monopoly money#fair analogy for what he s been doing for Google lately.
It ends with robots harvesting our bodies for energy.##Levandowski understands the sentiment. He just has more faith in robots than most of us do.#
#oepeople think that we re going to pry the steering wheel from their cold, dead hands, #he told me,
but driverless cars still putter along in prototype. Human beings, as it turns out, aren t easy to improve upon.
and sensors were ready for us.##Almost from the beginning, the field divided into two rival camps:
They needed sensors to guide them, computers to steer them, digital maps to follow. In the nineteen-eighties, a German engineer named Ernst Dickmanns, at the Bundeswehr University in Munich, equipped a Mercedes van with video cameras and processors,
#the roboticist Sebastian Thrun told me.##oethe sensors weren t there, the computers weren t there,
and the mapping wasn t there. Radar was a device on a hilltop that cost two hundred million dollars.
It wasn t something you could buy at Radio shack.##Thrun, who is forty-six, is the founder of the Google Car project.
he took a job at the country s leading center for driverless car research: Carnegie mellon University.
He went on to build robots that explored mines In virginia, guided visitors through the Smithsonian,
What he didn t build was driverless cars. Funding for private research in the field had dried up by then.
His favorite example is from a robotics contest at M. I t. in 1991. Tasked with building a machine that could shoot the most Ping-pong balls into a tube,
Charlie, this is robotics. Nothing actually works.##Finally, a year into the project, a Russian engineer named Alex Krasnov cracked the code.
Its robotic Humvee, Sandstorm, drove just seven and a half miles before careering off course. A helicopter later found it beached on an embankment,
the robots just weren t smart enough. In the wrong light, they couldn t tell a bush from a boulder, a shadow from a solid object.
a roboticist at Carnegie mellon, had hit upon an unusually efficient way to do this: he let his car teach itself.
Pomerleau equipped the computer in his minivan with artificial neural networks, modelled on those in the brain.
Machine learning is an idea nearly as old as computer science#lan Turing, one of the fathers of the field, considered it the essence of artificial intelligence.
and refine than machine learning. The trick, as in any educational system, is to combine the two in proper measure.
The C. M. U. team was led by the legendary roboticist William (Red) Whittaker. Pomerleau had left the university by then to start his own firm.
His robots had crawled over Antarctic ice fields and active volcanoes, and inspected the damaged nuclear reactors at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
Both teams used similar sensors and software, but Thrun and Montemerlo concentrated more heavily on machine learning.#
#oeit was our secret weapon, #Thrun told me. Rather than program the car with models of the rocks
putting something together that had never been done in robotics before, and some were insanely impressive.#
The driverless car project occupies a lofty, garagelike space in suburban Mountain view. It s part of a sprawling campus built by Silicon graphics in the early nineties and repurposed by Google, the conquering army, a decade later.
dulled somewhat by his Google glass eyewear. At one point, he asked if I d like to try the glasses on.
despite his victory in the second Grand Challenge, didn t think that driverless cars could work on surface streets#here were just too many variables.#
#And a few yards away in the laboratory, robotic arms mix together some compounds to produce the desired cells.
He has a chauffeur and it s a robot. Levandowski backs out of his suburban driveway in the usual manner.
it has used its GPS and other sensors to determine its location in the world. On the dashboard
right in front of the windshield, is a low-profile heads-up display. manual, it reads, in sober sans serif font, white on black.
The graphics are reminiscent of Pong. But the game play? Pure Frogger. There are two buttons on Levandowski s steering wheel, off and on,
Google has a small fleet of driverless cars now plying public roads. They are test vehicles,
The best way to execute that robot-to-human hand-off remains an open question.
#oeit ends with robots harvesting our bodies for energy.##Google is still not saying much to reporters (including this one) about its plans,
and it works on the same principle that radar and sonar do#ut today s most advanced lidar is much more accurate,
Who has control of a driverless car? For the autonomous vehicle that now drives Levandowski to work, the answer (according to Smith) is logical:
Peter Stone, an artificial-intelligence expert at the University of Texas at Austin, thinks that intersecting streams of automated traffic will essentially flow through one another, controlled by a new piece of road infrastructure#he computerized intersection manager.
Both use a combination of radar and computer vision to center the vehicle in the lane
The problem is that even the best radar -and vision-based pedestrian-avoidance systems fail to see the proverbial child running into the road 1 or 2 percent of the time.#
working with low-cost radar and camera components, will never adequately bridge that gap. It s chosen a different technical path,
#E-cigarettes are powered battery devices that look like cigarettes but do not burn tobacco. Rather, they deliver nicotine, flavor and other chemicals in the form of a vapor.
extra batteries and various nicotine cartridges, can cost $20 to $200. Because of the limited research into e-cigarette use, their risks and benefits remain uncertain and subject to widespread debate.
A small Photo Voltaic solar panel provides power for the micro controller, sensors, various valves, etc.
and is designed to work with PV solar panels and batteries, to continually generate water even in emergency situations.
and weight issues of previous prototypes. 9. Agriculture Robots Agricultural robotics are, somewhat surprisingly, still in their infancy.
Many companies worldwide are attempting to bring various types of robot farmhands to market, but in robotics (where government and academic projects still lead the way) it tends to take longer than in some other,
more commercial industries for such projects to obtain funding, produce a product, and prove its viability.
One Boston company that was able to raise nearly $8 billion in private funds in 2011 has developed a robot that it claims could perform 40 percent of the manual labor currently performed on farms.
A Japanese research company has developed a robot that performs stereo imaging of strawberries to determine their ripeness before picking them,
and MIT has a cherry tomato garden that is managed by a small crew of robots equipped with vision sensors.
the main advantage to robot farm workers is the fact that they can work around the clock and never get tired. 8. Sunscreen Pills An effective sunscreen that can be administered orally has been sought after for some time now.
it could bring about an end to batteries as we know them. 2. Ultra-High Speed Tube Trains Magnetic levitation,
Even before the preliminary design hit the. pdf#which he released open-source, no strings attached-Musk had made clear that the Hyperloop remained#oeextremely speculative.#
and juiced with 3, 400 pounds of batteries. The compressor s job is to blow onrushing air behind the capsule-otherwise,
and 3d printers cranking out spacecraft parts. Then he went toe-to-toe with Musk in a discussion of evacuated-tube transport.
#Agriculture the New Game of Drones Futurist Thomas Frey: A few days ago the people in Deer trail, Colorado made national news with a proposed ballot initiative to allow hunting licenses to shoot down flying drones.
Deer trail would charge $25 for drone hunting licenses, and the town would offer a $100 bounty reward for shooters who bring in debris from an unmanned aircraft from the U s. government.
This perfectly illustrates the growing paranoia associated with UAVS (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) often referred to as drones.
But the good people living in the farming community of Deer trail have obviously not been paying attention to the positive uses for drones
more specifically, the use of drones in agriculture. Even though the vast majority of drone use today is government and military,
one of the big emerging markets will be agriculture. Several new companies have begun moving into the ag-drone space,
but there are a few short-term problems. Current FAA rules limit their operation to under 400 feet
and to steer clear of airports and crowds on the ground. But that will change in a couple years.
The U s. Congress has mandated the FAA incorporate drones into national airspace by Sept. 30,2015. Many in this new industry are chomping at the bit to get started.
once drones get okayed for the national air space, the first 3 years will produce $13. 6 billion in economic activity
The FAA estimated up to 10,000 drones could be airborne in the U s. by 2018. Here s why that number is far too low.
Agriculture drones typically come in a fixed wing or quadcopter configuration Today s Ag Industry Drones There are many possible uses for flying drones,
and as we add capabilities, potential uses will grow dramatically. We are limited in our thinking to
but flying drones can be built large enough to move people and houses, and small enough to be invisible to the human eye.
and simply adding elements like cameras, lights, audio, sensors, video projectors, or even a robotic arm can increase the utility of a drone exponentially.
I ve written about some of these possibilities in previous articles. The automation of farming has led to fewer people tending massive estates, with many growing to tens of thousands of acres.
Drones, however, have the ability to amp up awareness, giving farmers powerful tools for managing both the plant and its growing environment throughout its lifecycle.
and research that can be automated through the use of drones: Terrain, rock, tree, and obstacle mapping Hybrid lifecycle charting Chlorophyll damage detection Ground cover profiling Wind profile
and CO2 sensing Trait assessment for breeding Wireless data collection from ground sensors Plant status tracking Crop status (growing stage, yield estimates, etc.)
and tracking+Weed levels Drone Startups With military use of drones beginning to level off, the industry itself is searching for other options,
In addition to the obvious skills of aviation and agriculture, they need people skilled in wireless communications, image sensors
) The Octane from Volt Aerial Robotics (voltaerialrobotics. com) The Octane multirotor drone weighs 4 lbs
. and takes high resolution, GPS-referenced imagery and video, and the company claims is easier to fly than fixed-wing UAVS.
) ebee and Swingletcam by sensefly (sensefly. com) Sensefly, a Switzerland-based manufacturer of both the ebee UAV and the Swinglet CAM, is already selling its digital camera equipped mini-drones to growers
these drones can create high-resolution Orthomosaic reconstructions from aerial imagery. 16 megapixel camera and 30 minutes flight range. 5.)AIMQ by DMZ Aerial (dmzaerial. com) DMZ Aerial s Aerial Intelligence Modified Quadcopter,
is sold in a package, which includes the UAV, the ipad flight app, camera, charging station, high performance batteries, Wi-fi extender,
and a tracking system. The UAV is controlled manually by using an ipad. DMZ provides flight training, guidance on effective scouting and technical support.
along with a stabilized Gopro3 camera, radio controller, batteries/charger, and a waterproof case. APA s newest model, the fully autonomous APA X4 is priced at $5, 000.7.)
) Experimental Ag Drone by Inventworks (inventworksinc. com) Inventworks Inc. and Boulder Labs Inc. have collaborated on developing an autonomous aerial drone with multispectral cameras to capture high-resolution images of row crop.
Image identification software will give farmers precise location of weeds that require suppression. 8.)RMAX by Yamaha (rmax. yamaha-motor. com. au) Yamaha s development of utility
he had no idea that we d some day be able to use 3d printers to#oeprint#a replica of his statue, one dot at a time, in hours rather than years.
Similarly, it s difficult to imagine a 20-ton tractor being replaced with swarms of flying drones.
#oeswarmbots#is a term to describe a grouping of robots that work together like a school of fish or a flock of birds.
The first iteration of tractor-replacing swarmbots will be based ground drones, with dozens of them working together to do the work of today s large tractors.
Phase 1#Data Drones Most of the drones today are focused on developing better information about the plants
Phase 2#Protection Drones Some companies are already working on Phase 2 drones capable of proactively protecting the crops from bugs, birds, disease,
protection drones may even be able to compensate for extreme weather conditions by applying warm foam during freezing conditions
Eventually there will be flying drones with lasers mounted on them. Because of the possible dangers, their use will be restricted highly, at least for the most powerful ones.
it s entirely possible to visualize a type of drone capable of breaking rocks, killing pests,
David Dorhout s robotic seeding machine Phase 3#Seeding, Harvesting Drones Robotics researchers at the National Agricultural Research center in Tsukuba,
Japan have experimented already with rice-planting robots. And American farmers already ride semiautomatic tractors that use GPS positioning to plant perfect rows of wheat.
Another form of robotic seeding machine is being created by David Dorhout founder of Dorhout R&d.
His autonomous five-legged#oeprospero#robot can move around in swarms with the ability to detect ideal planting spots,
digging holes, planting the seeds and then applying fertilizer or herbicides. As prices improve for specialty crops,
Over time, flying swarmbots will replace the ground-based drones, with thousands of tiny machines working in concert to replace the need for today s massive pieces of equipment.
Most ag drones are easily transportable in a case Final Thoughts A recent study by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) predicts that in a matter of years, the drone,
Aerial drones are about to become an everyday part of our lives. This is an industry in its infancy
And drones will be an essential part of making this happen. By Futurist Thomas Frey Author of#oecommunicating with the Future##the book that changes everything Via Futuristspeaker. com Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati swfobject. embedswf (http://www. youtube
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