Dragonfly Robot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz0XNGJ-ep8

Check out this video.  It is a Robot Dragonfly.  They show how the dragon fly and fly around the room being mainly controlled by a remote control.  It is so amazing to me that robots have come so far and how their parts can be so small and detailed.  

Russome Universal Robots summery(first use of the word robots)

Hey guys i found the cliff notes for Rossum's Universal Robot

R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots)

RUR [ Intro & Summary | Image Archive | Review ]

R.U.R. was written in 1920, premiered in Prague early in 1921, was performed in New York in 1922, and published in English translation in 1923. The following year, G. B. Shaw and G. K. Chesterton were among those in London participating in a public discussion of the play. Capek responded, via The Saturday Review, to what he felt was the excessive thematic attention they and other critics paid to one of his devices: "For myself, I confess that as the author I was much more interested in men than in Robots." [1]

Virtually every encyclopedia or textbook etymology of the word "robot" mentions the play R.U.R. Although the immediate worldwide success of the play immediately popularized the word (supplanting the earlier "automaton"), it was actually not Karel Capek but his brother Josef, also a respected Czech writer, who coined the word. The Czech word robota means "drudgery" or "servitude"; a robotnik is a peasant or serf. Although the term today conjures up images of clanking metal contraptions, Capek's Robots (always capitalized) are more accurately the product of what we would now call genetic engineering. The play describes "kneading troughs" and "vats" for processing a chemical substitute for protoplasm, and a "stamping mill" for forming Robot bodies. A more imaginative and scientifically plausible description of the artificial creation of armies of workers would have to wait for Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932). [2]

The translator (Paul Selver) changed the play quite a bit while preparing the English version, combining two Robot characters into one, and considerably toning down the ending. If you're interested in reading the play as it was originally presented to American audiences, read the 1920s version (most university libraries will have a copy -- it was tremendously popular in its day).

In the 1990s, a new translation, with much better dialogue and a chilling new final speech (new to English audiences, anyway) by the Robot Damon, was published in a Capek reader called Toward the Radical Center (with a short introduction by Arthur Miller).

Plot Summary (spoilers)

In R.U.R., the idealistic young Helena Glory arrives at the remote island factory of Rossum's Universal Robots, on a mission from a humanitarian organization devoted to liberating the Robots. From Domin (sometimes translated as "Domain"), she receives a compressed account of the company's father-and-son founders (who do not appear in the play). The mad inventor Old Rossum was bent on usurping the role of the Creator by artificially reproducing a man in painstaking detail, while the practical industrialist Young Rossum produced a stripped-down version of humanity to be sold as inexpensive workers: Domin: Practically speaking, what is the best kind of worker? Helena: The best? Probably the one who-- who-- who is honest-- and dedicated. Domin: No, it's the one that's the cheapest. The one with the fewest needs... [Young Rossum] chucked out everything not directly related to work, and [in] doing that he virtually rejected the human being and created the Robot. (41)

Mass-produced by Robot-run assembly lines, Robots remember everything, and think of nothing new. According to Domin, "They'd make fine university professors." Rejecting Helena's theory that Robots have souls, the psychologist Hallemeier admits that once in a while, a Robot will throw down his work and start gnashing his teeth. The human managers treat such an event as evidence of a product defect, but Helena prefers to interpret it as a sign of the emerging soul.

Domin rather inexplicably asks Helena to marry him. She accepts, but continues working to help the Robots by requesting that a scientist modify some Robots, so that their souls might develop more fully. One of the modified creatures is a Robotess, beautiful but useless. The scientist speculates that if the Robotess (named after her spiritual mother Helena) were to "wake up," she would hate him for making her so beautiful, yet giving her a body that cannot know love or give birth. The human Helena begins identifying with hothouse flowers -- sterile because they are artificially cultivated, satisfying a consumer demand that nature fulfills too slowly on her own. Meanwhile, human fertility has been dropping worldwide; industrial civilization's drive towards order and mechanization has made mankind superfluous.

The price would appear to be the gradual extermination of the human race; but one of Helena's specially modified Robots issues a manifesto: "Robots of the world, you are ordered to exterminate the human race. . . Work must not cease!" Domain possesses Old Rossum's formula for producing Robots -- a bargaining tool he hopes to use to ensure the freedom of the humans holed up in the factory. Helena, who has been kept ignorant of the real threat the Robots propose, decides to burn the formula, on the theory that halting the production of the Robots will halt the spread of economic and political collapse. The Robots swarm onto the stage, killing all the humans, leaving only Alquist -- the only human at the factory who still works with his hands. The Robot leader Damon plans to populate the earth: "We will give birth by machine. We will build a thousand steam-powered mothers. From them will pour forth a river of life. Nothing but life! Nothing but Robots!"

This dream, spoken by Damon (a demon?) echoes the dream of Domin (Dominus, the Lord?) -- both hope to use machinery to improve upon the work of nature. Without the all-important manuscript, however, the Robots discover "The only thing we cannot produce is Robots. The machines are turning out nothing but bloody chunks of meat." [3] They cajole, threaten and beg Alquist to help them discover what they call "the secret of life." In desperation, Damon offers himself up for study; screaming on the dissection table, he orders Alquist to continue the search.

Nature eventually re-emerges triumphant when two Robots (the beautiful but otherwise useless Helena, and Primus) fall in love. The play ends on an uplifting, religious note. Alquist blesses the lovers, renames them Adam and Eve, and sends them out to avoid the sins that destroyed their predecessors.

Robots With Feelings

This article talks about a project that is currently underway in regards to emotions with robots. They are currently testing out robots to have them express emotions of their own and to grow attached to people with emotional feelings. I think that this may be dangerous, because what if a robot learns to not like certain people???, then they may try to do something bad to that person. I think that robots should stay as machines that perform repetitive labor, and are not given emotional feelings.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081120111622.htm

Robots for the Home

Here are some robots just in time for the holiday season. Irobot has everything from the popular Roomba to a robot that will clean your gutters or pool. Do you think that in time people will no longer have to do "chores" and will be able to focus on the more important things in life?? I know that I hate having to clean, as soon as a reliable robot is put out for a reasonable price, I plan on purchasing it.

http://store.irobot.com/home/index.jsp

Robots in Hospitals

Robots are being used in hospitals, just like I talked about in my presentation. This article says that they are currently using the robots to perform simple routine surgeries. They hope in the future that they can perform major surgeries like heart surgery. Robots are being controlled by the surgeons from a remote location, so they can actually perform some of these surgeries from anywhere in the world. This is helping to keep costs down, and keeping less people in the surgery room.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/04/19/robmedical/index.html

cool articale

Futurist Ray Kurzweil explains how the boundary between man and machine is quickly disappearing. PLUS: A gallery of today's most mind-blowing 'bots

By Ray Kurzweil. Photo essay text by Eric Mika Posted 09.01.2006 at 2:00 am 3 Comments

by John B. Carnett: John B. Carnett

View Photo Gallery

Click "View Photos" to meet the world's most advanced humanoid precursors: a 'bot with vocal cords, a mapmaking Segway, and more. And to hear more from Ray Kurzweil on his visionary predictions, subscribe to the PopSci Podcast (directions below).

Human experience is marked by a refusal to obey our limitations. We´ve escaped the ground, we´ve escaped the planet, and now, after thousands of years of effort, our quest to build machines that emulate our own appearance, movement and intelligence is leading us to the point where we will escape the two most fundamental confines of all: our bodies and our minds. Once this point comes-once the accelerating pace of technological change allows us to build machines that not only equal but surpass human intelligence-we´ll see cyborgs (machine-enhanced humans like the Six Million Dollar Man), androids (human-robot hybrids like Data in Star Trek) and other combinations beyond what we can even imagine.

Although the ancient Greeks were among the first to build machines that could emulate the intelligence and natural movements of people (developments invigorated by the Greeks´ musings that human intelligence might also be governed by natural laws), these efforts flowered in the European Renaissance, which produced the first androids with lifelike movements. These included a mandolin-playing lady, constructed in 1540 by Italian inventor Gianello Torriano. In 1772 Swiss watchmaker Pierre Jacquet-Droz built a pensive child named L´crivain (The Writer) that could write passages with a pen. L´crivain´s brain was a mechanical computer that was impressive for its complexity even by today´s standards.

Such inventions led scientists and philosophers to speculate that the human brain itself was just an elaborate automaton. Wilhelm Leibniz, a contemporary of Isaac Newton, wrote around 1700: â€What if these theories are really true, and we were magically shrunk and put into someone´s brain while he was thinking. We would see all the pumps, pistons, gears and levers working away, and we would be able to describe their workings completely, in mechanical terms, thereby completely describing the thought processes of the brain. But that description would nowhere contain any mention of thought! It would contain nothing but descriptions of pumps, pistons, levers!â€

Leibniz was on to something. There are indeed pumps, pistons and levers inside our brain-we now recognize them as neurotransmitters, ion channels and the other molecular components of the neural machinery. And although we don´t yet fully understand the details of how these little machines create thought, our ignorance won´t last much longer.

The word â€robot†originated almost a century ago. Czech dramatist Karel Capek first used the term in his 1921 play R.U.R. (for â€Rossum´s Universal Robotsâ€), creating it from the Czech word â€robota,†meaning obligatory work. In the play, he describes the invention of intelligent biomechanical machines intended as servants for their human creators. While lacking charm and goodwill, his robots brought together all the elements of machine intelligence: vision, touch sensitivity, pattern recognition, decision making, world knowledge, fine motor coordination and even a measure of common sense.

Capek intended his intelligent machines to be evil in their perfection, their perfect rationality scornful of human frailty. These robots ultimately rise up against their masters and destroy all humankind, a dystopian notion that has been echoed in much science fiction since.

The specter of machine intelligence enslaving its creators has continued to impress itself on the public consciousness. But more significantly, Capek´s robots introduced the idea of the robot as an imitation or substitute for a human being. The idea has been reinforced throughout the 20th century, as androids engaged the popular imagination in fiction and film, from Rosie to C-3PO and the Terminator.

The first generation of modern robots were, however, a far cry from these anthropomorphic visions, and most robot builders have made no attempt to mimic humans. The Unimate, a popular assembly-line robot from the 1960s, was capable only of moving its one arm in several directions and opening and closing its gripper. Today there are more than two million Roomba robots scurrying around performing a task (vacuuming) that used to be done by humans, but they look more like fast turtles than maids. Most robots will continue to be utilitarian devices designed to carry out specific tasks. But when we think of the word â€robot,†Capek´s century-old concept of machines made in our own image still dominates our imagination and inspires our goals.

Care To Dance?

You guys have to check out this robot that dances! It was created in Japan and claims to be able to react to peoples movements and dance in the appropriate style. It's a pretty cool video as it gives a demonstration. I saw it today on MSN homepage. So I guess there's hope for the guy that can't get a date to this year's prom? Here's the link.

http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-us&from=MSNHP