TerminatorRobots

Here is another robot that is just barely capable of running.

Mabel was built by the University of Michigan’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and has a top speed of 7 MPH. For those of you fatsos who don’t enjoy running or jogging. 7 MPH is quite fast for a human running. This is about how fast you’ll run if you have a dog chasing you down the street. Most people who aren’t runners probably can’t run at this speed for longer than a minute or so.

I wonder how far along this technology is going to be ten years from now? There are several companies building walking robots now and some have DARPA contracts.

The Israeli Air Mule maybe the worlds next flying Hunter Killer. With the Predator UAV being the first deployed. This is an unmanned system that will later have mechanic arms attached to it so it can supposedly fix power lines. Ya, right.

I’m pretty sure long before that happens it will have Hellfire missiles or flame throwers mounted on it. Nowadays our technology kills thousands of people in far away lands long before it helps anyone. So far the Predator AUV technology has been in service for around a decade and the body count is getting higher and higher and it hasn’t helped a single person yet.

I can imagine it won’t be long until the internet is full of infrared videos of these devices gunning people, or pixels on a screen down.

DLR makes a number of various types of robots from space robots to bipedal and arms and all kinds of cool stuff. Here is a robot they call Justin.

Technical Data:


Workspace:
Diameter: approx. 1,7 m


Weight: approx. 45 kg


Payload: approx. 15 kg


Degrees of freedom: 2 x 7 arms
5 torso
2 x 12 hands


Sensors:
41 x torque (link side)
43 x position (motor / link side)


3DMo – Sensorhead:
Stereo-camerasystem
Laser-stripe sensore
Inertial Measurement Unit

Here is a user on Youtube named possumstew2 that made his own 6 foot tall robot bases loosely on the Terminator.

He also made this creepy looking aligator robot.

Quite impressive work! I hope to follow in his footsteps.


Then you have other scratch builders who make quit impressive replicas. Here is a prop built T-800 from automattox.

Another scratch build Terminator which is quite accurate with head and functioning eyes was built by SEANTECH.

Benjamin Stephens is a Ph.D. student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He is originally from Oklahoma, but received his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University.


His PhD research focuses on the control of humanoid robot balance and push recovery for force-controlled robots. He is interested in the use of real-time optimal control for robust control of very complex systems. Using his knowledge and experience, he hopes to make legged/humanoid robots more capable of operating in rough and uncertain environments. He also believes this work will lead to the creation of new intelligent assistive devices such as prosthetics and exoskeletons.


To learn more about Ben’s research and see other videos of the Sarcos Robot in action visit his personal webpage:


http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bstephe1/

The increased use of unmanned aircraft in conflict zones makes war more likely, and risks creating a ‘Terminator-like’ world, the MOD

It said that using robots to carry out wars for us could be unethical – as Britain continues to use unmanned drones in Afghanistan.

In the Terminator movies by director James Cameron robots have developed a consciousness and hunt down and kill humans.



Fearing that this could become a reality, the internal report says we must act now to decide what is ‘acceptable machine behaviour’.

The drones have killed 124 people in the war-torn country since July 2008, David Cameron revealed in December

Read more: Click Here

Daan Hobbelen of TU Delft invented a walking robot called Flame.



This robot walks like a human being however it don’t appear to do much else. Flame has seven motors articulating movement. Flame is a upgraded version of robot Denise. Denise also is a walking robot developed at Delft University.

For more information about the robot Flame visit there homepage.

Boston Dynamics isn’t the only company working on functioning endoskeletons. Anybots has two different types of robots in this category, Monty and Dexter. Monty is mounted in a two wheeled Segway and Dexter is able to walk by himself.

‘Dexter’ Photo credit Cnet

‘Monty’ Photo credit Anybots, Inc.

Dexter learns to walk in this clip while Monty gives him a push to test out his balancing abilities. Dexter is also capable of doing small jumps.

Monty unpacks a Roomba in this clip. This robot is quite impressive and very flexible in what it can do. Apparently it learns by trial and error so there is some programming on the self awareness level already. Anybots, Inc. and Boston Dynamics are two companies to keep your eye on. If you can build a robot to this level your company can survive off DARPA money or some aspect of the military industrial complex.

The Terminators are coming and its only a matter of time of when? Will they one day replace most of our soldiers in on the battlefield? Will they replace police officers or TSA? Will they replace us?

This week we’ll be focusing on robots that resemble the T-800 series endoskeletons. One company that specializes in balancing robots is Boston Dynamics who previous made big dog.

The robot above is called Petman. PETMAN is an anthropomorphic robot for testing chemical protection clothing used by the US Army. Give this robot an shiny head with red eyes and a gun and everyone will be running for the hills. Seriously we’re not that far off from seeing real life Terminators and we will be seeing them in the next decade.

DARPA has awarded Boston Dynamics with two new contract to build CHEETAH and ATLAS. “ATLAS will walk like a man, using a heel-to-toe walking motion, long strides and dynamic transfer of weight on each step,” explains Rob Playter, the ATLAS principal investigator and VP of Engineering at Boston Dynamics. CHEETAH will be a very fast cat that can run faster than a human. “It will accelerate rapidly, starting and stopping on a dime,” says Boston Dynamics in a statement. The purpose of Cheeta is for fire fighting ability.

Ya right! Then why is it supposed be able to run faster than a human and avoid capture? Did they leave out any details like it having a deadly mechanical mouth full of razor sharp teeth? The design of its specs sound like the moto-Terminators in Rise of the Machines which were deployed to hunt down humans on the battlefield.
However DARPA states the military will be the primary reason for these robots.

The intelligence into these Quadrocopters is pretty amazing. The way they can see and figure out how to play ball is a basic form of artificial intelligence. Right now these are friendly robots. We all know the military usually figures out how to weaponize things like this. One day copters like this might be delivering your pizza or beer to your front door. What will probably happen before that is swarms of these things dropping bombs are shooting people in the middle east.

They also have similar copters you can control with an iPhone. It has been rumored Google execs are interested in such robots so they can deploy them over our homes. Photographing everything you have in your backyard for Google maps. In the future its going to be hard to keep the things you have offline. A crooks dream will be searching for who has what in there back yards and determine which person to rob is the easiest all from Google maps.