Personaly I think you are wrong

I saw this video here, on the IEEE Spectrum blog. The bottom line is that soccer robots are evolving fast and soon will beat the crap out of human teams. Well, I don't doubt that will happen sooner or latter. After all, a lot of effort and money is going into making robots play soccer.

However, notice that in the fatal day that robots beat humans in soccer all that it proves is that you can built machines to beat humans at a particular task. No shit Sherlock ! We see that in our everyday lives.  Last year we saw a computer winning Jeopardy and a couple of years ago a computer won a game of chess. There is nothing extraordinary about this, although they are very impressive technical achievements. 

Personally I am convinced that it is impossible for machines to operate autonomously as living creatures having been doing for ages on this planet. And this places an upper bound on what machines, robots for instance, can accomplish no matter the amount of geeks involved in building them. I look forward to having robots beat me in soccer (not that hard given my growing beer belly) but I honestly doubt "we humans are doomed" as is implied by the author of the blog post.

Time is scarce (still)

I got to read this post in the blog Everything Robotic, which raises the question of why don't the manufacturers of industrial robotics move into the area of service robotics.

It is argued that the business model that these companies are accustomed to is not suitable for area of service robotics. I agree and would add that the way innovation occurs in both areas is also different.  For industrial applications, the ideas have to be (i) patentable and (ii) money cash cows. The two are related and that very much guides how business is conducted. With proprietary solutions, a lot of special training sessions for workers and you get the client by the balls. The manufacturers have to guarantee mean-time-between failures and upper bounded repair times. However I am sure that somewhere in the fine print of the maintenance contracts is written "Hey, shit happens. Deal with it".

In any case service robotics is much more about the application, not so much the tools to get the job done. That is why I believe that is it much more difficult to sell mobile robot solutions in this area. Basically, we are getting along just nice without mobile robots in the office, the house or the garden so why should we buy a fancy machine ? Especially now that people are cashless and have a crisis knowing at the doorsteps. At least those of us in Southern Europe.

I am not as confident about garage start-ups that sprout from research centers for the simple reason that the academic world is much more about nice theoretical concepts than actual working robots. But I might be wrong.

A new distro of Ubuntu comes out tomorrow

Bought a new laptop today. Nothing fancy, just a budget laptop for my work. By default it comes infected with Windows, the seventh incarnation. It took more than one hour to run the automatic setup of the operating system and the bloatware it ships with. Man, one hour to setup. Did I mention the new Ubuntu distro is out tomorrow ?

Time is scarce now

but a few things have caught my attention in this past week:

• Cubelets by Modular Robotics
• RobotEarth
• The Bilibot project

Cubelets are just cubes which you can snap together and immediately begin interacting with each other. Cool idea in bright, flashing colors. Think of them as lego bricks on steroids. They are sold as a "modular robotics kit", which can be great fun for kids and grown ups alike. But that is just that. Not sure how many different types of cubelets there are, but I have the feeling that there aren't all that many different combinations you can try. I would not put that lego Mindstorm kit away just yet.

The RobotEarth is a project aiming at collecting the learning experiences of different robots and making them available to every cybernetic creature. Think Wikipedia for robots. The motivation is to try to avoid re-inventing the wheel whenever a robot must solve a learning problem. And that is just fine, but just think about the countless different shapes robots come in. Sensors, actuators, hardware, colors and smells. Ok, that last one is streching it a bit. And now think on how alike humans are. No, really. Despite external physical appearances, and some internal ones as well, humans are very much alike wherever you find them. Unlike robots, which pretty much came in all shapes and sizes. That is why I am a bit skeptical on the utility of this robot aimed Wikipedia. But hey, after so many encounters with the robots in the field one cannot avoid becoming a cynical pessimist.

Finally, the Bilibot. If it ever manages to sell, it promises to be robotics on a shoestring. Well, at about 700 US$ it is still an expensive shoestring but at least they aim at making it available to the masses. Let's hope mass marketing can make it cheaper.

Summary of last week

the "another one" being me.

Post-battle state of mind

Spent all day battling the evil hardware gnomes

... yeah, I lost.