DARPA plans to offer a $2 million prize to whomever can help push the state-of-the-art in robotics beyond today’s capabilities in support of the DoD’s disaster recovery mission. DARPA’s Robotics Challenge will launch in October 2012. Teams are sought to compete in challenges involving staged disaster-response scenarios in which robots will have to successfully navigate …
Robin Hanson’s best guess for the next revolution on the scale of the industrial, or farming, or human revolutions, is artificial intelligence in the form of whole brain emulations, or “ems.” The powerpoint slides for the talk are here Sander Olson interviewed Robin Hanson in 2010 You have written about how a major AI advance …
Taipei Times/AFP – Japan is planning a futuristic farm where robots do the lifting in an experimental project on land swamped by the March tsunami, the government said yesterday. This report also shows that Japan is working to remediate land by removing more widespread salt from soil. There is also new technology for removing radioactive …
In an interview with Sander Olson, Cornell engineer and researcher Hod Lipson discusses adaptive, evolving robots. Lipson’s robots compete and learn, and acquire new skills in movement. Lipson uses simulators to co-evolve both simulators and robots. Lipson’s has already demonstrated a robot that can compensate for losing a limb by modifying its movement. Hod Lipson …
Quantum Computer researcher Suzanne Gildert claims that computronium is unobtanium. Computronium is defined by some as a substance which approaches the theoretical limit of computational power that we can achieve through engineering of the matter around us. It would mean that every atom of a piece of matter would be put to useful work doing …
Ideas for Space Industrialization in the spirit of G. Harry Stine’s The Third Industrial Revolution By Joseph Friedlander Space Products And Potential Earthly Markets. The original Space Age (say 1958-68 and to a lesser degree all the way to 1975) was not merely the successor to the Atomic Age (immediate post WW2 say 1945-57) but …
University of Pennsylvania roboticist Daniel Lee is a researcher at the Penn’s General Robotics Sensing and Perception (GRASP) lab. His students are building robots that compete in robotic soccer leagues, with the ultimate aim being to create a robotic soccer team that can beat the human world cup winners by 2050. Dr. Lee’s team has …
DARPA has new solicitations for 2011 Controlling Cellular Machinery – Vaccines Looking for new ideas about how to discover, design, evolve, assemble and demonstrate the ability to use genetic components, modules and circuits for the development of a highly efficacious nucleic acid based vaccine whose activity can be regulated in vivo by a mammalian host. …
Hi, this is Joseph Friedlander with a guest post for Next Big Future. This article will discuss setting up an industrial village on the Moon. And on import substitution and Jane Jacobs economics (transactions of decline and transactions of ascent). Note- This is a lengthy discussion of a plan for bootstrapping civilization into space. In …
Caterpillar, the world’s largest manufacturer of construction equipment, is starting to support research on the “Contour Crafting” automated construction system that its creator believes will one day be able to build full-scale houses in hours. This is concrete-jet instead of inkjet printing technology. Printing buildings to speed up the economy is one of the key …