I, Robot? A robot that can learn, think and act by itself!

Robotic technology is progressing really fast these days. The Tokyo Institute of Technology now came up with something really impressive: An intelligent humanoid robot, capable of learning and decision-making in a real environment.

Video documentary by DigInfo TV:

Link & HD video: YouTube

Perhaps there will be a need to implement the Three Laws of Robotics by Isaac Asimov soon - or to rethink them.

An article covering the recent breakthrough:

AUGUST 1, 2011 3:20 PM PDT
Japanese robot pours fake drinks with fake ice

Japanese researchers are developing a robot that can adapt its behavior to new situations and make educated guesses about new challenges based on its knowledge.

Tokyo Institute of Technology's Osamu Hasegawa and collaborators are working on a robot that operates based on an algorithm they've termed a self-organizing incremental neural network (SOINN), which is designed for unsupervised learning tasks.


The robot of the TIOT. Credit: Video screenshot by Tim Hornyak/CNET

The humanoid bot has a head, cameras, and two arms. In an experiment, when it's told to serve water, it can identify a cup, grasp it and then pour pellets, acting as the liquid, into the cup.
As seen in the video, the experiment isn't exactly mind-blowing. But practical artificial intelligence that works in real-world situations will require robots like this one to be able to figure out what a cup is, and how to pour water.

The SOINN system can filter useful sensory data from background noise, as well as mine the Internet and the experiences of other robots for knowledge. Hasegawa gave the example of an elder-care robot in Japan querying another in England on how to make tea.


German cooking robot PR2 paired with Rosie, preparing a Bavarian breakfast. Credit: Technical University Munich.

The idea of globally networked robots querying each other for how-to tips could gain traction with the advent of Willow Garage's open-source ROS operating system (see: PR2, German robot make breakfast of champions) - which is powering bots around the world. Let's just hope they don't get any dangerous ideas.

Source: news.cnet.com

Artificial Brains - I Robot to become reality?

Scientists Create Tiny Artificial Brain That Exhibits 12 Seconds of Short Term Memory

By Clay Dillow
Posted 2011-06-02

It’s not artificial intelligence in the Turing test sense, but the technicolor ring you see above is actually an artificial microbrain, derived from rat brain cells--just 40 to 60 neurons in total--that is capable of about 12 seconds of short-term memory.

This Artificial Rat Brain Has 12 Seconds of Short-term Memory. Ashwin Vishwanathan, Guo-Qiang Bi and Henry C. Zeringue, University of Pittsburgh - http://www.popsci.com/files/imagecache/article_image_large/articles/Petri-dish-brain-650.jpeg

Developed by a team at the University of Pittsburgh, the brain was created in an attempt to artificially nurture a working brain into existence so that researchers could study neural networks and how our brains transmit electrical signals and store data so efficiently. The did so by attaching a layer of proteins to a silicon disk and adding brain cells from embryonic rats that attached themselves to the proteins and grew to connect with one another in the ring seen above.

But as if the growing of a tiny, functioning, donut-shaped brain in a petri dish wasn’t enough, the team found that when they stimulate the neurons with electricity, the pulse would circulate the microbrain for a full 12 seconds. That’s roughly 12 seconds longer than they thought it would (they expected the pulse to live for about a quarter of a second).

That’s essentially short-term memory. The neurons were relaying the signal in sequence, persistently, mimicking the activity we know as working memory (though admittedly we don’t understand it that well). The brain is basically storing the stimulus long after the stimulus is no more, which is a big deal for a tiny brain grown in a dish.

Source: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-06/tiny-artificial-rat-brain-exhibits-12-seconds-short-term-memory