A Ping-Pong-Playing Terminator

Match Point: Kim Kyung-Hoon / Reuters

From Popular Science:

Meet TOPIO 3.0, the ping-pong-playing robot. Made by Vietnam’s first-ever robotics firm, TOSY, the bipedal humanoid uses two 200-fps cameras to detect the ball as it leaves the opponent’s paddle.

TOPIO’s brain—processors and an artificial neural network—analyzes the ball’s path to choose the best return. Last fall, TOPIO 3.0 debuted at the International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo.

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New Supercomputer Uses Water-Cooled Technology To Save Energy

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Feb. 16, 2010) — Nanyang Technological University (NTU) February 11 opens its much-anticipated High Performance Computing (HPC) Centre to support the university's growing international research profile and capacity, especially in the area of sustainability.

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Diamond Nanowire Device Could Lead To New Class Of Diamond Nanomaterials

A diamond-based nanowire device. Researchers used a top-down nanofabrication technique to embed color centers into a variety of machined structures. By creating large device arrays rather than just "one-of-a-kind" designs, the realization of quantum networks and systems, which require the integration and manipulation of many devices in parallel, is more likely. (Credit: Illustrated by Jay Penni.)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Feb. 15, 2010) — By creating diamond-based nanowire devices, a team at Harvard has taken another step towards making applications based on quantum science and technology possible.

The new device offers a bright, stable source of single photons at room temperature, an essential element in making fast and secure computing with light practical.

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Robot Hand Could Protect Soldiers On The Battlefield

The 'intelligent' substance d3o at the display

From The Telegraph:

A robot hand that could defuse bombs, luminous goo that flows around soldiers’ moving bodies but hardens to protect them if they are hit and a uniform that conducts electricity are among the first fruits of the Ministry of Defence’s version of the Dragons’ Den.

The Centre for Defence Enterprise (CDE) in Harwell, Oxfordshire, is an initiative that aims to harness British scientific innovation for rapid use on the battlefield. Ministers also hope to temper the MoD’s reputation for laborious and costly procurements that arrive in service years after they have ceased to be useful.

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Robot Stars In South Korean Plays

EveR-3: the all-singing, all-dancing thespian robot. Credit: Wikimedia

From The Cosmos/AFP:

SEOUL: A South Korean-developed robot played to acclaim in Robot Princess and the Seven Dwarfs and is set to take more leading theatre roles this year.

EveR-3 (Eve Robot 3) starred in various dramas last year including the government-funded Dwarfs which attracted a full house, said Lee Ho-Gil, of the state-run Korea Institute of Industrial Technology.

The lifelike EveR-3 is 157 cm tall, can communicate in Korean and English, and can express a total of 16 facial expressions – without ever forgetting her lines.

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Are Robot Scientists The Future Of Laboratory Research?

Eve, at Work in the Lab Automated Experimentation

From Popular Science:

There was a time when science produced robots, but a paper published recently in the Automated Experimentation Journal suggests that in the future robots will autonomously produce science. It's not just a matter of cheap labor or taking menial tasks off the hands of researchers; the authors argue that science needs to be uniform and formalized, and AI robot scientists could help us get to that point by developing their own hypotheses and carrying out experiments with minimal human input.

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Can Battlefield Robots Take The Place Of Soldiers?

Can battlefield land-robots be made to obey the rules of war?

From The BBC:

Can war be fought by lots of well-behaved machines, making it "safer for humans"? That is the seductive vision, and hope, of those manufacturing and researching the future of military robotics.

With 8,000 robots already in use, they believe they can bring about a military revolution.

Most of the robots currently deployed on land deal with non-combat tasks such as bomb disposal - unlike lethal aerial drones.

But Bob Quinn, who works for the US subsidiary of the British robot manufacturer QinetiQ, says the future promises more armed robots on the battlefield, including driverless vehicles.

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