Here’s an item from Artificial Intelligence and Robotics talking about Tartalo, “a robot that can perform tasks without have to be told concrete rules, as most modern-day robots are.” Funny, that sound exactly like something I heard of once called “programming”.

The research is being done by the University of the Basque Country who are actually making interesting inroads into bionimetic recognition for robots. GPS is hard to use inside a building, so why not have a robot train to recognize objects and file them away in memory?

From Science Daily:

The machines best known for guiding one from a starting point to a given goal are GPS navigation systems. However, these do not function inside buildings and neither would it be realistic to create a database with the plans for every building in the world. For this reason the UPV/EHU researchers use biomimetic systems as a basis for developing the robot, meaning that Tartalo does the same as a person or animal on entering a new place: explore the terrain and take in points of reference. But, for a machine to carry out what living creatures do by, as it were, instinct, the computer programmers have to nevertheless put in a huge quantity of data, programmes and calculations.

It’s actually cooler than my snark would have you believe.

[via Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and Science Daily]

This post photo-free because I am a lazy bum, and in a hurry.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Neat Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.