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First up, a Newsweek excerpt from the book "GEARHEADS: The Turbulent Rise of Robotic Sports" by Brad Stone. Detailed is Survival Research Lab's (SRL) December 2001 efforts to outsmart San Francisco law enforcement and hold banned robowar contests with 500+ spectators. "I have no bad feelings for the police and fire department," SRL guru Mark Pauline said. "I'll always find ways to get around the restrictions, and they'll always find new ways to circumvent the shows, and I'll always find new ways to uncircumvent them." Perhaps SFPD wanted to close SRL's shows down because not all the carnage was on the battle arena. At this show, one SRL co-conspirator climbed up to the top of the trucking containers, where the security team were monitoring their police scanners. She hadn't been up there yet and didn't know, as the other SRL members did, that a plastic rain shelter extending from one of the containers could not support any weight. She started to hug a friend, and took a wrong step onto the parapet. It crumbled. Both women fell 20 feet, tumbling across Pauline's peripheral vision as he spoke to his mom. "Uh, oh," the SRL chief thought. "That looked bad."
At least the SRL robots respected Asimov's First Law at the SRL event and weren't responsible for any human injuries suffered there. That may not be true of DARPA's new spawn. The research arm of the US military just gave Icosystems a contract to program a battalion of 120 military robots previously built by I-Robot with a swarm intelligence software upgrade to enable them to mimic the organised behavior of insects. Eric Bonabeau, chief scientist for Icosystems, concedes it is possible that some unforeseen circumstance could throw the robots into chaos. "There may be some pathological configurations and we need to investigate that," he says. "But I think that it applies to virtually every man made system that has to operate in the real world." Remind you of anything?
Finally, Steve Potter (no relation to Harry - we hope) of Georgia Tech has introduced the Hybrot, a small robot that moves about using the brain signals of a rat. Hybrot is the first robotic device whose movements are controlled by a network of cultured neuron cells and was built using a $1.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. Potter is connecting laboratory cultures containing living neurons to computers in order to create a simulated animal, which he describes as a "neurally-controlled animat." "We call it the 'Hybrot' because it is a hybrid of living and robotic components," he said. "We hope to learn how living neural networks may be applied to the artificial computing systems of tomorrow. We also hope that our findings may help cases in which learning, memory, and information processing go awry in humans."
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