Human and Robots: Visions of the Future

The future is not written yet and who knows whether robots are dangerous or not. What is for sure is that humans, being the curious beings, will develop new advanced generations of robots.

It happens so that people and robots go together in this life side by side, in some spheres of life they are even interchangeable and who knows into what this opposition “Human and Robots” will translate. Robots and humans that live and prosper together…Or robots will realize they don’t need that much…

For now it is up to out fantasy to express what we think will happen in human-robot relations in the future. This is a collection of 3d computer generated images of various creative 3d artists that shows their vision. 

The level of detail of these computer graphics shows that our technology will lead us to the point where these fantastic photographs will be the reality.

PERSONAL ROBOT 04, AUTHOR: FRANZ STEINER (SOFTWARE: 3DS MAX)

Who will win in this game of chess? When there is the opposition of the mechanical creature and the human intellect it is not easy to predict the outcome of the game. You can make books, but you will never be sure about the results, they are unpredictable.

PERSONAL ROBOT 08, AUTHOR: FRANZ STEINER (SOFTWARE: 3DS MAX)

In the process of the humming work robots can be of a great use for people. With them less time would be spend for the most complicated tasks and the crunch times would take place not so often. The only question that is left – to find such a robot.

PERSONAL ROBOT 02, AUTHOR: FRANZ STEINER

I’m not sure that it is more pleasant to work in the company of robots, but it definitely has certain advantages. One of the main is the high efficiency of the process of work, furthermore not a lot of time is spent for the idle talks, spreading silly rumors and gossiping.

PERSONAL ROBOT 06, AUTHOR: FRANZ STEINER (SOFTWARE: 3DS MAX)

This robot looks like a housekeeper who takes care of everything around. In its duties are household activities and it copes with all the everyday duties without any difficulties in a short time and without procrastinations.

MECHA, AUTHOR: TINYPANTS

This robot looks like the one that was made either in correspondence to the model of a human being or using the human’s corpus as the basis. A little bit creepy and at the same time intriguing. Anyway, the excellent model and the great work!

I’M ROBOT,  AUTHOR: WIDYANTARA

Some time ago, when I was a human being I was dreaming about the perennial youth, the thoughts that were so peculiar for every woman. My dreams turned into life immediately after my death and I have obtained the desired eternity: now I’m a robot.

PERSONAL ROBOT 07, AUTHOR: FRANZ STEINER (SOFTWARE: 3DS MAX)

When you touch gently the lips of your beloved your heart begins to beat speedily, the mind is hazed with pleasant feelings and you fly away. These minutes can fly not so that you’d notice, but they are so sweet and inimitable.

PERSONAL ROBOT 05, AUTHOR: FRANZ STEINER (SOFTWARE: 3DS MAX)

Love is a curious thing, one never knows when it happens so that you will be overtaken with this feeling and who will be the matter of your sleepless nights. It can be a bonny girl from the next door, a handsome boy from the night-club or even a caber creature.

New Pressure-Sensitive Electronic Skin Gives Robots the Sense of Touch

Robotics has made tremendous strides in replicating the senses of sight and sound, but smell and taste are still lagging behind, and touch was thought to be ‘The Impossible’…until new pressure-sensitive electronic skin came along.

The electronic skin is made out of germanium and silicon wrapped around a sticky polyimide film. The prototype measures about 7.6 square inches and can detect different pressures between 0 and 15 kilopascals, which is the range of pressures one might encounter while typing on a keyboard or holding a small object. The skin does this thanks to its rubber skin, which changes its thickness in response to changes in pressure, which is then measured and controlled by built-in capacitors.

Design team member Ali Javey explains why a robot with a well-developed sense of touch is so crucial to expanding robots’ usefulness:

“Humans generally know how to hold a fragile egg without breaking it. If we ever wanted a robot that could unload the dishes, for instance, we’d want to make sure it doesn’t break the wine glasses in the process. But we’d also want the robot to grip the stock pot without dropping it.”

And the same logic is true outside of the household, of course, but it’s worth remembering how many simple activities human take for granted would defeat current robots. Even something as basic as getting dressed or reading a newspaper requires a fairly intuitive sense of touch and pressure, and this new skin puts those abilities within robots’ grasp.

This is definitely a breakthrough, but sensing a range of pressure is hardly a good substitute for the extremely sophisticated sensors we have built into our skin. We don’t just sense pressure, but other linked sensations like heat, pain, and others. Of course, once we perfect one type of artificial sensor, we could make pretty much any other type of sensor we want, giving robots the ability to detect anything from radioactivity to biological agents purely by touch. That would greatly increase the usefulness of robotic probes in areas humans can’t venture.

Even better, this artificial skin could one day help restore sensation to humans that have lost feeling in parts of their body, although research leader Zhenan Bao says that’s still a ways off:

“Connecting the artificial skin with the human nerve system will be a very challenging task. Ultimately, in the very distant future, we would like to make a skin which performs really like human skin and to be able to connect it to nerve cells on the arm and thus restore sensation. Initially, the prototype that we envision would be more like a handheld device, or maybe a device that connects to other parts of the body that have skin sensation. The device would generate a pulse that would stimulate other parts of the skin, giving the kind of signal ‘my (artificial) hand is touching something’, for instance.”

Via io9

Top 10 Worst Technological Failures

Sometimes even the best can fail and at the most inappropriate of times, leaving you stunned and confounded; Zidane’s legendary headbutt in the 2006 world cup surprised even the casual fan. Technology isn’t invincible either; it can leave Bill Gates speechless in face of a blue screen of death in Windows 98 in front of hundreds. Here we are with Top 10 worst technological failures that left lawsuits to near-mayhem in their wake.

10. Hubble Space Telescope

A 2.5 Billion dollar device, which finally goes to space, sends back some pictures and which shockingly enough, are all blurry. The problem was with the telescope’s calibration instruments, as later it was found out. The problem was fixed using corrective lenses three years later.

9. Dell laptop explosions

At a conference in Japan, Dell’s laptop suddenly burst into flames. There were multiple explosions and the fireworks continued for a good 5 minutes or so. It turned out that batteries were the ones that exploded and eventually Dell announced recall of 22 thousand of their notebook batteries. Fortunately, there were no casualties.

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8. Nokia N-gage

Being a gaming platform and a cell phone at the same time was good, but its weird when-calling pose was not so cool. Secondly, there were just a handful of decent games for it and it was a total disaster. You can still buy one of these though.

7. Asimo – The Humanoid Robot’s Embarrassing Fail

This robot by Honda failed embarrassingly in front of a packed auditorium in 2006. As a demo, Asimo moved towards the stairs, took few steps up and then suddenly freezes as if it would turn around and start singing. But, it didn’t sing, it teetered backwards and fell over horribly. The Honda presenters quickly turned off the lights and took the robot away.

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6. Cloud Computing Disaster

In October of 2009, Microsoft servers holding data for thousands of T-Mobile SideKick users crashed without a warning. And, there was no back-up either. Many Law-suits were filed over data loss, with users alleging that company failed to protect the data entrusted to them. While Microsoft eventually recovered most of the lost data, this collapse severely hurt the future of cloud computing.

5. Pepsi’s Computer Glitch

Pepsi ran it’s “Number fever” promotion back in 1992 in Philippines, a number was announced at the end of each day and whomever’s number matched this would be awarded 1 million Philippine currency. Unfortunately, the number 349 produced thousands of winners and all of them reached Pepsi’s bottling plant to collect their prize money. Pepsi could never pay such money to thousands, so the situation turned ugly; the Pepsi plant was bombed and more than 30 trucks were burned down. The famous “Pepsi 349” case is still hanging in the balance. One woman and child were killed when a grenade was tossed at a Pepsi truck during these horrible riots.

4.  Mars Climate Observer Mishap

The Mars Climate Observer was sent to Mars to study its weather, climate, water and carbon dioxide contents. The orbiter was supposed to enter the Martian atmosphere at an altitude of 140.5 – 150 km above Mars. However, some navigation error caused it enter too low into the Martian atmosphere, specifically 57 km above the Martian surface, where it was destroyed due to heavier than expected stresses. The cause? Contractors of the craft’s thruster’s used Imperial units to express its performance, when  NASA specified Metric units.

Get it why they stress on using the correct units in school?:P

3. Ariane 5 explosion

In 1996, Europe’s 8 Billion dollar unmanned satellite-launching rocket self-destructed after 36.7 seconds of take-off. After the launch, the guidance system’s computer tried to convert a number from 64-bit to 16-bit, but failed because the number was too big, the system was shut down in response to this error and it passed on the control to a similar unit, which unfortunately had already been shut down milliseconds before, thus the system had nothing else to do, other than self-destruct.

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2. Apollo 13 Debacle

The malfunction of Apollo 13’s mission service module caused an explosion during a routine tank stirring, which forced the astronauts to use the lunar module for oxygen, as it had quickly ran out in the service module. The mission to land on moon was immediately aborted and after many hardships and bravery the crew safely returned to earth. The mission was termed as a “successful failure”.

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1. Glitch of the Millennium – 1983’s near WW3

Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov prevented a nuclear holocaust in 1983 when he indentified an early-warning satellite system’s alarm as fake or mistaken. When the alarms went off in Moscow, the Russian satellites indicated that US had fired 5 ballistic missiles at Russia. But Petrov’s gut feeling rejected this because he thought that if US would ever attack, it wouldn’t be 5 missiles, it would have been dozens! Believe it or not, if he hadn’t acted right, the World we live in might not have been the same as it is now.

In fact, the Russian satellite system had picked up sun’s reflections off the cloud tops as missile launches.

Bonus: Steve Jobs and iPhone Wireless failure

Well, even the iPhone is prone to failures. Have a look.

The Best TV Show Mistakes in Pictures

Taco Bell's Super Delicious Ingredient Force must call on the spicy powers of the Volcano Menu in a fight to keep Urbanapolis from falling into the boringly bland hands of the evil Baron Von Bland.