Artificial Intelligence

Insects have provided the inspiration for a team of European researchers seeking to improve the functionality of robots and robotic tools. The research furthers the development of more intelligent robots, which can then be used by industry, and by emergency and security services, among others. Smarter robots would be better able to find humans buried beneath the rubble of a collapsed building, for example.

European researchers are making progress on piecing together a new generation of machines that are more aware of their environment and better able to interact with humans. While building robots with anything akin to human intelligence remains a far off vision, making them more responsive would allow them to be used in a greater variety of sophisticated tasks in the manufacturing and service sectors. Such robots could be used as home helpers and caregivers, for example.

Gamers have devoted countless years of collective brainpower to idle pursuits. This week researchers will try to harness those finely honed skills to make medical discoveries through a competitive protein-folding computer game.

Teaching robots to understand enough about the real world to allow them act independently has proved to be much more difficult than first thought. The team behind the iCub robot believes it, like children, will learn best from its own experiences. The technologies developed on the iCub platform -- such as grasping, locomotion, interaction, and even language-action association -- are of great relevance to further advances in the field of industrial service robotics.

A new approach to robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) could lead to a revolution in the field by shifting the focus from what a thing is to how it can be used. Identifying what a robot is looking at is a key approach of AI and machine cognition. So far ambitious researchers have managed to teach a computer's vision system to recognize up to 100 objects. Granted, this is a huge achievement, yet far short of an "I, Robot" scenario.