Neuron Robotics

Oscar the TrashBot

Oscar the TrashBot

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Oscar the Trash Bot - Final Setup

Oscar the Trash Bot - Final Setup

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WPI Robotics: ADIS MQP Prototype Showcase

WPI Robotics: ADIS MQP Prototype Showcase

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Tutorial: Eclipse Setup for the NRDK

Tutorial: Eclipse Setup for the NRDK

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Tips on Assembling the Neuron Robotics Hexapod

Tips on Assembling the Neuron Robotics Hexapod!

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Anyone Can Build Robots!

Check out the build of our animatronic singing and dancing skeleton!

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Mass Challenge and Our Patent

We've applied to the 2011 Mass Challenge!

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Ice Bot Featuring the DyIO!

We're thrilled that students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) are using the DyIO in their Major Qualifying Project. Look for the DyIO at about 1:04 on the video.

This is the Auger Driven Ice Surveyor. The video shows initial testing on the prototype auger-drive system, the first movement tests on carpet, and the first outdoor testing.

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Picture an Office

[caption id="attachment_1469" align="alignleft" width="224" caption="Alex's desk has been put in this very spot. I sit to his left and then Bob sits to my left. Kevin is to the right of Alex(his space is off-camera)."][/caption] We are (mostly) moved in.
See, it goes like this: it's an incubator space, close to WPI. So we have all manner of furniture in a space that provides lighting, power, HVAC and a lock on the door. And, that's about it.
And that's fine. It is, as they say, a start.
We have whiteboards. There is a big conference table. We have chairs that are decent, ergonomically speaking. And we have a soldering station and our stuff (screws, robotic arms, electrical tape and whatnot) is fairly well sorted. There is a coffee maker and a small fridge.
Little touches are appearing, like my Wegman calendar, and Bob's photographs. Plus there's Kevin's remote controlled helicopter.
Yes, we have a company helicopter. It can only transport a few amoebae (or a really small mouse), but we still have one. Kevin flew it around the office on Friday after we had put the furniture in, and it is a fun little toy. If you come over, and someone yells, "Duck!", well, now you know why they might be doing that.
At some point, we will have an Open House, when things are more together. But not only was it fun to get the stuff in and fairly well arranged, there was a while there where we were all sitting and working. I was typing a blog draft, Kevin was coding, Bob was looking at email and Alex was putting stuff into drawers (Greg is in Baltimore right now, but he was there in spirit). It felt, for lack of a better term, real.
We are getting there. And that is definitely a good half of the fun.
Just don't forget to duck on occasion.

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Robotics and Ethics, Part VIII and Conclusion

There is another disturbing look into the future of the military's use of robotics. At the present time all current uses of robotics in the military assume the current policy of “man-in-loop” systems, where a soldier is on the other end of a system directly controlling it.
However, there is research and an initiative to have an autonomous fighting force by 2012. (Sparrow, R. (2007))
If this becomes the case, there comes a whole other level of moral responsibility that cannot be directly claimed by one person. This is a very dangerous situation where no human can be blamed if a robot participates in an atrocity. There is research to embed ethics into the autonomous systems so that they cannot knowingly commit war crimes, but ultimately those ethical models must be part of the system that governs the behavior of the robot. The only time that a robot could commit an atrocity (unless directly ordered to) would be if some part of its control system were to be damaged, or malfunctioning. If the ethical model meant to stop the robot from commuting atrocities is the same system running the robot, then there is no oversight of ethics on its behavior.
At the present time there are no autonomous systems in place capable of deciding to kill a human on their own. There are, however, projects such as the Talon project in the US and the Korean Armed Border Guard Robots that are being developed.
The Talon project is a US funded mobile autonomous gun platform that will be in a very real sense the type of robots feared by generations of science fiction writers. The Korean Border guard Robot is a stationary platform that will shoot and kill any person attempting to cross the 38th parallel. These types of projects show that a world where these ethical concerns must be considered is fast approaching. (Sharkey, N. (2008))
The politicians are the only ones that have the ability to effect policy on moral grounds. It is their job to temper the military's singleminded goal-oriented view of the world with reason and morals. Any lack of opposition on their part means that they have allowed other motives to corrupt their primary goal of representing the peoples will with an ethical decision making process.
There are some politicians who have objected to war on moral grounds, but the majority have not, and in fact have actively supported and even championed the war effort. There are monetary rewards for a technological war being waged and the most likely scenario is that this money has colored decisions. This leaves the politicians and their lack of action as the most morally culpable in the ongoing wars.
In the end, everyone in today’s modern society has participated in the ever-expanding world of technology and its cyclical interaction with its use in the military. The citizens sit back and watch their government and military, content with the comforts today’s technology has brought them. The military has used the technology available to them to hide the true nature of war and convince the citizenry to be content. The politicians have lost their ethical compass due to the lack of public outrage at immoral or unethical acts. All of these forces have worked together to create a society that cannot pull itself out of an ever deepening spiral towards an increasingly technological and increasingly deployed military.

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Robotics and Ethics, Part VII

One theme that is a constant among the varied uses and effects of the use of technology is that the merits are always determined by the user. There is no technology that can be good or evil or even neutral. It is always a matter of the motives of use of the technology. Is it being used to help people or to hurt, to create or to destroy? The responsibility for the effect of a piece of technology is on the designer of its final intended use, and on those who use it. Ultimately no technology can be praised or blamed for anything, it will always be the user that deserves the acclaim or accusations.
The motive behind the increased use of technology on the part of the average citizen is the least complex. A citizen is looking for a few simple things, to live, be safe and happy and to have those close to them be safe and happy as well. The average citizen has utilized technology to keep in closer contact with friends and family and become better informed about the world.
The average citizen will claim to be just “wasting time” on the Internet when they are in fact consuming information and media. Their motivation is often benign, as they are curious. They seek information about the people they care about and when that is consumed, they seek more information. The information is often slanted one way or another, but to the average citizen this is of little consequence. Because they believe themselves to be more informed about the world and see no reason to rise up against their government, they act less than previous generations have. For their part in the military and political process, they are mostly inactive. If any blame can be assigned, it is a matter of apathy at worst.
The military has decided to incorporate technology into the modern fighting force for a number of reasons. They are assumed to have the primary goal of protecting the United States from foreign threats. To do this effectively they need an effective fighting force. In generations past, this used to mean more and more soldiers. The new paradigm is better and better equipped soldiers.
The military has made effective use of technology for the purpose of keeping soldiers out of harm’s way, and not having to replace them. This might seem a noble intention on the surface, but this is just a reaction to the difficulties of running a wartime draft. The real motivation is that replacing soldiers is actually getting more and more difficult; therefore, it becomes important to protect the soldiers that you have. From less than noble intentions comes a positive result. The military comes out looking better than their intentions merit. Their moral culpability for the negative effects of technology comes from their myopic view of the world. They fail to see, or fail to care about the further reaching effects of their policies.
Next: the future, and the conclusion

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TEDxBoston - Getting Ready

Oh, it's coming.
What? you may be asking.
Innovation, the kind you only get from TED.
And we're a part of it. We'll be at the Microsoft NERD Center, One Memorial Drive, Cambridge from 6 to 9 PM, on the 11th floor.
Please use hashtag #NRBR for our event.
Stay tuned.

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Robotics and Ethics, Part VI

As a result of its technological superiority, the United States has chosen to attack the countries where such groups (guerillas, extremist groups, etc.) reside only to find that all of our technology not only is not helping, but it is instead working against us.
The core of the conflicts are the people. When you respond to people with bombs and robots, you are unlikely to win them over as an ally later on. They will feel that the monolithic power that has taken over their country is nothing more than a steely robot face, nothing to be empathized with. What needs to happen is to have a human interacting with the people in these regions in order to win them over. This naturally requires that there be soldiers to perform this human to human task.
Where military technology does help is in situations such as mines or booby traps, both of which are increasingly common on today’s battlefield. An unmanned tele-operated robot can defuse these hazards not just for military personnel, but also for the citizens who have to live in these areas. This reduces soldier and civilian casualties at the same time and undoubtedly can be considered a good thing. Weighed against the other effects of using technology in warfare, however, it's not enough to balance it out. There still seems to be more bad then good.
One other effect of technology on war and vice versa has been the great strides that all sorts of technologies have made as a result of the motivation of warfare. These have benefited humanity as a whole.
From technology developed for military purposes we have gotten nuclear fission, turbo-jet thrusters, and the Internet. No one will refute the benefits these technologies have had to the world as a whole, not even nuclear fission, as it has provided energy on a scale that no other fuel could compete with. But the price that it came with was the nuclear bomb, the most destructive manmade force on earth.
The turbo-jet thruster democratized air travel by making it smooth, efficient, fast and cheap to travel long distances. It also helped escalate the Cold War, and has been the delivery system for most airborne weapons ever since.
The Internet has brought information from the whole to the whole world. Information is the backbone of the modern economy and has produced a more knowledgeable society. Yet it has simultaneously brought together the previously isolated scum of the earth into online communities of rapists, pedophiles and innumerable other horrors from the bowels of the Internet. The Internet was also originally developed to be a distributed command network in the event of a military attack. The purpose was to ensure maximum retaliation in the case of an effective first strike.
Next: the average citizen's consumption of technology and the military's motivations in using it.

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Robotics and Ethics, Part V

While the military is just trying to maintain an effective fighting force, politicians use the misconception of soldiers’ safety to their own advantage. War means money. Specifically, military contracts for new materials bring an influx of federal cash and jobs into any region of the country that can supply the desired materials. It is always in the interest of a politician to support a conflict on behalf of a district that stands to profit from it. This is of course an optimistic view of political motives. Other less reputable politicians might have personal stock in a company that stands to profit from war, and therefore they stand to profit as well.
The most public example of this sort of corruption is the close interaction Vice President Dick Cheney and his company, Halliburton, had during the Iraq war. As is common knowledge, Vice President Cheney had the authority to influence which company won the contract to rebuild Iraq after the Second Iraq War. He was a known member of Halliburton and, despite Halliburton not having the best proposal, they were awarded the contract.
This clear and obvious corruption takes place without anyone objecting enough to stop it from happening. Thanks to this sort of influx of money, there are funds to help to develop newer and better technological advances as well, furthering the cycle. From the point of view of the politician there is little to de-motivate a politician from supporting war apart from personal objection and strong public outcry. And as mentioned before, the public outcry in no longer there. This is a dangerous positive feedback loop in the making: technology shields the citizens from the reality of war, the citizens do not therefore object to going to and staying engaged in conflicts, the politicians have every reason to go to war, and little reason not to, and the money from ongoing conflict drives the development of more and better technology.
In the end, there are only two questions to ask, is the world a better place for the furtherance of technology and is it even possible to stop the movement if it is not? For one, the United States has carefully cultivated an air of invincibility. This is by having demonstrated its ability to wage war at such a high level of technical sophistication that few armies can compete against it. The ability to drop bombs and hit targets based on information from satellites is intended to strike terror in the hearts of current and potential enemies.
And while these feats are incredible, the response has universally been underwhelming, to wit, the guerrilla fighters of the Vietcong people and soldiers of limited means brought the United States to its knees time and time again. While in the current conflict in Iraq, insurgent fighters use our own unexploded munitions and cell phones to wage war effectively. They have learned not to be targets and to blend into regular communities.
All of the United States combined might cannot hit what it can't see. To that end, no organized nation has attempted to attack the United States in open warfare for fear of their retaliatory capabilities. Yet instead there have been extremist groups with no national backing that have attacked. This is something that all of the United States' mighty technology cannot find and successfully retaliate against. Next: the side benefits of technology.

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Robotics and Ethics, Part IV

While it may seem like a good thing to have a technological shield for the purpose of keeping some soldiers physically out of harm’s way, there are unintended societal consequences. As has been seen from the conflict in Sarajevo, the First Gulf War, and the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the citizens of the United States are much less willing to speak out against ongoing conflicts than they were just 40 years ago with the Vietnam War. We must ask ourselves as a nation why sending our military into armed conflicts has not produced the opposition it has in previous generations. (Such, E. (2005))
One factor that cannot be ignored is the lack of the use of the military draft. The government saw what a divisive move establishing the draft was for the country during the Vietnam Era. As a result, since the Vietnam conflict, the government, in conjunction with the military, has been looking to alter their strategies so that future conflicts require fewer soldiers. This is not out of a concern for soldiers’ lives, but rather a desire to prevent the opposition they saw to the Vietnam War. To achieve this goal they have, over time, reworked the big lumbering military of old into an agile technology-infused force. The goal is to increase the effectiveness of a single soldier such that they can deploy fewer of them.(Voth, D. (2004)). This would reduce the total number of soldiers needed to accomplish a task, ultimately reducing pressure to reinstate a draft in order to keep numbers up in times of conflict. Many will indicate that with the increased use of technology, better armor, and more action-at-a-distance weapons, the individual soldier is less and less likely to come to harm. This is of course not the case (it will be discussed later), but, enough people believe it so that the concept of a “safer soldier” has become a part of the common consciousness.
Enough people believe that our soldiers are safe because it makes it easier to live with their chosen silence in objection to these policies; therefore the wars continue. The military plays into this idea as much as it can in recruitment advertisements. (Dertouzos, J. (1989)) With more volunteers there is less of a need for a draft, and this lack of a draft prevents public opposition. The recruitment advertisements reinforce the misconception in the public's consciousness that war is safe and that misconception leads to the public having further reason to support a military engagement, never mind oppose it. The use of technology has put this cycle into motion; the military using technology to prevent opposition, and that new-found public support and awareness that has called for a demand for more technology on the battlefield. Next: Politicians get involved.

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