More on Animats

Wired News: It's Alive (ish)

A lovely article on Animats with Potter at Georgia Tech. $60K is the going rate for an Animat setup these days. At $60K, he can't do the kind of multi-animat networking he'd like to do -- too bad, but maybe something similar can be done!

Novamente LLC - Artificial General Intelligence

Novamente LLC - Artificial General Intelligence

Who are these guys? It looks like they rose from the ashes of Genobyte in 2001, which was working on the artifical neuron and artificial brain hardware. They had a paper in AAAI about artificial general intelligence, and (by taking the hardware approach, and a competing-agents view of cognition) it looks like they have ideas I might agree with about AI and may even be on the closest track.

But they're a bunch of non-luminaries, it seems, and they've got a profit motive behind them. Read their papers and find out their approach. What's their story???

News from the bees-finding-bombs front

BillingsGazette.com :: Some convinced insects could be used to detect bombs

Apparently DARPA is convinced bees can't find bombs, but Montana teams are convinced they can. I seem to recall the DARPA experiment failing - the bees just flew away, or something? I wonder why they're using lasers and not RF-tracking?

The article's more about pork-barrel politics than functionality, so who knows.

Robotic Exoskeletons - handy at work and home

Great work by Tsukuba University:

"An exoskeleton that can be worn by a human is a new type of robot under development at Tsukuba University. It's called Hybrid Assistive Limb, HAL for short, and anyone who wears it has potential to lift up to 10-times the weight they normally could."

... well done!!! And, it's got EMG at its core, taking it one step closer to being a BCI...

"HAL works by figuring out what the wearer's muscle are doing. The suit then simply reacts.

“The command signals from the brain are transmitted to the muscles through the motor neurons, and we can detect such faint bio-electrical signals on the surface of the skin, and these signals are calibrated into the computer here, and after that this computer controls these power units so he can move or upgrade his power,” says Sankai.

And believe it or not, sometimes the suit interprets those electrical signals more quickly than the wearer's muscles. In other words, it moves before the human muscle does."