Photo: Suitable Technologies The Beam remote presence system, from Suitable Technologies, allows you to "beam in" and visit family members from anywhere. Social roboticist Heather Knight argues that such technology could become a valuable co-parenting tool.

Theres always something heart-wrenching when parents have to be far away from their children. Sometimes parents travel. Sometimes separated parents split time with the kids.

Maybe telepresence robots can help.

This article explores some of the potential benefits and challenges of using telepresence robots as a co-parenting tool. To my knowledge, there is only oneresearch instance of this[pdf], so a lot of questions remain to be answered. What is clearis thatthere are reasons why co-parenting with telepresence robots could be a fantastic idea, and reasons that this could be terrible. Lets start with the fantastic.

Lets review some shortcomings of Skype, FaceTime, and similar applications when they are used for communicating with younger children.

Screens feel distant:The benefit of robots over screen-based communication is that they are physically present. A six-month-old might ignore mommy or daddy on the screen, but find parent-robot delightful. A more companionable parent avatar might help distant parents feel closer to their kids. The robot doesnt need to be particularly complexSkype-on-a-stick is a great way to beginbecause just the fact that it can move through the space will change the way kidsinteract with it.

The kids fight over the phone:I have 2- and 4-year-old sons, and they both want to hold the phone when I am traveling. If I had a telepresence robot, I could control the view myself, either moving the baseideally an omnidirectional robot so I can rotate in placeor moving an actuated head. No more fighting.

A child decides to watch Netflix instead:I dont know who came up with the idea of putting every application you can think of on a single device, but as a parent of two, I hate you! One of the major drawbacks of using a phone or iPad to Skype with your childrenis that these smart device super-users (a.k.a. 2-year-olds) might not be of the wait-to-eat-the-marshmallow variety, and realize they are just a button-and-two-clicks away from Clifford the Big Red Dog. Attaching your device to a projector generally helps, but a single purpose telepresence robot (hopefully with lots of fake buttons so they cant figure out how to turn it off) could also be the solution.

Kids dont like to sit still: If your child doesnt have the gift of the gab today, sometimes adult-like turn-taking conversations become dull and they might now talk to you for very long. Contrast that with a robot that can play tag, or chase a toddler across the house. Yay! Lets play tag! There could be a whole new market at the holidays for books addressing games you can play with your kids through telepresence robots.

Technology can be used and misused, so here are some guidelines and precautions for using co-parenting robots for positive impact.

Robots should not replace real parents:This might seem like a ridiculous newspaper headline from a dystopian future, but it is important to understand here that the purpose of social and socially-augmenting robots is to connect people, not replace human connection. Social networks dont replace in-person friendships and direct conversation, and similarly, parents should not use telepresence robots as an excuse to stay late at work every night or just watch sports/do their nails when they come home. The point is to make the times when youneedto be away from your children more satisfying. I tell my kids that one of the hardest skills to learn in the world is sharing, and so it is with parents who split the time with their kids.

Think about size:The telepresence robots out there today are not optimized for children. Having adjustable heights down to 2 feet or so would be great. Maybe someone can partner with Fisher-Price to make it childproofand hide the power/volume buttons. (Willow Garage, a fabled robotics company, now foregone, had a remote worker who would drive into peoples chairs when people turned his volume off. Im sure a child would find such a sequence entertaining too.)

Dont use robots for alienation of affection:Maybe Im biased, but I think robots are pretty cool, and a lot of kids do too. When someone goes out of town, thats often a chance for the other parent to be in chargeso maybe dont interrupt homemade pizza night with a super cool robot just when the kids were about to put on the toppings. Im not sure exactly how to incorporate this into a robot user interface or behavior system, but it would be a fascinating area for future research. How do we get robots to help us help ourselves? Sometimes we know the right thing to do, but a little notification here or there could make us pause for a second before we hit that robot call button.

Dont hack your exs robot:Im not a psychologist, but I am pretty good with technology. That being said, it seems pretty intuitive that hacking your exs telepresence robot is not going to benefit your co-parenting relationship. I suggest robot designers consider cyber-security a top priority in this sometimes high-emotion application context.

Lets let our imaginations run wild and think about future risks and benefits should such a technology truly take off. Im having fun here, but sometimes science fiction is exactly what inspires future technology designers.

Robots as mediators:Thinking back to the alienation of affection by robot (lawyers should have a field day with that one in custody battles), could a robot have a role in improving parent-to-parent or parent-to-child communication? This might not be as far-fetched as it sounds. Cornell researcher Guy Hoffman and colleagues studiedmediated telepresence between conflict-ridden couples[pdf], including a robotic telepresence that cowered when someone spoke in angry tones. The robots reaction, at least in a user study context, did cue the participants to speak in kinder tones. In addition to reminding you when might be a bad time to call, they might be able to give you live feedback about a current call.

Applications for marriage therapy:Related to the above, perhaps annotated interaction logs (or extracted quotes?) could be sampled in marriage therapy or individual counseling to help peoplelearn to improve their communication patterns. Obviously privacy would be an enormous concern, so perhaps the parents would need to approve the clips ahead of time, host them on their own devices, and they would be automatically deleted after the session. Proceed with caution! However, these robots would be transmitting lots of personalized data, and just like with data-driven analysis, which is helping us solve problems from image classification to financial markets, I would expect future therapy practices to benefit from life-habits analysis.

What about privacy?With any technology that stores personal data, and as we have seen with the various hacked toys so far, co-parenting robots would need to have bulletproof data-protection. Just like when people thought they would never use credit cards on the internet, and now 75 percent of us do our holiday shopping online, people will get used to managing data privacy for social devices and general technology. Were too addicted to them to not make them work. Robots with social capabilities also raise particular privacy concerns: If the robot had some local intelligence or conversational capabilities, it might easily convince a small child or the other parent to reveal personal information as they bond with the system itself. (So much more to say on this topic, but lets save robot social manipulation for a future post.)

Remote co-parenting could leverage embodiment to help remote parents feel closer to their children via embodiment, spatial games, singular use devices, and improved engagement. Its risks include bad physical designs (in terms of both safety and interaction), misuse by parents who meant better but find it easier to call via robot than to come home early, or other parents who also use it to stalk their partner (Whosepair of shoes are thosebehind that door?). The future is exciting, and with balanced consideration, I hope robot designers consider all sides.

And yes I am in Silicon Valley for the summer, so if theres a company that wants to buy this idea and pay me lots of money to help them get it to work, Im happy to take this post down.

But right now, its my childrens bedtime

Dr. Heather Knightis currently the robotic artist in resident at X, the advanced technology lab of Googles parent company, Alphabet. Starting in fall 2017 she will bea computer science professor at Oregon State University, in Corvallis. Her research interests include human-robot interaction, non-verbal machine communications, and non-anthropomorphic social robots. She completed her PhD in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, and holdsB.S. and M.S. degrees from MIT. Follow her on Twitter: @heatherknight

IEEE Spectrums award-winning robotics blog, featuring news, articles, and videos on robots, humanoids, drones, automation, artificial intelligence, and more. Contact us:e.guizzo@ieee.org

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See the rest here:

Why Co-Parenting With Telepresence Robots Could Be a Fantastic Idea - IEEE Spectrum

Two teams entered the skills robotics challenge which saw teams build their own hardware and software to successfully pick and stow items in a warehouse.

Amazon is known for being able to quickly package and ship millions of items daily from locations all over the world. But the company is yet to develop automated picking technology.

A total of eight teams made it the finals, the Aussie team the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision, was placed fifth after the picking and stowing rounds. According to the Centres COO Dr Sue Keay, it was a tense few hours.

Our team top scored early with 272 points on the final combined stowing and picking task, but we then had to wait on the results for five other teams, many of whom had outperformed us in the rounds, before it became clear that we had won.

Not bad for a robot that was only unpacked and reassembled out of suitcases a few days before the event, with at least one key component held together with cable ties.

The winning robot: Cartman, was a Cartesian robot developed by the team. Cartmans movement is similar to that of a gantry crane, it can move along three axes at right angles to each other. The robot also features rotating gripper that enabled the robot to pick up items using a suction device or a simple two-finger grip.

The unique design of the robot was what won the team the prize. Juxi describes the robots design:

With six degrees of articulation and both a claw and suction gripper, Cartman gives us more flexibility to complete the tasks than most robots can offer.

The team made up of people from QUT, The University of Adelaide and the Australian National University travelled all the way to Japan to compete in the event. The team spent more than 15,000 hours developing Cartman.

The competition was made up of object recognition, pose recognition, grasp planning, compliant manipulation, motion planning, task planning, task execution and error detection and recovery challenges. The robots were judged on how well they picked and stowed in a set amount of time.

"We are world leaders in robotic vision, and we're pushing the boundaries of computer vision and machine learning to complete these tasks in an unstructured environment," says Juxi.

According to Dr Anton Milan, Cartmans vision system was the result of hours of training data and training time, We had to create a robust vision system to cope with objects that we only got to see during the competition.

Our vision system had the perfect trade-off of training data, training time and accuracy.....We only needed just seven images of each unseen item for us to be able to detect them.

University of Adelaide team member Dr Trung Pham agrees, "Our robot uses deep learning to see robustly and acts reliably due to smart design. The competition was a fantastic chance for us to truly test our state-of-the-art algorithms as well as opening up new real-world challenges that go beyond academic research.

It feels amazing to have accomplished this, says Anton. Excellent team effort. Looking at the overall performance across all teams, we see huge advances in robotics and AI. We definitely have very exciting times ahead of us.

Header:Team ACRV is ecstatic with a score of 272 points in the final round of the Amazon Robotics Challenge

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Aussie Robotics Win Amazon Robotics Challenge - National Geographic Australia

The age of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics is upon us, but the current fad of emotional humanoid robots is not headed in the right direction.

First, lets understand what robotics are based on:

Given the above, it is ludicrous to think that human-like robots will roam our homes any time soon. When a robot looks like a person, talks like a person, and has features like a person, home users will have unattainable human-capability expectations. The disappointment alone will doom any company hoping to bring science fiction to the living room in the next decade, not to mention the price-sensitivity for consumer markets.

Robotics must begin with utilitarianism in mindrobots should make money, save money, increase productivity, or deliver entertainment. There will be industrial robots that build other robots in high-volume, manufactured with todays technologies. There will be commercial robots that deliver economic value (such as replacing security, receptionists, and drivers). There will be consumer robots that mimic todays appliances and toys, requiring no consumer education, and causing no human-capability expectation.

These robots wont look like a person. The industrial robot is a giant factory run in the dark by machines (like at Foxconns most advanced factories), or a warehouse with smart forklifts (like our investment Dorabot). The commercial robot comes in various forms and applications. It might look like an array of cameras (like our investment Megvii) or an automated store (like our investment F5 Future Store). The autonomous vehicle will look like a car, except will be first deployed in low-speed, freight, or fixed-function transportsuch as in airport autonomous car-only lanes, or in transport from parking garages to shopping malls/theme parks (like our investment UISee). And the consumer robot may look like a speaker (like the Amazon Echo), a TV, a vacuum cleaner (like Roomba), an educational toy (like our investment Wonder Workshop Dash Bot), or a pad-on-steroids for family communications (like our investment Ainemo).

Will AI capabilities increase over time? Of course. Speech recognition will get better, computer vision will improve, SLAM will be improved to help the robot move around fluidly, and the robot will be able to translate languages, or have a dialog within limited domains. The robot may be able to read some of our emotions, or mimic certain human emotions. But this mimicking will go from laughable and entertaining to occasionally acceptableand generally not genuine. For decades to come, robots by themselves will be unable to learn common sense reasoning, creativity, or planning. They also wont possess the self-awareness, feelings, and desires that humans do. This type of general AI does not exists, and there are no known engineering algorithms for it. I dont expect to see those algorithms for decades, if ever.

Trying to make robots human-like is a natural temptation for robotics and AI scientists, and predicting humanoid robots comes naturally to science fiction writers. But we humans simply think differently from AI. We create and AI optimizes. We love and AI is stoic. We have common sense and AI learns patterns from big data in a singular domain. Simply stated, we are good at what AI is not, and AI is good at what we are not.

In the future, the human edge will be in creativity and social interaction. Therefore, we need to focus robotics development toward what theyre good at: repetitive tasks, optimization, and utilitarian value creation. We should also let people do what theyre good at: innovation, creation, human-to-human interaction, and performing services.

I am an advocate of making utilitarian robots, and encouraging people to go into service jobs. I am not an advocate of making humanoid service robotsit is too hard today, and will not meet peoples expectations; therefore they will likely fail. Whether or not my analysis is correct, we need to be reminded that in the next decade AI will replace a massive number of manual-labor, repetitive, and analytical jobs. We have a human responsibility to help create societal service jobsnot dream or plan a society in which all jobs come with a sign not applicable to humans.

Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

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Robots should make money, save money, increase productivity, or deliver entertainmentand let humans be human - Quartz

When it rains it pours -- confetti, that is. The field is nearly hidden in a sea of confetti after Team 862 and its alliance members won the Festival of Champions.(Photo: Mike Saunders)

Not even the school year can contain Plymouth-Canton's Lightning Robotics Team 862.

Three months after capturing a world championship in St. Louis, Team 862 traveled to New Hampshire to team with its St. Louis alliance to win the inaugural FIRST Robotics Festival of Champions.

The competition the first of its kind in the birthplace of FIRST Robotics pitted the world championship teams from this spring's competitions in St. Louis and in Houston, Texas.

And the festival was won in epic style, with Team 862 and its St. Louis alliance Stryke Force from Kalamazoo, Cheesy Poofs from San Jose, Calif., and The Pascack PI-oneers from New Jersey scoring a record 588 points to win the best of five match, 3-2.

Team 862 faculty advisor Jay Obsniuk with the star of the show, Valkyrie.(Photo: Mike Saunders)

"It was the most amazing weekend," said Jay Obsniuk, the robotics honcho and faculty adviser to Team 862. "To meet (FIRST Robotics founder) Dean Kamenand all the leaders who attendedand then to go out and win was amazing."

Plymouth-Canton actually sat out the first two matches of the best-of-five series against the Houston champions teams from California, Arizona and Georgia then got back into the rotation for the third matches.

The St. Louis alliance came back to win the final three matches of the set to win the inaugural title.

"It was really exciting to come back and win three straight," Obsniuk said.

Vivian Clements, who starts her senior year at Canton High School next month, said the Festival of Champions is different from the world championships in St. Louis. For one thing, she said, you don't have to compete to find out whether you're chosen to be in an alliance.

Having a lot of those kinds of issues settled made for a quick, exciting competition, she said.

"In St. Louis, you're competing very hard for three days," said Clements, who served as a human player, collecting and feeding gears to the team's robot, Valkyrie. "The Festival of Champions is different. You already know who your alliance is, you just have to work hard and do your best. It was a whole big collaborative effort."

Theoretically, 2017 graduate Tyler Harris's robotics career should have been over. Harris, the team's pilot in the on-field airship,was part of the St. Louis alliance that captured Plymouth-Canton's first world titleand then put off starting at Kettering University in order to travel to New Hampshire.

Obviously, he's pretty happy he did.

"It's insane. ... When you go from just having an idea to having a full-fledged robot to working with your alliance ... it's mind-boggling," said Harris, due in a college classroom about 12 hours after returning from the trip. "I wouldn't trade that experience for anything."

bkadrich@hometownlife.com

Twitter: @bkadrich

An enthusiastic crowd of supporters welcomed Team 862 back from New Hampshire.(Photo: Brad Kadrich)

Pilot Tyler Harris, who is now off to Kettering to get his college career started, was all smiles after the Festival of Champions.(Photo: Mike Saunders)

Team 862 from Plymouth-Canton worked with its alliance to win the first Festival of Champions.(Photo: Mike Saunders)

Members of Team 862 show off the championship banner they brought home from the Festival of Champions in New Hampshire.(Photo: Brad Kadrich)

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LIGHTNING STRIKES AGAIN! Robotics team wins inaugural ... - Hometownlife.com

TABOR | If you travel about three miles northeast of Tabor, there is a hillside that is home to the Pechous Dairy. It might not look different from the average dairy operation on the outside, but inside it's a different story.

Housed inside the walls of the Pechous Dairy's newly built free-stall barn is a high-tech system of four robots working 24/7 to milk 230 cows an average of 2.8 times per day. The new barn and advanced machinery are investments in the family's legacy as dairy farmers for future generations. Tabor is in Bon Homme County, northwest of Yankton.

Having grown up and lived on dairy farms only two miles apart, Bob and Nancy Pechous took over Bob's parents' operation in 1980 before getting married in 1981. The couple started with 30 cows in a stanchion barn and had to physically haul their own buckets of milk to the cooler. In 1986, the couple expanded their operation and built a 12-station milking parlor with a pipeline for hauling milk. The upgrade allowed them to gradually begin increasing their herd size to around 125 cows.

"The addition of the milking parlor was great because everything became centralized," Nancy Pechous told the Yankton Daily Press & Dakotan. "We could have six cows on each side. Once we finished milking on one side, we could switch to the other side and rotate in six new cows."

The Pechous Dairy operated out of its 12-station milking parlor for the next 30 years with help from two hired hands and family support before changing to their current operation.

Out of their three children, only the Pechous' youngest son, Kyle, decided to join the dairy as a partner. Their oldest son, Justin, operates Pechous Repair in Tabor and their daughter, Jennifer, teaches in Brandon.

"Kyle was adjoined at the hip with Bob since he could walk," Nancy said. "We knew he was going to be our farmer. He was always helping out at the dairy as soon as he was old enough."

Kyle obtained a degree in diesel mechanics from Northeast Community College before returning home as a full-time partner in 2005. It was his idea to upgrade to the new robotic milking system in 2016.

"We got to the point where the old barn was falling apart," Nancy said. "We either needed to repair it or start new. Bob and I were actually thinking about getting out of the dairy business at the time, but Kyle came up with the idea to implement the new robotic system. We decided that we were all in this together and went full speed ahead."

Construction on the new barn and the installation of the robotic milking system began in January 2016 and finished late last September.

"We are now nine months into the new system," Nancy said. "For the first three months, we practically lived up in the barn after it was built. That's how long it took before the cows adjusted to the new system."

Built with the potential for expansion in mind, the new barn is divided into two main sections capable of housing 120 cows on each side. Both sections are outfitted with access to a feeding trough, back scratchers and bedded stalls. The barn is also outfitted with fans that create a constant five-mile-per-hour breeze that keeps the cows comfortable and the bugs out. Adding to the overall automation of the Pechous Dairy, manure is also automatically scrapped from the floors by a robotic system and pressed into dry bedding to be put on top of the rubber mats that cover the stall floors.

"We built this for future generations," Bob Pechous said. "We want to keep this dairy going and pass it down to our grandchildren."

Installed in each section are two fully-automatic milking machines, each with the capability of milking 60 cows. All the cows at the dairy have been trained to come to one of the four milking machines through the use of special protein pellets that are delivered by the robots. When a cow walks into the stall next to a machine, it reads the chip inside of a collar placed around the cow's neck. The cow is then weighed and fed according to how much milk it produces.

While the cow is feeding, the machine washes each teat and hooks up to them automatically, guided by lasers. The system records how much time each cow has been attached to the machine; it even measures down to the exact time that each teat is attached and how much milk each one produced. All the milk is then automatically transported from the machine to the cooler where it waits to be hauled out by truck every other day.

If something were to go wrong with the machine, like a computer glitch or a milking cup getting knocked out of position, the system automatically calls for assistance until someone responds. As an added safety net in case of power outages, the whole dairy is also backed up by a diesel generator to ensure that the system never goes offline and the cows are always milked.

The automated system also offers total monitoring of the herd from an office computer. It notifies the dairy of which cows are in need of artificial insemination and which cows need to be dried up. It also records the weight and body temperature of each animal, as well as notifies the dairy of abnormal milk, mastitis and other potential illnesses.

"The new system allows us to get to the cows before they get sick," Nancy said. "It helps us to head off a lot of things before they become a real problem."

Under the new milking robotic milking system, the Pechous Dairy has seen an increase of approximately 10 pounds of milk per cow. The daily average at the dairy is currently about 80 pounds of milk per cow. Overall, the dairy produces approximately 20,000 pounds of milk per day.

"My goal per cow was 86 pounds per day," Bob said. "We are not far from that right now. We actually have 33 cows producing over 100 pounds of milk per day, and our top producer is at about 145 pounds per day."

Currently, two-thirds of the Pechous Dairy's herd is first-time heifers who don't produce as much milk until their second lactation.

"Next lactation, we are going to probably get another 10 pounds of milk per cow from the majority of our herd," Nancy said. "After our first-time heifers have their second calf, they will produce more milk."

Already the largest of three dairies in Yankton County, the Pechous family said it wants to continue to lead local dairy production well into the future with the technological investments they have made at their facility.

"We want to help educate people on where their dairy products come from," Bob said. "A lot of people might not know what goes into the process of getting their milk from the cow to the table."

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South Dakota dairy looks to future with robotics - Rapid City Journal

NuTonomys driverless car took a spin around in South Boston.

It was this time last year that it first occurred to me that the U.S. presidential election was a choice between two World War II acronyms: SNAFU (Situation Normal All F***ed Up) and FUBAR (F***ed Up Beyond All Recognition).

In essence, American voters faced a choice between a candidate who personified the political status quo under an arrogant and detached liberal elite and a candidate who promised the disruption of that status quo. With Hillary Clinton there was the certainty that nothing much would change. With Donald Trump there was the chance of quite a lot of change, but the risk that it would be change for the worse.

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This week, the time has arrived to break the bad news to those who voted for Trump. You wanted change. You got it. For only the second time since 1955, Republicans control both the White House and Congress. But the result is a political system that I can now officially certify as FUBAR. This is not politics. This is fubatics.

Fubatics is to politics what comedy is to news. Ever since Americans began to get their politics from comedians like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, the danger has existed that the politicians would respond by providing them and their scriptwriters with material for gags. We have now reached that point.

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On Wednesday, newly appointed White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci told a New Yorker journalist that his colleague, chief of staff Reince Priebus, was a (expletive) paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac.He took to Twitter to imply that Priebus was guilty of a felony in leaking details of his financial disclosures. Meanwhile, their boss was also tweeting that he had lost faith in his very weak attorney general, Jeff Sessions.

For the White House, the attacks on the attorney general have touched off a serious problem on Capitol Hill when it did not need any other headaches.

Unified government? These guys are unified the way the cast of Reservoir Dogs were unified.

Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, the plan to render most Americans and indeed most humans unemployed goes smoothly forward.

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If you dont live in northern California, you tend to assume that it will be decades before self-driving vehicles are the dominant mode of transport. Last week, British Environment Secretary Michael Gove announced that the sale of new diesel and petrol cars would be banned in the UK by 2040, to encourage people to buy electric vehicles. This time frame surely underestimates Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, not to mention the established car manufacturers currently chasing him in the race to bring electric cars to the mass market. Goves worries about diesel fumes remind me of the Times editorial in 1894 warning that, by the middle of the 20th century, every street in London would be buried under nine feet of horse manure.

Despite overwhelming evidence of the accelerating pace of technological change and its diffusion, we humans remain chronically bad at making realistic projections about our economic future. According to the American trucking industry, the number of jobs for heavy-truck drivers and tractor-trailer drivers will be 21 percent higher in 2020 than in 2010. The Bureau of Labor expects that growth to continue until 2024. Yet self-driving vehicles are already on the road in several states in the United States. The Tesla Model S that takes me to the airport is already fitted with an autopilot mode.

According to the American Trucker Association, there are 3.5 million professional truck drivers in the United States. It is the most common job in the overwhelming majority of states. But the stark reality is that truckers are sitting where the drivers of horse-drawn carriages were sitting a century ago: on the brink of unemployment. Nor are they alone. Nearly half of jobs in United States are at risk of being automated over next decade or two, according to Carl Frey and Michael Osborne of Oxfords Martin School. Looking at global employment as a whole, the McKinsey Global Institute recently concluded that half of todays work activities could be automated by 2055, but this could happen up to 20 years earlier.

Trump voters thought it was globalization that destroyed the good jobs in American manufacturing. In reality, it was globalization and technology and now technology is getting ready to destroy the not-so-good jobs too.

As an economic historian, I cling to the hope that current predictions of the impending redundancy of humanity like similar predictions at earlier stages of industrialization will turn out to be wrong. As a reader of Dostoevskys Notes from Underground, I also expect bloody-minded humanity to put up more of a fight against the automation of the world than Silicon Valley expects. (That is probably what Steve Bannon is thinking, too.)

Yet I watch my son play gleefully with a new toy robot called RoboSapien. The G.I. Joe we gave him for Christmas lies forgotten in a corner of his bedroom. Suddenly I felt a sense of kinship with that poor, discarded doll.

The goings-on in Washington that I follow so closely are the politics of a distracted age. But the more attention we give to @realDonaldTrump on Twitter, the less we pay to the economic revolution going on all around us. The future belongs to robotics, not fubatics.

Originally posted here:

From fubatics to robotics - The Boston Globe - The Boston Globe

TABOR, S.D. (AP) - If you travel about three miles northeast of Tabor, there is a hillside that is home to the Pechous Dairy. It might not look different from the average dairy operation on the outside, but inside its a different story.

Housed inside the walls of the Pechous Dairys newly built free-stall barn is a high-tech system of four robots working 24/7 to milk 230 cows an average of 2.8 times per day. The new barn and advanced machinery are investments in the familys legacy as dairy farmers for future generations.

Having grown up and lived on dairy farms only two miles apart, Bob and Nancy Pechous took over Bobs parents operation in 1980 before getting married in 1981. The couple started with 30 cows in a stanchion barn and had to physically haul their own buckets of milk to the cooler. In 1986, the couple expanded their operation and built a 12-station milking parlor with a pipeline for hauling milk. The upgrade allowed them to gradually begin increasing their herd size to around 125 cows.

The addition of the milking parlor was great because everything became centralized, Nancy Pechous told the Yankton Daily Press & Dakotan (http://bit.ly/2vuoCFf ). We could have six cows on each side. Once we finished milking on one side, we could switch to the other side and rotate in six new cows.

The Pechous Dairy operated out of its 12-station milking parlor for the next 30 years with help from two hired hands and family support before changing to their current operation.

Out of their three children, only the Pechous youngest son, Kyle, decided to join the dairy as a partner. Their oldest son, Justin, operates Pechous Repair in Tabor and their daughter, Jennifer, teaches in Brandon.

Kyle was adjoined at the hip with Bob since he could walk, Nancy said. We knew he was going to be our farmer. He was always helping out at the dairy as soon as he was old enough.

Kyle obtained a degree in diesel mechanics from Northeast Community College before returning home as a full-time partner in 2005. It was his idea to upgrade to the new robotic milking system in 2016.

We got to the point where the old barn was falling apart, Nancy said. We either needed to repair it or start new. Bob and I were actually thinking about getting out of the dairy business at the time, but Kyle came up with the idea to implement the new robotic system. We decided that we were all in this together and went full speed ahead.

Construction on the new barn and the installation of the robotic milking system began in January 2016 and finished late last September.

We are now nine months into the new system, Nancy said. For the first three months, we practically lived up in the barn after it was built. Thats how long it took before the cows adjusted to the new system.

Built with the potential for expansion in mind, the new barn is divided into two main sections capable of housing 120 cows on each side. Both sections are outfitted with access to a feeding trough, back scratchers and bedded stalls. The barn is also outfitted with fans that create a constant five-mile-per-hour breeze that keeps the cows comfortable and the bugs out. Adding to the overall automation of the Pechous Dairy, manure is also automatically scrapped from the floors by a robotic system and pressed into dry bedding to be put on top of the rubber mats that cover the stall floors.

We built this for future generations, Bob Pechous said. We want to keep this dairy going and pass it down to our grandchildren.

Installed in each section are two fully-automatic milking machines, each with the capability of milking 60 cows. All the cows at the dairy have been trained to come to one of the four milking machines through the use of special protein pellets that are delivered by the robots. When a cow walks into the stall next to a machine, it reads the chip inside of a collar placed around the cows neck. The cow is then weighed and fed according to how much milk it produces.

While the cow is feeding, the machine washes each teat and hooks up to them automatically, guided by lasers. The system records how much time each cow has been attached to the machine; it even measures down to the exact time that each teat is attached and how much milk each one produced. All the milk is then automatically transported from the machine to the cooler where it waits to be hauled out by truck every other day.

If something were to go wrong with the machine, like a computer glitch or a milking cup getting knocked out of position, the system automatically calls for assistance until someone responds. As an added safety net in case of power outages, the whole dairy is also backed up by a diesel generator to ensure that the system never goes offline and the cows are always milked.

The automated system also offers total monitoring of the herd from an office computer. It notifies the dairy of which cows are in need of artificial insemination and which cows need to be dried up. It also records the weight and body temperature of each animal, as well as notifies the dairy of abnormal milk, mastitis and other potential illnesses.

The new system allows us to get to the cows before they get sick, Nancy said. It helps us to head off a lot of things before they become a real problem.

Under the new milking robotic milking system, the Pechous Dairy has seen an increase of approximately 10 pounds of milk per cow. The daily average at the dairy is currently about 80 pounds of milk per cow. Overall, the dairy produces approximately 20,000 pounds of milk per day.

My goal per cow was 86 pounds per day, Bob said. We are not far from that right now. We actually have 33 cows producing over 100 pounds of milk per day, and our top producer is at about 145 pounds per day.

Currently, two-thirds of the Pechous Dairys herd is first-time heifers who dont produce as much milk until their second lactation.

Next lactation, we are going to probably get another 10 pounds of milk per cow from the majority of our herd, Nancy said. After our first-time heifers have their second calf, they will produce more milk.

Already the largest of three dairies in Yankton County, the Pechous family said it wants to continue to lead local dairy production well into the future with the technological investments they have made at their facility.

We want to help educate people on where their dairy products come from, Bob said. A lot of people might not know what goes into the process of getting their milk from the cow to the table.

___

Information from: Yankton Press and Dakotan, http://www.yankton.net/

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South Dakota dairy looks to future with robotics - Washington Times

Duluth East Daredevils Teach Robotics at the Boys and Girls Club

DULUTH, Minn. Custom built robots zipped through obstacle courses at the Boys and Girls Club of Duluth this summer.

I think its fun, says Rodrick Campbell, a robotics camper. I like to play with remote control cars and how to see how they work and I like to play with my drones.

It was all part of the second annual Lego Robotics Camp.

Ive always been interested in looking at the way things work and robotics really allowed me to expand on that, says Cameron Anderson, co-captain of the Duluth East Daredevils robotics team, and a teacher at the camp.

At the camp, the Duluth East High School Daredevils robotics team teaches elementary and middle school kids the basics of programming and robotics.

Its our way of reaching out to this group who normally wouldnt be able to have this experience, says Anderson.

If you want a good hockey player, you start them young, says Tim Velner, coach of the Daredevils. If you want a good engineer, you got to start them young, and thats what were trying to do.

The kids use those skills to design and build their own robots capable of making it through a challenging course.

Theyre given a problem to solve and then they have to engineer, both mechanically and with a program, a way to solve the problem, says Velner.

If the robot cant finish, its back to the drawing board for the campers.

Most problems arent solved overnight, says Velner. Theyre solved because we have the grit to stick with it.

The kids make upgrades until their robots are unstoppable.

I learned that you should never stop trying, says camper Ira Alves.

The kids have a lot of fun and, in the process, learn valuable skills needed in the modern world.

I love the idea of inspiring the next generation especially of engineers, says Anderson.

When Im growing up, I want to be a mechanical engineer, says Campbell.

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Robotics Camp Teaches Kids Engineering and Problem Solving - FOX 21 Online

An Australian robot partly held together with cable ties has defeated 15 international teams to win a competition by global retail giant Amazon in Japan.

The Australian Centre for Robotic Vision, based at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, battled teams to win the $US80,000 ($A100,280) competition with their 'Cartman' robot picking up and storing the most items for Amazon in the shortest amount of time.

The Australian Centre for Robotic Vision, based at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, battled and won against 15 other international teams using their 'Cartman' robot.

The centre's chief operations officer, Dr Sue Keay, described the competition as "tense" but the team proved their ability from the outset when they won through to the eight-team final.

Despite being one of the "cheaper" robots in the competition, Cartman took top prize by picking up and storing the most items for retail giant Amazon in the shortest amount of time.

Dr Keay said it was a fine result for a robot unpacked and reassembled from a suitcase with "at least one key component held together with cable ties".

Team leader Dr Juxi Leitner said Cartman may have been the lowest-cost robot competing, but paid credit to its innovative Cartesian manipulator.

"We were the only team with a Cartesian robot at the event. Cartman was definitely a large reason for our success," he said.

Cartman works by moving along three axes and picking items up using either suction or a pincer grip, making squishy items like socks, no problem.

The robot was built from scratch by the robotics team which includes researchers from QUT, the Australian National University and the University of Adelaide.

"Looking at the overall performance across all teams, we see huge advances in robotics and Artificial Intelligence," said Adelaide-based team member Dr Anton Milan.

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Aust robotics team win Amazon competition - NEWS.com.au

The H.O.T. Squad, a FIRST LEGO League (FLL) robotics team from Socorro traveled to Fairmont, West Virginia to compete in the Mountain States FIRST LEGO League Invitational July 7-9 9. The team was composed of local home-schooled and Cottonwood Valley Charter School students and led by coaches Gwen Valentino and Jim Jackson. The team competed in multiple categories with 40 of the best FLL teams from the United States, Canada, Brazil and Uruguay.

H.O.T Squad team members attended the invitational with two other New Mexican teams from Albuquerque. All teams competed in three categories: Core Values, Project, Robot and Robot Performance. The event was hosted by the West Virginia Robotics Alliance, Fairmont State University and the WV High Technology Foundation.

The Core Values are at the cornerstone of the FIRST LEGO League. During the competition, teams are tasked to demonstrate how they embraced each of those core values which are: 1. We are a team; 2. We do the work and find solutions with guidance from our coaches and mentors; 3. We know our coaches and mentors don't have all the answers; we learn together; 4. We honor the spirit of friendly competition; 5. What we discover is more important than what we win; 6. We share our experiences with others; 7. We display Gracious Professionalism and Coopertition in everything we do.; 8. We have FUN!

For team members Iriana and Ithan Valentino, they enjoyed the social and core values portion of the competition the most. Ithan shared that the dance party before the awards was my favorite part. Iriana said she best enjoyed, meeting team members from other countries and sharing what we have in common.

Team members Gavin Spitz and Jared Hitchcock expressed that they most enjoyed being able to travel and experience West Virginia while Joshua Walsh said his favorite experience was having a pickup soccer game with Team Brasil.

Walsh, the project team leader said, I felt really good about our project and I really did think we were going to come away with an award. That didnt happen but when I saw the judging rubric, we only had one category just below the top score and now I know how to fix it for the next competition. We had the judges rolling with laughter during our skit; they really got it.

The team created a pet evacuation kit called the My Pet Hero which could be customized to your pet when ordered from the website Walsh created.

Ixchel Valentino, the teams lead robot builder and programmer said, We knew going in to the competition that our robot performance scores were going to be in the middle of the pack so we just focused on our ability to communicate our engineering notebook and being able to perform under pressure. The team definitely faced the pressure. During the trip, the robots gyroscope had some damage meaning the robot couldnt line up correctly during a mission and test runs did not have the same results seen while practicing in Socorro.

It was tough but I actually liked programming on the fly when things didnt work on the second day, said Ixchel. On Saturday night, while other teams were playing and hanging out around campus, the H.O.T. Squad was brainstorming new programming code and approaches to up their robot performance scores. In spite of the challenges Ixchel said, It was super stressful but it was so worth it; in the end Im glad that I was a robot driver and I was so happy when everything worked in the final alliance round.

The H.O.T. Squad paired up with the Flaming Dragon Bots from Pennsylvania for the alliance competition; they made it to the semifinals and missed the finals by only 13 points. Walsh, the other driver added, Ixchel and I were stressed all weekend because the wall mission didnt work then our entire team exploded with cheers when it worked perfectly in the last round.

This opportunity wouldnt have been possible without the support of our fan club and local organizations, said team coach Gwen Valentino. We had donors who appreciate the program pay to get the team to West Virginia. New Mexico FIRST LEGO League partners, Socorro County, New Mexico Tech and the City of Socorro sponsored our entry fees and pit design and gave us tons of give-aways to share with participants. We were really able to show off our community. The 3rd Phase Foundation helped outfit the kids with very cool tee-shirts using the FIRST robotics grant won in 2016. Valentino added, We did a lot of bragging about Socorro and New Mexico Tech; out of our six team members, five of their parents (and one grandparent) are New Mexico Tech alumni.

Though the H.O.T Squad didnt come home with any awards this year, the team came back with excellent feedback from the judges to improve on their performance next year. Coach Valentino said the next FLL challenge will be released in August and most of the team members are expected to return. These kids had a taste of international competition and they want to qualify for the World Competition in 2018. I think they have a shot.

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Socorro robotics team competes against international field - El Defensor Chieftain

Genevieve DiNatale @cnb_DiNatale

CRESTVIEW The 6th annual Ed-Spark STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) Lego Robotics Camp kicked off Monday at Shoal River Middle School.

Right now they are working on building a basic EV3 Tribot configuration. Its standard with all the Lego Mindstorms, and basically this is just to help them learn how to build and get used to the programming so when we give them challenges later this week they will be able to complete those efficiently, said Jacob Thursby, a 17-year-old camp mentor and rising senior at Niceville High School.

I went to this camp last year because I just have a fascination about robots, so my mom thought it would be a good idea to see how it is and thats how I met my coach, Ms. Allen, 12-year-old Marysia Ray said while building a robot with classmate Taylor Smith.

After building their robots, campers hooked them to a computer using Bluetooth or programming cords.

They are going to build a Lego robot and they will use the programming from the computer and it will download onto the robot and the robot will work autonomously, said Laurie Allen, the camps co-founder and a teacher at Shoal River Middle School.

Tim Sexton is a STEM teacher at Davidson Middle School who began the program with Allen after meeting her at the science center about six years ago.

I really enjoyed playing sorry, I mean working with the Legos and wanted to start something new and we wanted to build a robotics program (at) the north end of the county and to do so we started this camp, Sexton said

He said the skills middle school students develop at the camp are manifold.

One is teamwork. They have to work with a person they probably never met before, and to work as a team to accomplish whatever given tasks after the robot is built," he said. "It also teaches them to modify and troubleshoot their robots when something isnt working right, so there is some troubleshooting and engineering skills, (such as) building attachments that would work for emissions."

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Crestview students learn robotics at STEM summer camp - The Northwest Florida Daily News

Washington, D.C. In its first-ever appearance at the FIRST Global Robotics Competition, a group of three students from the federation, accompanied by Dr. Ricardo Neil, placed 36th out of 163 nations in a three-day competition from July 14-17. Jermelia Henry, Zhavier Shaw and Jervik Lapsley represented the nation with flying colors at the Robotics Olympics. Competitors aged 17 or 18 were tasked to design and create a robot that could separate different colored balls that simulated clean and contaminated water, as well as pull itself up off the ground and drive on an incline.

But the team barely made the competition, as Neil found out only in March that it was occurring. The students were quickly assembled and willing to work until 2 or 3 in the morning to make this journey a reality.

At the end of the first day of competing, SKN Robotics had risen has high as fifth place, which served as an extraordinary boost to the teams confidence.

For us to go up against Russia, Ukraine, North Korea, South Korea and the United States, and actually beat them, says a lot, Neil said. Some of these countries had robotics programs going on for years, but our students were able to outwit them with the ways they drove them. We were able to maneuver all over more quickly than the other nations.

SKNs team designed a robot that was smaller than what some other competitors had to offer, which made the group nervous when they first examined other robots. This turned out to be an advantage, as the decreased size, as well as two different types of wheels that worked together to increase the robots speed and turning ability, gave them excellent scores. The students worked tirelessly and took their time to ensure they had developed the right robot.

There were several prototypes before, Neil said. They had to design and redesign endlessly until they got one that was flexible, workable and could maneuver in the pit. We were able to design a robot that had an arm that hooks an area and actually pulls itself up, so we were able to achieve something that not many other countries could do.

The robots ability to lift itself up separated SKNs team from the competition immediately, as they were able to gain five more possible points than most other nations, whose robots couldnt lift themselves fully off the ground and instead focused on driving at an incline. The teams ability to hit the ground running and establish SKNs robotics program on a world stage left an impact on competitors.

We have got the respect from a lot of countries who may have not heard about St. Kitts and Nevis, Neil said. Now they want to visit. We had people coming to us asking about our country. You had that kind of build up, people did not expect us to rise so high. When the competition started, most people overlooked us, but when they realized we were outperforming some of the more developed countries in terms of resources, then we began to garner a lot of respect.

After a day of alliance competition, where the SKN robotics team grouped up with Slovenia and Zimbabwe, and another day of solo competition, SKN finished the Robotics Olympics in 36th place overall, third out of Caribbean nations and first in the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States.

Neil and the team came back to Basseterre with their heads held high and went right back to work. They were invited back to the competition next year, and hope to increase their success with more time to work on the robot.

One thing that we hope to do going forward is to open the recruiting process a bit broader, Neil said. We want to open the competition to the secondary schools and see how well these students can perform so we can give everyone a chance to be a part of this. We want to make sure that the students are being highlighted, we have heard a lot of negative things about young people, so Im happy we were able to showcase something positive that is happening.

The team outperformed expectations and established that St. Kitts and Nevis is capable of producing students who can compete on an international level. The team is ready to continue to build on their success, but will be retiring the robot that took them so far in this competition as a memory of what they can do if they are given the opportunity.

I want to personally take the time to congratulate the TVEMS Information students for valiantly representing St Kitts and Nevis without being intimidated by the representatives of other countries, Neil said. Instead, you were able to form meaningful relationships and in the process create a network [that] secured valuable connections all over the world.

Thank you. You achieved the impossible. Your performance exceeded that of more than 120 countries in your first appearance at the Robotics Olympics. If this doesnt deserve the welcome afforded to heroes, there is nothing more that can be said.

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SKN robotics team excels at international level - The St. Kitts-Nevis Observer

U.S. AIR FORCE ACADEMY, Colo. --

The Center for Character and Leadership Development hosted 25 robotics educators from across the U.S. at the FIRST Leadership Experience June 24-26 in Polaris Hall.

Air Force Recruiting sponsored and accompanied the teachers, all members of the national organization For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, or FIRST. Most teach at the middle and high school level and are commonly called FIRST Mentors.

"We wanted to attract the best and brightest here and create a STEM connection with them," said Capt. Ross McKnight, an Academy grad and Air Force recruiter.

The mission of FIRST is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders and innovators, by engaging them in exciting mentor-based robotics teams that build science, engineering and technology skills. They engage kindergarten through high school students to build their STEM skills and inspire their imagination by fostering self-confidence, communication and leadership.

"Our vision is to transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated and young people dream of becoming science and technology leaders," said FIRST Founder Dean Kamen.

McKnight said the mission of his office is to connect the Air Force with like-minded organizations who foster STEM goals in U.S. education.

The teachers participated in sessions designed to hone their mentoring skills through immersion with the Air Force core values. Sessions covered team building, leadership, creative problem solving and organizational skills.

Adrianne Strange of Air Force Recruiting said the CCLD was the obvious place to bring the group to discuss new ways of leading tomorrow's STEM stand-outs.

Mentors were also given tours of the CCLD, mechanics lab, aero lab, robotics lab and cadet pavilion. They also took a turn on the ropes course.

"It's great to be reminded of how the Air Force core values should be at the fore-front of our leadership and therefore our teams and classrooms," said Tom Shultz, a teacher and FIRST Mentor from Michigan. "I'm grateful for this tremendous opportunity which will undoubtedly make a positive impact on my classroom students and [robotics] team. I'm sure I speak for the other 24 teachers when I say I'm excited to see the domino effect that this will have on all of the students in our lives."

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Academy hosts leadership conference with FIRST Robotics Mentors - U.S. Air Force Academy

At a summer robotics camp for high school and middle school kids in South Jerseys Salem County, failure is an option but only temporarily.

When 17-year-old Noah Halsted switched on his teams 3-by-2-foot, gear-packed robot and absolutely nothing happened, he took just a second to groan, That failed, before grabbing some electrical tape, fixing a cable, and sending the reenergized robot to scoot across the floor on six wheels, scooping up plastic balls with a cleverly hidden broom.

In the room next door at Salem Community College, 14-year-old Christian Goldsborough programming a smaller robot made from Legos said he knows the feeling. Whats cool about robotics, the Penns Grove teen said, is that when you mess up and youre frustrated, then do the right thing. A job well done is the best part.

The kids can-do, blue-collar approach to high-tech wizardry reflects the scrappy nature of the program they are part of South Jersey Robotics, a volunteer effort that for nearly a decade has steadily built a network of competitive robotics teams and worked with programs like this GEAR UP! summer camp to promote tech careers in one of the poorest stretches of the Garden State, where job opportunities have been shrinking.

These are counties that are forgotten, said Rosanne Danner, the retired DuPont engineer who as president of South Jersey Robotics has seen the program expand to 15 teams with roughly 100 high schoolers and middle schoolers in Cumberland, Salem, Atlantic, and Cape May Counties. This is about exposing them to STEM science, technology, engineering, and math and STEM careers, and things they can do. This is about giving them the belief that they can have opportunities beyond what is happening in the counties.

South Jersey Robotics is pushing to expand into several of the regions chronically underfunded schools, where STEM education has lagged behind more affluent suburbs where some kids learn coding in kindergarten. The programs target counties include five of New Jerseys 31 so-called Abbott districts cited in a landmark court case as victims of an unfair school-funding formula. Three of those districts Vineland, Bridgeton, and Millville are in Cumberland County, which has the states highest poverty rate.

We have no robotics, no STEAM (STEM learning with an arts component), no nothing for middle school students, said Joanne Colacurcio,supervisor of instructional technology and career, tech, and education classes for the public schools in Millville, where 80 percent of kids qualify for free or reduced lunches. Thats slated to change this fall with an Intro to STEM class at Lakeside Middle School and a new First Lego League Robotics team supported by South Jersey Robotics.

For Danner and other backers of South Jersey Robotics, getting kids from rural and underdeveloped corners of South Jersey to compete in FIRST Robotics in which students around the world try to outdo each other with game-playing bots is a vehicle to put them on a path toward studying science or math in college and toward career choices where job opportunities are more plentiful and more lucrative. The group says more than 95 percent of its participants move on to post-secondary school and more than 70 percent major in a STEM field.

But along that path, winning is still important. The programs two high-school-level teams including the LuNaTeCs, whove been around since 1999 have been to the national/world competition in cities including St. Louis and Atlanta five times. This year, three of the programs 11 teams in the Lego League, geared toward middle schoolers, advanced to the South Jersey district finals at Rowan University.

In addition, the teams work on tech-oriented community projects. For example, the high school students in LuNaTeCs built an adaptive device that allowed a child born without a left hand to jump rope.

Danner said the clubs are structured so that kids learn not just tech skills but marketing, networking, finance, public speaking, as well as more access to scholarship money skills that should help later in life.

Margo Reed

Mya Gregory (left) and Niajah Mitchell work with robotics at Gear Up! Camp at Salem Community College on Wednesday, July 26, 2017. ( MARGO REED / Staff Photographer )

At the GEAR UP! program, experienced middle- and high-schoolers from South Jersey Robotics come in two days a week to teach robotics skills to seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders at a camp designed to spark future career ambitions.

Halsted, the 17-year-old from Lower Alloways Creek, said hes been fascinated by robotics ever since other club members came to his grade school and did a demonstration. Now a junior at Salem County Career and Technical High School studying computers, animation, and drafting, he said he knows how to program in nine computer languages and is aiming for a career in information technology.

There are no school teams around here, no [school] clubs, said Halsted, whos working with officials at his school to create an IT internship program. He said taking part in South Jersey Robotics and its Velocity team is a lot of fun. You get to meet new people at every event. Theres always something new you can learn.

Tim Roy, a 13-year-old camper and an eighth-grader at Penns Grove Middle School, helped program a Lego robot to perform tasks on a game board. You can express your feelings about Legos, he said. When Im able to do something like this, I feel good about it.

He said he wants to become a mechanical engineer; his campmate Goldsborough said his career ambition is sound engineering. That kind of talk is music to the ears of the adults backing South Jersey Robotics.

David Stump, director of grant development and management at Cumberland Community College, said he believes robotics is the vehicle to get more kids focused on tech as a career option in a poverty-plagued county where too many kids dont stick with STEM learning.

His college has partnered with First Jersey Robotics, two adjoining school districts in Millville and Morris River Township, and Salem Community College in applying for a $1.2 million federal grant under a program called Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers, or ITEST, that targets underprivileged youth to start robotics teams in more local schools.

Stump said the program could be a huge boost for Cumberland County, where long-term unemployment is nearly double the national rate and just 13 percent of students earn bachelors degrees.

Although the federal dollars if they come at all wouldnt arrive until 2018 at the earliest, First Jersey Robotics, which now has about55 volunteers and cobbles together an annual budget of roughly $80,000 to 90,000 through grants and fundraising, last year partnered with East Greenwichs Samuel Mickle Middle School to launch robotics teams and clubs and to help train teachers.

Program volunteers like board member Sandee Rodriguez, whose son competed with the LuNaTeCs and is close to earning a computer and electrical engineering degree from Grove City College in western Pennsylvania, say this is the best escape route in a county where many families struggle to get off public assistance. What were doing is changing lives, Rodriguez said. Were trying to provide opportunities that werent there before.

Published: July 28, 2017 3:01 AM EDT

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At South Jersey Robotics, gears and switches set careers in motion - Philly.com

Posted on July 28, 2017 | 2:16 p.m.

IntriPlex Technologies Inc., an MMI company, helped Riviera Robotics, a local teen robotics team, achieve its goal to participate in the 2017 FIRST Robotics championship in Houston.

After excelling at two regional competitions the Riviera Robotics team made a strong showing at the championships with its unique and formidable robot.

This achievement did not come easy and was a true team effort from the teens, mentors and local supporters like IntriPlex.

We all have hopes of helping out in our community, said Lawney Falloon, managing director of IntriPlex, Inc.

Knowing that we were able to make specialized components that helped the Riviera Robotics team complete their robot is very gratifying. We are proud of their achievement, Falloon said.

This year, MMI helped us machine two critical metal components called collectors for our robot, said Andrew Duerner, lead mentor for the Riviera Robotics team.

We have worked with IntriPlex in the past and we knew we could count on them to help us with the detailed work needed for these two parts," Duerner said.

"We look forward to future collaborations and appreciate that our teens are exposed to a local technical manufacturing company," he said.

IntriPlex is an innovator in ultrahigh precision metal stamping. Over the past 30 years it has developed and produced billions of parts for the hard disk drive and other industries from its production facility in Goleta.

Riviera Robotics, founded in 2016, is a nonprofit robotics program open to high school students in Santa Barbara County.

The team is comprised of some 20 students and six mentors from the fields of engineering, computer programming, electrical design, business, outreach, and finance. For more information, visit http://www.rivierarobotics.org/.

Julie Fishman for IntriPlex.

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Local Tech Company Gives Riviera Robotics Team a Hand - Noozhawk

Photo: Georgia Tech This robot can step in with ethical advice when a relationship gets complicated.

Most of the discussion around robots and ethics lately has been about whether autonomous cars will decide to run over the nearest kitten or a slightly farther away basket full of puppies. Or something like that. Whether or not robots can make ethical decisions when presented with novel situations is something that lots and lots of people are still working on, but its much easier for robots to be ethical in situations where the rules are a little bit clearer, and also when there is very little chance of running over cute animals.

At ICRA last month, researchers at Georgia Tech presented a paper on an intervening ethical governor for a robot mediator in patient-caregiver relationship. The idea is that robots will become part of our daily lives, and theyare much, much better than humans at paying close and careful attention to things, without getting distracted or bored, forever. So robots with an understanding of ethical issues would be able to observe interactions between patients and caregivers, and intervene when they notice that somethings not going the way it should. This is important, and we need it.

In the United States, there are about a million people living with Parkinsons disease. Robotic systems like exoskeletons and robot companions are starting to help people with physical rehabilitation and emotional support, but its going to be a while before we have robots that are capable of giving patients with Parkinsons all the help that they need. In the meantime, patients rely heavily on human caregivers, which can be challenging for both parties at times. Parkinsons is specifically tricky for human-human interactions because declining muscle control means that patients frequently have trouble conveying emotion through facial expressions, and this can lead to misunderstandings, or worse things.

To test if a robot mediator could help in such cases, theGeorgia Tech researchersJaeeun Shim, Ronald Arkin, and Michael Pettinatideveloped anintervening ethical governor (IEG). It is basically a set of algorithms that encodes specific ethical rules, and determines what to do in different situations. In this case, the IEGuses indicators like voice volume and face tracking to evaluate whether a humans dignity becomes threatened due to others inappropriate behavior in a patient-caregiver interaction. If that happens, the IEGspecifieshow and when the robot should intervene.

To embody their IEG, the researchers used a Nao humanoid, which has good sensing capabilities (a microphone arrayand camera)and can do speech synthesis (for the intervention bit). They then conducted simulated, scripted interactions between two grad students to see how the robot would react:

In the final part of the project, the researchers recruited a group of people (olderadults who could potentially be using the system)to watch these interactions and describe their reactions to them. It was a small number of participatants (nine, withaverage age of 71), but at this stage the IEG is still a proof-of-concept, so the researchers were mostly interested in qualitative feedback.Based on the responses from the study participants, the researchers were able to highlight some important takeaways, like:

Safety is most important

I think anything to protect the patient is a good thing.

Thats a high value. Thats appropriate there, because it gives real information, not just commanding.

The robot should not command or judge

I think that [commanding] puts the robot in the spot of being in a judgment I think it should be more asking such as how can I help you? But the robot was judging the patient. I dont think thats why we would want the robot.

He [the patient] should not be criticized for leaving or forgetting to do something by the robot. The caregiver should be more in that position.

If the robot stood there and told me to please calm down, Id smack him.

Ah yes, it wouldnt be a social robotics study if it didnt end with someone wanting to smack a robot. The researchers, to their credit, are taking this feedback to heart, and working with experts to tweak the language a bit, for example by changing please calm down to lets calm down, which is a bit less accusatory. Theyre also planning on improving the system by incorporating physiological data to better detect patients and caregivers emotional statuses, which could improve the accuracy of the robots intervention.

We should stress that theres no way a robot can replace empathetic interactions between two people, and thats not what this project is about. Robots, or AI systems in general, can potentially be effective mediators, making sure that caregivers and patients act ethically and respectfully towards each other, helping to improve relationships rather than replace them.

IEEE Spectrums award-winning robotics blog, featuring news, articles, and videos on robots, humanoids, drones, automation, artificial intelligence, and more. Contact us:e.guizzo@ieee.org

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If robots are going to drive our cars and play with our kids, well need to teach them right from wrong 31May2016

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Robots will soon have the power of life and death over human beings. Are they ready? Are we? 31May2016

As artificial intelligence in military robots advances, the meaning of warfare is being redefined 31May2016

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Videos of Barack Obama made from existing audio, video of him 12Jul

To respond to a plague of drones, airports and other venues deploy AI systems to track and identifyintruders 28Jun

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A GPU-based neural network was the only way to handle a garage full of Lego 23Jun

It may be more than youd like 23Jun

Intel says its new Olympics sponsorship is about changing the experience for the digital generation 21Jun

The preliminary work for simulating the human brain is already under way 21Jun

Nearly 400 teams have already signed up to create an AI with true generalized intelligence 21Jun

Georgia Tech's Shimon has analyzed thousands of songs and millions of music clips and can now compose completely original music 14Jun

Affectivas Rana El-Kaliouby says our devices need to get a lot more emotionally intelligent 13Jun

At the intersection of two challenging computational and technological problems may lie the key to better understanding and manipulating quantum randomness 13Jun

If machine learning systems can be taught using simulated data from Grand Theft Auto V instead of data annotated by humans, we could get to reliable vehicle autonomy much faster 8Jun

DeepMind's training data set of 300,000 YouTube clips finds AI struggles to recognize actions such as eating doughnuts or face-planting 8Jun

Adversarial grasping helps robots learn better ways of picking up and holding onto objects 5Jun

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Robots Could Act as Ethical Mediators Between Patients and Caregivers - IEEE Spectrum

The Girl Scouts of the USA unveiled 23 new badges related to science, technology, mathematics, and nature activities this week, responding to popular demand for activities related to interests such as the outdoors, mechanical engineering, and computer programming.

The new badges will have members designing robots and learning about mechanical engineering, " building and testing rollercoasters, race cars, and gliders," the organization said.

"The level of skills will be appropriate to the girls' ages, starting with kindergarten-age Daisy Scouts," member station Arizona Public Media reports.

Jessica Malordy, communications coordinator for Girl Scouts of Southern Arizona, tells APM, "Girls have expressed a ton of interest and have been very vocal about their desire to do more STEM."

As part of the effort, the Southern Arizona group is set to open a new facility that includes a new STEM lab.

"STEM and the outdoors really help girls learn to take risks and to seek challenges and learn from setbacks," Malordy told APM.

The Girl Scouts announcement brought enthusiastic responses on its Facebook page.

"So proud of our Girl Scouts," Connie Willegal wrote, adding, "when I told my 2nd year Brownie granddaughter about these, she was delighted!"

Caitie Ann Bolich said, "WooHoo!! So happy to have more fun with my Brownie Scout! She is so excited to build some robots and go camping!"

The new badges will initially only be available for younger members, the group said. Replying to comments noting the lack of opportunities for middle- and high-school-age girls in the organization, the group said badges for older girls are "in the works."

In keeping with this week's theme emphasizing science, the Girl Scouts posted a project created by the Girl Scouts San Jacinto, for building a solar eclipse pinhole projector.

Back in 2011, the Girl Scouts updated their badges for the first time in some 25 years, adding badges for activities such as Digital Movie Maker and Website Designer.

The Boy Scouts of America have placed a similar emphasis on science activities making changes such as adding a Robotics badge in 2011 and badges for Game Design, Sustainability, and Programming in 2013.

As the group says on it page explaining the STEM/Nova program, "We must work together to cultivate the next generation of critical thinkers and innovators."

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Girl Scouts Add Badges For Robotics, Other Science Skills - NPR

Teams competing in Amazon's third-annual contest tackle a problem that has kept companies from automating warehouses entirely.

July 27, 2017, 8:00 AM EDT

Sixteen teamsofrobotics researchersare traveling to Japan this weekto help Amazon.com Inc. solve its warehouse problem. The company has a fleet of robots that drive around its facilitiesgathering items for orders. But it needs humans for the last step picking up items of various shapes, then packing the right ones into the correct boxes for shipping. Its a classic example of an activity thats simple, almost mindless, forhumans, but still unattainablefor robots. Starting Thursday, the company is running theAmazon Robotics Challenge, the third annualcontest for robots that push those limits.

Amazon gets nothing out of this, directly. But their own robotics team can potentially pick up techniques, or even new colleagues -- it has hired people who have entered past contests. More broadly, having robots that could reliably carry out the tasks from the challengeon their own would be a big steptowardsfully autonomous warehouses, which theoretically could run faster,cheaper, and around the clock.

This raises uncomfortable questions aboutthe future prospects for warehouse workers. In May, therewere949,000 people working inthewarehouseand storageindustry in the U.S., making an average wage of just under $20 an hour,according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number of people working in the warehouse industry has grown 43 percent overthelast decade, and wages have kept pace with inflation, even as a first wave of automation has taken place. Optimists argue that more automation leads to more growth, creating better jobs elsewhere. Pessimists are basically predicting that artificial intelligence will usher in an economic apocalypse.

Startupslike Right HandRoboticsand Universal Logic claim that theirsystemsare far more sophisticated than what has come out of Amazons challenge so far. Yaro Tenzer, a co-founder of Right Hand Robotics, is in Japan for RoboCup 2017, the conference where Amazon's contest takes place. He says he may recruit participants, but sees little reason to show off his company's techniques publicly. "The value for us is staying ahead of everyone else," he said.

Alberto Rodriguez, a professor at MIT's department of mechanical engineeringwho leads a team from MIT and Princeton, puts it in more idealistic terms. He sees value in getting a bunch of researchers pointedin exactly the same direction. "Theres some notion of common knowledge that has been generated because so many people have been motivated to work on the same problem," he said.

Theteams havebecomeincreasinglysophisticated in their approaches. They started withalgorithms that required them to program rules so robots coulddistinguish specific objects in the contest. They now useneural networks, a form of artificial intelligence that helps robots learn to recognize objects with less human programming.The biggest difference this year is that Amazon isnt tellingthe teams whichitems theyll see in advance. Instead, it gives them 40 items to traintheirsystems on, then replaces 20 of them with new objects ahalfhour before the contest starts. This undermines a basic strategy from last year, when teams fed the systems hundreds of images of each item theyd see from all different angles and in different lighting.That worked, but it was an unrealistic solution in a real world scenario,saidRodriguez.

Whether Amazon will be able to leverage the contest to leapfrog othercompaniesworking on similar problems has yet to be seen. The company hasnt incorporated anything from the contest into itsactual operations, according to Robinson.Kris Hauser,thefaculty advisor for this year's team ofstudents from Duke University,says a warehouse staffed with fullyautonomous picking robots is still several years away.Amazons guidance, hesays,keeps academics like himself from straying too far into the theoretical. This is really forcing us to look at these problems from the point of view of a potential commercial technology,"he said. "When we take research products and try to put them out in the real world, were oftentimes surprised at how bad they perform."

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Amazon Enlists Researchers to Build Box-Packing Robots - Bloomberg

Robert Shiller is well-known for his views on valuation, volatility, dividends and bubbles. But when asked what currently worries him most, the Yale professor of economics turned to another subject entirely.

"A theme that I have been coming back to is that the big worry that's on people's minds I don't know how active it is in trading but it's about where the world is going with automation and robotics," Shiller said in a Wednesday interview on CNBC's "Trading Nation."

Providing just one recent example of technological advancements pushing aside traditional human roles, the Nobel laureate cited the attempt by two Norwegian companies to develop a crewless container ship.

"We are going to see ships sailing across the ocean with nobody on it, just cargo like driverless cars," Shiller said. "These things keep coming up and I think they make people worry about everything, including even stocks. You don't know how all this automation is going to play out for various kinds of companies. This is what, I imagine, is on people's minds all the time now."

In a Thursday interview on CNBC's "Halftime Report," Shiller added that these concerns may actually be spurring the stock market rally.

"It just seems like, it doesn't matter what job you have, there's always some robot out there about to take it," he said. "I think people are worried, and they want to buy tech, because they feel like they're taking part [in] the thing that's threatening them. So there is this deep emotional fear which is increasing, which is having the effect of pushing up prices for now."

This fear is "substantially driving the market," he said.

Indeed, the information technology sector is by far the top performer in the S&P 500 this year. And the best-performing large U.S. stocks include AI chipmaker Nvidia and self-driving pioneer Tesla; those shares have surged 49 percent and 55 percent year to date, respectively.

Meanwhile, the titans of technology are speaking openly about artificial intelligence concerns. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has memorably called AI "our biggest existential threat," and when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently called his warnings "irresponsible," Musk retorted that Zuckerberg's "understanding of the subject is limited."

Facebook, like Tesla, has been a notable force in AI research and a company whose shares have risen substantially this year.

For Shiller, the market move he sees as being partially driven by technological anxiety appears a bit irrational, but may not yet be over.

"I don't know that it's come to a culmination," he said Thursday. "It might go on for years like this."

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Robert Shiller: Fear of robots is driving the market rally - CNBC

Currently, the start-up's software connects to retailers' and shippers' systems to get data about what orders are coming in the door, and where items are located in a facility. The Chuck also takes in data from on-board sensors to navigate within centimeters of a desired item on a shelf.

The robots could become smarter over time, and help the managers and operators of warehouses identify areas for improvement, essentially managing foot traffic and placement of inventory on shelves.

Dubois told CNBC, "When researchers truly figure out grasping, and things like that, there's also a real opportunity to put an arm on Chuck, and start to use him to help people with different kinds of work."

The company's competition includes Locus Robotics, Fetch Robotics and a handful of other more niche systems designed to help workers in warehouses move goods around more efficiently.

6 River Systems recently attracted $15 million in new venture funding, Dubois said. The round was led by Norwest Venture Partners, joined by Eclipse Ventures and iRobot, the company that created the Roomba vacuum.

Norwest's Matt Howard said one reason his firm invested in 6 River Systems is because its technology can be installed without any changes to a warehouse.

"You can start using the Chuck without pouring in any concrete, or installing cameras and sensors or special networks all over. This will be accessible for small to medium-sized enterprises, which are essential for making deliveries over that last mile," he explained.

While the CEO did not have permission to name early customers of 6 River Systems, he said they already include half a dozen publicly traded companies including massive department stores, big box retailers and third-party logistics businesses. He expects the installed base for Chuck will more than double in the next three months.

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The team who created Amazon's warehouse robots returns with a new robot named Chuck - CNBC