Robot bartenders

Great attitude:

“We really just like robots and cocktails, and both together seemed like the perfect thing,” said Simone Davalos, one of the organizers of the Barbot 2010 event. “There is no real aim for world-changing, paradigm-shifting technological achievement, at least not from our perspective, but who knows? Lots of amazing things have happened over cocktails.”

Wired article.

Journal of Autonomous Robots

Not a lot of multi-robot stuff in the Journal of Autonomous Robots. In fact only one in the two 2010 issues and only 1-2 more in the 13 "Online First" articles. The articles that do appear are swarm robotics.

Here is the only multi-robot article for 2010, on swarm robots self assembling and repairing themselves.

Buying UAV time instead of UAVs

The lead story in this months Robotic Trends newsletter (here) is about AAI a company offering UAV time to defense, industry and academia.

I think this is a fantastic way to run a UAV company. I think a big reason that UAVs are not getting the penetration they should, outside of defense, is the technical skill required to use them, fix them, service them and integrate them into other systems. AAI is doing all that for you and providing the data. We'll see if this opens the floodgates.

What is AI? When will we get it?

A silicon.com article ask what AI really is and when we will get there. With quotes from people like Daphne Koller, Eric Horvitz and Warwick.

In today's popular imagination AI still conjures up ideas of intelligent robots - Data in Star Trek, or a disembodied and often malevolent super-intelligence of the kind seen in The Matrix. These incarnations of AI project an image of machine intelligence that is superior to man's, at least when it comes to things like reasoning and problem solving. Emotionally, of course, fictional AI has always been a bit simplistic - if not downright psychopathic, and keen to do away with the human competition.