Ancient Robots

I came by accident across this book and its title, unavoidably, caught my attention. Written by Eirini Mpourdakou, the book goes back into ancient times providing an overview of ancient automation technology. 

Via archaeological artifacts as well as scriptures detailing the design of such technology, the reader discovers that starting more than 2000 years ago with Greek civilization and pursued by Byzantin and Arab later on, the foundations of modern automation technology were being set. Predominantly based on simple hydraulic rules, inventions of incredible ingenuity could be designed from automatic maids and fountains for courtyards of nobles and kings to moving and speaking statues for religious use inside temples. 

Being more than just an overview of such inventions, the book seeks to highlight the long standing desire of the human to create technology and tools capable of performing the toil inducing, repeatable tasks. Through ancient art and mythology, we witness this desire and human vision for mastering nature's laws and exploiting them at our service. Which is the very definition of "robot" today, namely, the worker who performs labor on demand.

A very nice read, rich with pictures and well documented.

ISBN: 960-7931-71-8

Year: 2001

Language: Greek

Motobot project - Automated motorcycle driving

Robot cow milker

Eagles trained to intercept drones in the french military

These sorts of projects make really cool headlines (at least, until the arrival of drones with defensive capabilities).

On an earlier post, we had seen already the Dutch working on the same idea. Check out this video for more advanced apparatuses.

My colleague is a robot

    

   This is a very interesting book written recently by Valéry Bonneau. It showcases a number of representative robots from various domaines of applications (from agriculture, to services, industry, entertainment, etc) and pinpoints, in a tone that combines humour, pessimism and severity at the same time, how robots are steadily starting to replace humans, and in turn, render obsolete a variety of professions / jobs. 

    It is very up to date with respect to the state-of-the-art in robotics technology and could be very easily read by audiences of all ages and backgrounds. As a professional in the domain, as well as an individual, i highly recommend it to potential readers (currently only francophones as i guess it has not yet been translated).

   

Personal gardening robot

FARM-BOT (Open-source)

Wi Vi: Using wifi signals to sense human presence and activity

Abstract:

Wi-Fi signals are typically information carriers between a transmitter and a receiver. In this paper, we show that Wi-Fi can also extend our senses, enabling us to see moving objects through walls and behind closed doors. In particular, we can use such signals to identify the number of people in a closed room and their relative locations. We can also identify simple gestures made behind a wall, and combine a sequence of gestures to communicate messages to a wireless receiver without carrying any transmitting device. The paper introduces two main innovations. First, it shows how one can use MIMO interference nulling to eliminate reflections off static objects and focus the receiver on a moving target. Second, it shows how one can track a human by treating the motion of a human body as an antenna array and tracking the resulting RF beam. We demonstrate the validity of our design by building.

Link to paper:

http://people.csail.mit.edu/fadel/papers/wivi-paper.pdf

Link to project web-page:

http://people.csail.mit.edu/fadel/wivi/