Babybot, a robot modeled on the torso of a 2-year-old child, is helping researchers take the first tottering steps toward understanding human perception, possibly leading to the development of machines that can perceive and interact with their environments.
Researchers in the European Commission's Artificial Development Approach to Presence Technologies (ADAPT) project used Babybot to test a model of the human sense of "presence," a combination of senses like sight, hearing and touch. The work could have enormous applications in robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine perception, they say.
"Our sense of presence is essentially our consciousness," says Giorgio Metta, ADAPT project coordinator and assistant professor at the Laboratory for Integrated Advanced Robotics at Italy's Genoa University.
Imagine a glorious day spent lying on a beach drinking a pina colada, or having any powerful, pleasurable memory. A series of specific sensory inputs is essential to the memory. In the human mind, all these sensations combine to create the total experience. It profoundly influences our future expectations, and each time we go to a beach, we add to the store of contexts, situations and conditions. It is the combination of all this data and its cumulative power that the ADAPT researchers sought to explore.
"We took an engineering approach to the problem," says Metta. "It was really a consciousness for engineers, which means we first developed a model and then we sought to test this model by, in this case, developing a robot to conform to it."
They developed a "process" model of consciousness, says Metta. This assumes that objects in the environment are not real physical objects as such; rather, they are part of a process of perception.
The practical upshot is that while other models describe consciousness as perception, cognition and then action, the ADAPT model sees it as action, cognition, then perception. And it's how babies act, too. The team used Babybot to test the model, providing a minimal set of instructions -- just enough for Babybot to act on the environment. For the senses, the team used sound, vision and touch and focused on simple objects within the environment.
By simply interacting with the environment, Babybot did its engineering parents proud when it demonstrated that it could learn to successfully separate objects from the background. Once the visual scene was segmented, Babybot could start learning about specific properties of objects that would, for instance, allow the robot to grasp them. Grasping opens a wider world to the robot and to infants.
"Ultimately, this work will have a huge range of applications, from virtual reality, robotics and AI to psychology and the development of robots as tools for neuroscientific research," concludes Metta.
Groves of academe: Purdue scientists produce micropump to cool chips
Engineers at Purdue University have developed a "micropump" cooling device that fits on a computer chip and circulates coolant through channels etched into the chip.
Innovative cooling systems will be needed for future computer chips that will generate more heat than current technology, says Suresh Garimella, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of Purdue's Cooling Technologies Research Center. A decade from now, chips will likely contain upward of 100 times more transistors and other devices than the chips currently in use, Garimella says.
The new device has been integrated onto a silicon chip that is about 1 cm square. Garimella, doctoral student Brian D. Iverson and former doctoral student Vishal Singhal published an article about the device in the May issue of Electronics Cooling magazine.
"Our goal is to develop advanced cooling systems that are self-contained on chips and are capable of handling the more extreme heating in future chips," says Garimella.
The prototype chip contains numerous water-filled microchannels -- grooves about 100 microns wide, or about the width of a human hair. The channels are covered with a series of hundreds of electrodes, which receive varying voltage pulses in such a way that a traveling electric field is created in each channel. The traveling field creates ions, or electrically charged atoms and molecules, which are dragged along by the moving field.
The traveling electrical field pulls the ions forward, causing the water to flow and inducing a cooling action, Garimella says.
The research team is planning its work ahead. "One big challenge is further developing mathematical models that are comprehensive and accurate, because this is a very complicated, dynamic system," says Garimella. Other challenges include sealing the tiny channels to prevent water leakage and designing the system so that it could be manufactured under the same conditions as semiconductor chips.
Difference engines: Click-clack calculations
Of all the mechanical computing machines ever devised, the longest-lived in terms of actual use are the bead-based tools English speakers call the abacus. Most researchers trace abaci back to the Babylonians, with estimates ranging as far back as 2,400 B.C. Using a Babylonian abacus involved moving beads along lines engraved in a slab of stone. The Roman abacus, which predated the Chinese suanpan by several centuries, was a sand-covered wax tablet, marked table, or grooved table or tablet made of a range of materials, from wood to bronze. It was, of course, designed to calculate using Roman numerals. Some sources mention the use of an abacus called a Nepohualtzintzin in ancient Aztec culture.
Because they are still used in many parts of the world today, the most recognizable forms of the abacus are devices consisting of beads strung on wires (or wooden rods) attached to a wooden frame, exemplified by the suanpan, the Japanese soroban and the Russian schoty. The suanpan dates back at least to 200 B.C. in China. It was introduced in Japan in the 15th century A.D., and by the 19th century the Japanese had developed the soroban with improved functions. The schoty didn't appear until the 17th century A.D. and was designed to count kopeks and rubles.
Simple counting boards are still used in some Chinese and Japanese elementary schools, but Chinese-style abaci can be used for functions other than counting. And some very efficient techniques have been developed for the suanpan to do multiplication, division, addition, subtraction, square-root and cube-root operations at high speed.
While they are slowly being replaced by speech-enabled calculators, abaci have been commonly used by the visually impaired. The suanpan is still the most common calculating tool in rural China, and the soroban and schoty are still used in remote areas of Japan and Russia, respectively.