There is a lot being written right now about "Gamification" - the translation of gaming techniques to put the "fun" into real life. I was quite interest to pick up a sort of reverse trend - here, agent based simulation modelling (used to model all sorts of real world problems from traffic flow to stock movement) is being added to game rendering to inform actual tactices - in this case, the movement of the mediaeval Byzantine army to the battle of Manzikert in 1071.
(For the history buffs, Manzikert in 1071 AD was the battle that cost the Byzantines their Empire and set up the future Ottoman Turks, as well as spawning the Crusades and all that spun out of that. Of course, in the West it is ignored for the smaller impact of Hastings, 5 years earlier).
Historical accounts put the size of the army led by Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes at the battle of Manzikert at up to 100,000 troops, but could an army that large really have been raised and supported in AD 1071? To find out, a group of computer scientists, archaeologists and historians teamed up to create what's known as an 'agent-based simulation' of the Byzantine Army as it marched from Constantinople into what is now modern Turkey. (Here's a paper on the research and a short video.)
Agent-based simulations model complex things like societies by simulating the simple ways that individuals in that population interact. At the head of those agents is an Emperor choosing, for example, the route the army will take, but the actual progress of its march consists of relatively straightforward things like setting up and breaking down camp, acquiring food, disseminating orders and the like. All of which this simulation includes.
This kind of simulation works because, as complicated as the behavior of individual humans might seem, in aggregate, crowds of humans aren't so different from termites or birds or any other animal. Group behaviors like flocking and nest building can be achieved with just a few basic rules describing the inclinations and interactions of the individuals in a group.
While models of this kind can never definitively answer questions about the historical accuracy of various claims, they can eliminate some possibilities, while also helping to address matters on which historians are mostly silent. These include things like how the economies of medieval societies were structured (think of taxes, transportation and food production) in order to support large standing armies.
The agent-based simulator used in this case doesn't simulate battles, because the decision-making that takes place in combat is too complicated to model at present. Just simulating how thousands of individual agents march from one location to another over a period of days requires significant parallel processing.
We consider this sort of algorithm maths to be part of the driving middleware for the Mobile Internet of Things which will blend Robotics and the IOT.
One of the areas we watch is the area of intersection between the 'Net, mobile Robotics and ICT - the "Internet of Moving Things". This video shows teams of 4-rotor (quadrotor) model helicopters assembling a frame. Make the choppers a bit bigger to add more onboard intelligence and more lifting power, and you have some impressive (and potentially scary) applications that suggest themselves.
Earlier this week we predicted 2010 would be the year of Robotics moving up into the forefront of a networked world (point 13 here). We had no inkling of this device then, but here is a 4-rotor helicopter drone robot, controlled via the sensors on an iPhone and using WiFi for control transmission to the device.
For the aeronautical fundis among you, having 2 blades allows contra-rotation so that the body doesn't spin about its rotor, having 4 blades allows it to manage its airborne stability very simply. The big ship in Avatar had such an arrangement, albeit its blades were shrouded.
Quid Est Demonstratum - (literally - check out the video)
Readers of this blog will know we think robotics and sensors are about to "Tip" and create the "Internet of Things" and that this will be the real Next Big Thing in Internet-speak. One of the the things we track are small robots - the miniaturisation of technology is allowing ever smaller devices to operate independently. Here's the newset smallets one - New Scientist::
Aeronvironment has released video that shows its "nano air vehicle" (NAV), which is the size of a small bird or large insect, hovering indoors without such crutches and under radio control. "It is capable of climbing and descending vertically, flying sideways left and right, as well as forward and backward, under remote control," says the company.
Pentagon support
The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency commissioned the flying bug in 2007 and has rewarded the firm's success with a further development grant. It wants a version rugged enough to cope with wind and the other challenges of flying outdoors.
About 12 months ago we showed a Dutch device the size of a pigeon, well here (above) is one the size of a sparrow - thats' Moore's Law for you - now go forward 3 years and imagine what we will see......
Fifteen spiderbots, so-named because of the three spindly arms protruding from their suitcase-sized steel bodies, were lowered from a helicopter to spots inside the crater and around the rim of Mount St Helens, an active volcano in the US state of Washington, in July.
Each has a seismometer for detecting earthquakes, an infrared sensor to detect heat from volcanic explosions, a sensor to detect ash clouds, and a global positioning system to sense the ground bulging and pinpoint the exact location of seismic activity.
Once in place, the bots reached out to each other to form what is known as a mesh network. "It's similar to the internet," says Steve Chien, the principal scientist for autonomous systems at JPL. "You just lay them out, and they figure out the best way to route the data."
Its the economics that is driving the Internet of Things, of course:
The spiderbots are flexible and inexpensive enough that they can be set down almost anywhere. "You can imagine just dropping these out of a helicopter, and they'll just land like spikes in the ground and do their thing," Chien says.
The spider web's unique networking capabilities also give it a distinct advantage over other monitoring systems. The network is self-healing – if one node dies, the others automatically route data around it.
The Internet of Things is coming, in fact robots and such devices may even get their own operating system (oh no, just what we need - splitting a nascent market into multiple competing opertaing systems...). But things are definitely on the move, a recent McKinsey paper talks of the two big innovation "Nexii" transforming the Net over the next few years. One is "The Internet of People" - aka the Social Net. The other...:
The second innovation nexus is what we call the “Internet of Things,” which arises from the tiny sensors, computers, and other microdevices that can be built into physical objects and connected through wireless networks. The results are objects that become “smarter” and more interactive, with the potential to transform traditional business models. Goods and services that self-monitor can be sold in much finer slices and much more efficiently. Rather than buy a product outright, or sign a long-term service contract, sensors can track actual usage, enabling customers to pay only for what they consume or even the value they receive. In some cases, what was once a weighty capital expenditure is transformed into a lighter-weight operating expense, when products are transformed into services.
The new logic of paying for value is creating an array of novel business models. Take aircraft engines, where manufacturers are selling “thrust” as a service—rather than engines as a product—since they now are able to track the usage and performance of their engines electronically. At the same time, airplane manufacturers are offering contracts that guarantee “uptime” of their products, using embedded sensors in airframes that are able to determine when preventative maintenance is needed.
While you can see where they are going with all this, these models may be as fanciful as those of the "Social Net" have turned out to be so far. "Thrust as a Service" is just another term for "Servicing Engines as a Service", and any aero engineer worth their salt will want the frigging engines to work properly - but in Management NewSpeak, there is one born every minute, as PT Barnum once said.
A Robot will have its own page on Facebook, notes the BBC:
While robots that can engage people have been produced before now, research suggests that humans lose interest at most a few weeks after being introduced as the behavioural repertoire of the machine is exhausted.
In a paper on the pre-print website Archive.org server, the researchers say they want to find out if this can be thwarted by giving humans and robots a pool of shared memories and if they are part of the same social circle of friends.
The platform for exploring the problem is a robot that can recognise faces created by Dr Mavridis and colleagues from the Interactive Robots and Media Lab (IRML) at the University of the United Arab Emirates plus co-workers in Germany and Greece
The prototype is based around a PeopleBot machine from ActivRobots to which they have added a range finder, touch screen and stereo camera. The current prototype is called "Sarah" but when the project begins this will be swapped for a machine with the face of Arabic scholar Ibn Sina aka Avicenna.
Interesting, and well worth watching as an evolution of the interface between humans and the Internet of Things.
Never work on Twitter of course, as robots can't twt about what they had for lunch
TED session 1 was called “Reboot” and session 2 was “Reframe” – but a strong theme throughout these was “Robot”. At Broadstuff it seems we’ve covered nearly all the robotic areas that were brought up today so we have a finger on the pulse (or a pulse at any rate - see here for all the Broadstuff posts on robotics), with 2 exceptions – stickybots and human augmented intelligence – so we’ll cover these here:
Stickybots (see video above)
From the IEEE - Wall-climbing bots could scale buildings or creep up windows, secretly spying for hours. They could also be used for search-and-rescue operations. More benignly, they could inspect and repair the hard-to-reach parts of airplanes, spacecraft, and bridges.
Cutkosky and his doctoral student Sangbae Kim get their inspiration from geckos. The bottom of a gecko's foot is covered with billions of fibers with 200-nanometer-wide tips. The lizards can stick to any surface because of a weak intermolecular attraction known as Van der Waals force, which acts between the fiber tips and the surface the gecko is climbing. The adhesion is directional: the fibers stick only when the toes drag downward, and they release in the opposite direction.
To emulate the gecko's dry adhesive, the researchers created polymer patches covered with tiny stalks about 30-micrometers wide. The stalks are angled and have oblique tops, which give them directional stickiness. The patches go on the toe pads of a robot that Cutkosky and Kim have endowed with a gecko's gait, curling toes, and other details. The original version, built two years ago, crawled up smooth surfaces such as glass and glazed tile at a speed of 4 centimeters per second
Update - on day two the Stanford team demonstrated the Stickybot, had a good chat re the adhesives and the use of balancing tail. The most advanced adhesive can hold about 5 pounds (2.2 kg) per square inch of surface.
Augmented Intelligence –
Patti Maes presented the work of an MIT Media Lab team in the use of wearable devices to augment intelligence – they combined web cam, mobile phone and projector devices to give a wearable multimedia system that could read data, send it out for server side processing, and also project it. An interesting application was tracking a sort of man-machine “sign language” – using coloured bands on each index and forefinger one can make common signs, like a “frame” gesture to take a picture for example, and the device tracks your hands, understands the gesture, and the webcam takes a picture. Similar signs exist for writing via projection on surfaces, and even typing on the palm of your hand.. It was quite interesting to see how this has come on, having seen stuff like this several years ago in the British Telecom labs – in essence the gear has become lighter and cheaper, but the real difference is the level of onboard processing now available as well as the server side activity possible via broadband.
There was also an interesting/sobering presentation by a US military analyst (P W Singer) on the rapid escalation in the use of robots of all types – especially bomb clearance and aerial drones – in Iraq and Afghanistan, and his projections of their use going forward. As we’ve shown before, today robots and drones are almost pro-am devices, so the concern is that robots will be used by all sorts of people as proxy soldiers in future – as he put it, you don’t have to promise a robot 700 virgins to get it to blow itself up.
On a related note, Tim Berners Lee presented on a proposed architecture of data recognition on the Web, and called for all to release their “Raw Data Now”. He showed a type of “DatabaseWiki” and the resultant searches which were very interesting and showcased the Art of the Possible. Very stirring stuff, but as we’ve explained here, pretty unlikely in today’s walled garden Freeconomics. Still, TED is more about change than status quo, so lets see….
The emoting head technology has also moved on a tad, in that the one demonstrated here has got more complex and looked like Einstein – and I got to see it in the flubber (the synthetic material of choice for flesh that today’s androids wear).
Update - on Day 2, mo' Robotics - surgical robots from Catherine Mohr, the micromachine robotic arms, light and cameras are contained in a tube that is inserted via keyhole, so it can then do microsurgery.
As regular readers know, we follow robotics development on the blog. The video above shows an Apprenticeship Learning AI based robot flying aerobatics with a radio controlled helicopter. This also represents the current state of the art in outboard computing controlling another potential robot (in this case the helicopter)
For about 20 years various types of AI and EA (Evolutionary Algorithms) have been used to self-teach robots, but until recently the computation needed meant they had to be outboard of the robotic vehicle unless it was quite large. But, one of the impacts of Moore's law has meant that now computer miniaturisation means they can run the controllers onboard (especially with EAs, which usually generate quite compact programs), so the robots can evolve their intelligence in real time (though starting off with a flying robot is not advised - most learn to walk before they fly ). This starts an entirely new chapter in robotic design.
Another interesting evolution is this fascinating talk on TED by Hod Lipson, this one about using EAs for robots to build themselves. For about 20 years people have been using EAs to let robots work out their own way of controlling themselves, but using EAs for them to design themselves is much newer.
The future of robotic evolution increasingly looks like it will be self evolution - software robots can already self replicate, it will be interesting to see how hardware self replication evolves.
Who could resist? From NASA.....beats programming throwaway sheep, Tim O'Reilly would be proud
We are looking for a full-time developer to help NASA send robots to the Moon.
If you want to make a difference in space exploration, come join us!
Ideal candidates will have a solid history of implementing and deploying
complex software systems that integrate multiple languages and libraries on
multiple platforms.
Responsibilities:
- Develop software tools for remotely controlling a rolling-walking robot.
This project includes interactive 3D graphics, GUI design, middleware, and
working with multi-language/multi-platform components.
- Develop software sysetms for processing satellite imagery of the Moon
into maps and 3D models. This work involves creating very high-performance
processing pipelines and innovative geospatial user interfaces.
Dusting off all those notes from my BSc final year Robotics stuff ......
). This starts an entirely new chapter in robotic design. 
