科技英语 safty issue.docx

1、科技英语 safty issueRobots with skin enter our touchy-feely world 19 April 2010 by Paul Marks Magazine issue 2756. Subscribe and get 4 free issues. For similar stories, visit the Robots Topic Guide BEAUTY may be only skin deep, but for humanoid robots a fleshy covering is about more than mere aesthetics

2、, it could be essential to making them socially acceptable. A touch-sensitive coating could prevent such machines from accidentally injuring anybody within their reach.In May, a team at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa will dispatch to labs across Europe the first pieces of touch-s

3、ensing skin designed for their nascent humanoid robot, the iCub. The skin IIT and its partners have developed contains flexible pressure sensors that aim to put robots in touch with the world.Skin has been one of the big missing technologies for humanoid robots, says roboticist Giorgio Metta at IIT.

4、 One goal of making robots in a humanoid form is to let them interact closely with people. But that will only be possible if a robot is fully aware of what its powerful motorised limbs are in contact with.Roboticists are trying a great variety of ways to make a sensing skin. Early examples, such as

5、the CB2 robot, built at Osaka University in Japan, placed a few hundred sensors in silicone skin. But now many, many sensing methods are emerging, says Richard Walker of Shadow Robot, London. Until a lot of robots are using them, it is going to be hard to say which are best suited for particular app

6、lications.Whats more, there are many criteria the skin has to meet, says Metta: it must be resilient, able to cover a large surface area and be able to detect even light touches anywhere on that surface. Many of these factors conflict with each other, he says.The iCub is a humanoid robot the size of

7、 a child of three-and-a-half years old. Funded by the European Commission, it was designed to investigate cognition and how awareness of our limbs, muscles, tendons腱 and tactile 触觉environment fuels the development of intelligence. The iCubs technical specifications are open-source and some 15 labs a

8、cross Europe have already cloned their own, so IITs skin design could find plenty of robots to enwrap.The skin is made up of triangular, flexible printed circuit boards三角状柔性印刷电路板which act as sensors, and it covers much of iCubs body. Each bendy triangle is 3 centimetres to a side and contains 12 cap

9、acitive copper contacts 电容铜触点(pictured). A layer of silicone rubber acts as a spacer间隔 between those boards and an outer layer of Lycra that carries a metal contact above each copper contact. The Lycra layer and flexible circuits constitute the two sides of the skins pressure-sensing capacitors电容器.

10、This arrangement allows 12 tactile pixels - or taxels - to be sensed per triangle. This taxel resolution is enough to recognise patterns such as a hand grasping the robots arm. The skin can detect a touch as light as 1 gram across each taxel, says Metta. It is also peppered with semiconductor-based

11、temperature sensors. This version of the skin will be released in May. Later, IIT plans to add a layer of a piezoelectric polymer called PVDF to the skin. While the capacitance sensors measure absolute pressure, the voltage produced by PVDF as a result of its deformation when touched can be used to

12、measure the rate of change of pressure. So if the robot runs its fingertip along a surface, the vibrations generated by friction give it clues about what that surface is made of. Such sensitivity might help it establish the level of grip needed to pick up, say, a slippery porcelain plate.Philip Tays

13、om, CEO of British company Peratech of Richmond, North Yorkshire, is not a fan of sensing skins based on capacitors, which he says can lose sensitivity with repeated use. Peratechs answer is a stretchy, elastic material it calls quantum tunneling composite (QTC). 量子隧道合成物This comprises a polymer聚合体 s

14、uch as silicone rubber硅橡胶 that is heavily loaded with spiky nickel nanoparticles尖的镍纳米颗粒. A voltage is applied across the skin, and when it is pressed, the distance between the nanoparticles within the polymer diminishes, which results in electrons flowing, or tunnelling, from one nanoparticle spike长

15、钉 to the next in the area being touched. Crucially, the materials electrical resistance drops dramatically and in proportion to the force applied, so the touch can be interpreted.At the Massachusetts Institute of Technologys Media Lab, Adam Whiton is developing a QTC-based sensing skin for a commerc

16、ial robot-maker which he declines to name. Instead of a tight, conforming skin, Whiton uses a looser covering, more akin to clothing. We cover ourselves with textiles when we interact with people, so clothing may be a better metaphor as a humanoids pressure-sensitive surface covering, he says.Natura

17、l gestures, like tapping a humanoid on the back to get its attention, or leading it by the arm, can be easily interpreted because QTC boasts high sensitivity, he says. But novel skin capabilities could be on the way, too. For example, QTC can also act as an electronic nose. Careful choice of the mat

18、erials base polymer, says Taysom, means telltale resistance changes can be induced by reactions between volatile chemicals in the air - so it can become an e-nose as well as a touch sensor, able to detect, for example, a gas leak in your home. This shows we can probably build into robots a lot of th

19、ings that our skin cant do. Its another reason not to stick rigidly to the human skin metaphor, says Whiton.Thats not to say our skin isnt a great influence. Shadow Robot will soon start testing a novel human-like touch-sensing fingertip from Syntouch, a start-up based in California. Its fingertip c

20、omprises a rubbery fluid-filled sac that squishes just like a real fingertip, and is equipped with internal sensors that measure vibration, temperature and pressure.Whichever of the emerging technologies prevail, sensing robot skins should help us get along with our future humanoid assistants, says

21、Whiton. Right now, robots are about as friendly as photocopiers. The interactions skins encourage will make them much friendlier.Parlez-vous robot?If youve ever tried to direct a lost tourist to their intended destination, youll know how difficult directing someone that doesnt speak your language ca

22、n be. Directing robots presents a related challenge.Typically, robots respond well to precise instruction sets but they are flummoxed if their instructions are given in the fuzzy, everyday language so beloved by humans. Now a team at the University of Washington in Seattle have developed translation

23、 software which could enable robots to understand a set of natural-language directions. The technology could make it easier to control robots in situations like search and rescue, where it can be preferable to send a robot rather than a human.Cynthia Matuszek and her colleagues used the principles o

24、f machine translation - commonly used online to translate text of one language into another - to develop a navigation program for robots. Machine translation tools are designed to learn from previous efforts, improving their accuracy through experience.The team first sent a small mobile robot to exp

25、lore and map portions of two buildings on campus. The researchers then generated random paths through the maps and asked human volunteers to annotate the routes with natural commands, such as turn right, or take the second left that would have led to successful completion of each path.Matuszek used

26、these maps to train the navigation program, which learned to associate the various human commands with specific types of route-finding behaviour.The navigation program was then run on a virtual robot, which was given natural-language directions for a variety of previously unknown routes through the

27、maps. The virtual robot was able to successfully complete 10 of the 14 direction sets on its first attempt. The results were presented at the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction in Osaka, Japan, in March.Im glad to see work that is getting back to the original dreams of the field, li

28、ke having a robot that you can talk with naturally, says Ray Mooney, a machine-translation researcher at the University of Texas in Austin.He says that previous attempts to give robots instructions have favoured explicit rules for sentence structures, semantics and syntax. He says this traditional a

29、pproach is labour intensive and requires strictly defined commands, making it cumbersome in emergency situations where many robots are deployed.Six ways to build robots that do humans no harm 14:24 18 November 2008 by Tom Simonite For similar stories, visit the Books and Art and Robots Topic Guides

30、With the relentless march of technological progress, robots and other automated systems are getting ever smarter. At the same time they are also being given greater responsibilities, driving cars, helping with childcare, carrying weapons, and maybe soon even pulling the trigger.But should they be tr

31、usted to take on such tasks, and how can we be sure that they never take a decision that could cause unintended harm?The latest contribution to the growing debate over the challenges posed by increasingly powerful and independent robots is the book Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong.Au

32、thors Wendell Wallach, an ethicist at Yale University, and historian and philosopher of cognitive science Colin Allen, at Indiana University, argue that we need to work out how to make robots into responsible and moral machines. It is just a matter of time until a computer or robot takes a decision that will cause a human disaster, they say.So are there things we can do to minimise the risks? Wallach and Allen take a look at six strategies that could reduce the danger from our own high-tech creations.Keep them in low-risk situationsMake sure that all computers