THE ROBITS HAVE ARRIVES

Thats right, the robits.

From New Scientist: ‘Baby’ robot learns like a human

The robot consists of a one-armed torso with a pair of cameras for eyes and a grasping hand. It has an in-built desire to physically experiment with objects on the table in front of it and an ability to assess different forms of interaction and learn from mistakes. If the robot fails to grasp an object securely, for example, it remembers and tries a differently strategy next time. One unbidden skill developed by Babybot was the ability to roll a bottle across its table.

You can see video of the little guy in action here and here (right click, save as). He’s pretty damn cool, and the way he moves is really quite child-like. I love the way you can track his line of sight.

By the way, I hope the term ‘robit’ gets picked up (and attributed to me) because ‘Robocub’ is dreadful.

edit: I should comment on this as well-

“The idea is fantastic,” says Steve Grand, founder of UK robotics research company Cyberlife Research, who has also worked on simple learning robots. “It’s the only way you can research the development of intelligence or artificial intelligence.”

However, Grand believes fundamental differences between the human brain and computers used to control learning robots like Babybot may mean that such machines can never become as intelligent as us.

What he means, of course, is that the robot can never become intelligence like us. Of course the bot is already intelligently engaged with its toys, though it isn’t really that smart or sophisticated about it. Turing said over 50 years ago was that the path to machine intelligence was to develop child-like machines that can learn like humans, and this shows we are well on our way towards that end. But because of the differences between neural nets and actual human wetware, there’s no real reason to think the bots will become intelligent in the same way we are.

But who cares, as long as they can play catch?