To celebrate the popular film "Robots," two writers from the animation industry offer a sneak peek at the early visual developmental stages of the movie. Full color.

An accessible and engaging account of robots, covering the current state of the field, the fantasies of popular culture, and implications for life and work. Robots are entering the mainstream. Technologies have advanced to the point of mass commercialization—Roomba, for example—and adoption by governments—most notably, their use of drones. Meanwhile, these devices are being received by a public whose main sources of information about robots are the fantasies of popular culture. We know a lot about C-3PO and Robocop but not much about Atlas, Motoman, Kiva, or Beam—real-life robots that are reinventing warfare, the industrial workplace, and collaboration. In this book, technology analyst John Jordan offers an accessible and engaging introduction to robots and robotics, covering state-of-the-art applications, economic implications, and cultural context. Jordan chronicles the prehistory of robots and the treatment of robots in science fiction, movies, and television—from the outsized influence of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Isaac Asimov's I, Robot (in which Asimov coined the term “robotics”). He offers a guided tour of robotics today, describing the components of robots, the complicating factors that make robotics so challenging, and such applications as driverless cars, unmanned warfare, and robots on the assembly line. Roboticists draw on such technical fields as power management, materials science, and artificial intelligence. Jordan points out, however, that robotics design decisions also embody such nontechnical elements as value judgments, professional aspirations, and ethical assumptions, and raise questions that involve law, belief, economics, education, public safety, and human identity. Robots will be neither our slaves nor our overlords; instead, they are rapidly becoming our close companions, working in partnership with us—whether in a factory, on a highway, or as a prosthetic device. Given these profound changes to human work and life, Jordan argues that robotics is too important to be left solely to roboticists.

The first compendium on robotic art of its kind, this book explores the integration of robots into human society and our attitudes, fears and hopes in a world shared with autonomous machines. It raises questions about the benefits, risks and ethics of the transformative changes to society that are the consequence of robots taking on new roles alongside humans. It takes the reader on a journey into the world of the strange, the beautiful, the uncanny and the daring – and into the minds and works of some of the world’s most prolific creators of robotic art. Offering an in-depth look at robotic art from the viewpoints of artists, engineers and scientists, it presents outstanding works of contemporary robotic art and brings together for the first time some of the most influential artists in this area in the last three decades. Starting from a historical review, this transdisciplinary work explores the nexus between robotic research and the arts and examines the diversity of robotic art, the encounter with robotic otherness, machine embodiment and human–robot interaction. Stories of difficulties, pitfalls and successes are recalled, characterising the multifaceted collaborations across the diverse disciplines required to create robotic art. Although the book is primarily targeted towards researchers, artists and students in robotics, computer science and the arts, its accessible style appeals to anyone intrigued by robots and the arts.

An authority on creativity introduces us to AI-powered computers that are creating art, literature, and music that may well surpass the creations of humans. Today's computers are composing music that sounds “more Bach than Bach,” turning photographs into paintings in the style of Van Gogh's Starry Night, and even writing screenplays. But are computers truly creative—or are they merely tools to be used by musicians, artists, and writers? In this book, Arthur I. Miller takes us on a tour of creativity in the age of machines. Miller, an authority on creativity, identifies the key factors essential to the creative process, from “the need for introspection” to “the ability to discover the key problem.” He talks to people on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, encountering computers that mimic the brain and machines that have defeated champions in chess, Jeopardy!, and Go. In the central part of the book, Miller explores the riches of computer-created art, introducing us to artists and computer scientists who have, among much else, unleashed an artificial neural network to create a nightmarish, multi-eyed dog-cat; taught AI to imagine; developed a robot that paints; created algorithms for poetry; and produced the world's first computer-composed musical, Beyond the Fence, staged by Android Lloyd Webber and friends. But, Miller writes, in order to be truly creative, machines will need to step into the world. He probes the nature of consciousness and speaks to researchers trying to develop emotions and consciousness in computers. Miller argues that computers can already be as creative as humans—and someday will surpass us. But this is not a dystopian account; Miller celebrates the creative possibilities of artificial intelligence in art, music, and literature.

The 33rd Annual German Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (KI 2010) took place at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology KIT, September 21–24, 2010, under the motto “Anthropomatic Systems.” In this volume you will ?nd the keynote paper and 49 papers of oral and poster presentations. The papers were selected from 73 submissions, resulting in an acceptance rate of 67%. As usual at the KI conferences, two entire days were allocated for targeted workshops—seventhis year—andone tutorial. The workshopand tutorialma- rials are not contained in this volume, but the conference website, www.ki2010.kit.edu,will provide information and references to their contents. Recent trends in AI research have been focusing on anthropomatic systems, which address synergies between humans and intelligent machines. This trend is emphasized through the topics of the overall conference program. They include learning systems, cognition, robotics, perception and action, knowledge rep- sentation and reasoning, and planning and decision making. Many topics deal with uncertainty in various scenarios and incompleteness of knowledge. Summarizing, KI 2010 provides a cross section of recent research in modern AI methods and anthropomatic system applications. We are very grateful that Jos ́ edel Mill ́ an, Hans-Hellmut Nagel, Carl Edward Rasmussen, and David Vernon accepted our invitation to give a talk.

This is the eBook version of the printed book. If the print book includes a CD-ROM, this content is not included within the eBook version. A real-world business book for the explosion of eBay entrepreneurs! Absolute Beginner's Guide to Launching an eBay Business guides you step-by-step through the process of setting up an eBay business, and offers real-world advice on how to run that business on a day-to-day basis and maximize financial success. This book covers determining what kind of business to run, writing an action-oriented business plan, establishing an effective accounting system, setting up a home office, obtaining starting inventory, arranging initial funding, establishing an eBay presence, and arranging for automated post-auction management.

Robots exist for so many different reasons. Many robots replace humans, whether it’s because a situation is dangerous or just tedious. There are rover robots to explore space and drone robots that play a part in our military today, but then there are also vacuum robots available for the average household’s chores. In Japan, there is a robot teacher that can mimic a wide range of human emotions—including anger at uncooperative students—thanks to eighteen small motors hidden beneath the latex skin covering her face. The Japanese government hopes to use robots to fill jobs left vacant by an anticipated labor shortage due to an aging population. In the United States, robots even help with surgery, allowing for incisions to be cut much smaller than they would be otherwise—meaning fewer complications and faster recovery times. This fascinating book in the Fact Atlas series explores the history of robots, from the very first robot designed by Leonardo da Vinci to predictions of the roles robots will play in our future. Kids will learn about how robots are often modeled after real life-forms, such as bees, sharks, and, of course, humans. Robots also takes into account the robots in pop culture—robots we have imagined could be a part of our future. Readers can decide for themselves whether or not they think robots should be developed to their fullest potential or kept in check by safety limitations.

The increasing presence of mobile robots in our everyday lives introduces the requirements for their intelligent and autonomous features. Therefore the next generation of mobile robots should be more self-capable, in respect to: increasing of their functionality in unforeseen situations, decreasing of the human involvement in their everyday operations and their maintenance; being robust; fault tolerant and reliable in their operation. Although mobile robotic systems have been a topic of research for decades and aside the technology improvements nowadays, the subject on how to program and making them more autonomous in their operations is still an open field for research. Applying bio-inspired, organic approaches in robotics domain is one of the methodologies that are considered that would help on making the robots more autonomous and self-capable, i.e. having properties such as: self-reconfiguration, self-adaptation, self-optimization, etc. In this book several novel biologically inspired approaches for walking robots (multi-legged and humanoid) domain are introduced and elaborated. They are related to self-organized and self-stabilized robot walking, anomaly detection within robot systems using self-adaptation, and mitigating the faulty robot conditions by self-reconfiguration of a multi-legged walking robot. The approaches presented have been practically evaluated in various test scenarios, the results from the experiments are discussed in details and their practical usefulness is validated.

This book is for both robot builders and scientists who study human behaviour and human societies. Scientists do not only collect empirical data but they also formulate theories to explain the data. Theories of human behaviour and human societies are traditionally expressed in words but, today, with the advent of the computer they can also be expressed by constructing computer-based artefacts. If the artefacts do what human beings do, the theory/blueprint that has been used to construct the artefacts explains human behaviour and human societies. Since human beings are primarily bodies, the artefacts must be robots, and human robots must progressively reproduce all we know about human beings and their societies. And, although they are purely scientific tools, they can have one very important practical application: helping human beings to better understand the many difficult problems they face today and will face in the future - and, perhaps, to find solutions for these problems.