octopus-Inspired Robots

The article starts off with an example of what most robots due which only functions in a highly structured environment, like factories assembly lines. But thanks to scientist they are starting to do more research on bio-mimicry which means that their are trying to mimic animals by build robot that look like animals and can do the same thing as an animal. For example a team of researches in Italy wanted to build a squishy aquatic robot so they drew inspiration from an octopus. The articles states that they way they work is that "The animal’s movements don’t require a lot of brainpower. Rather than relying on top-down instructions from the central nervous system, many of an octopus’s movements happen almost spontaneously–the result of the physical interplay between the animal’s body and its surrounding environment."

Why do you want drones to have emotions?

The reason that it would be good for the robots to feel emotion is so that can be more like humans that will feel all this feelings. It will also be good for the robots to feel emotion in order that they won't go corrupt and try to take over the world. This would also allow the robots to feel kind of remorse and they would act based on what is good and what is bad.

Monkey navigates wheelchair with its thoughts

In the article "Monkeys Navigate a wheelchair with their thoughts" by Prachi Patel talks about how scientist at Duke university demonstrated a wireless brain machine interface simply known as BMI that allows monkey to navigate the chair with their thoughts. This could help a lot people who are not able to move their whole body this makes them be able to move the wheel chair with their thoughts. This project began around the year 2012 and they keep on improving the BMI to be able to properly help out the people who are disable or ill.

Drones recognise and follow forest trails in search of lost people

In this article "Drones recognize and follow forest trails in search of lost people" by Linda Seward and NCCR Robotics talks about how they setup this drone to be able to track trails in order to find people who have gotten lost. This was done by a team of Swiss students who have program a drone to be able to find lost people in the forest by using this algorithm that is called Deep Neural Network which it follows the trails to find the lost people. The drones don't rely on sensor instead it has two small cameras and the algorithm to be able to find the lost people. The did this because every years a lot of people get lost in the wild worldwide and roughly about 1000 people get lost in Switzerland alone so they made this drone to be able to help out the people not only in Switzerland but around the world to.