MIT's Robust Robotics Group seems to be as thrilled with the Kinect and the hacking possibilities that emanate therefrom as we are. They've attached a Kinect to a quadrocopter, which enables completely autonomous 3-D mapping and flight--even the processing is done on board. MIT worked with the University of Washington on this project, using UW's SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) algorithms to construct these pretty models of the environment, using the data picked up by the Kinect's sensors. The SLAM maps are actually kind of a bonus on top of the main function of the project, which is to enable fully autonomous flight in areas without GPS coverage: SLAM maps are processed off site, but they're not necessary to the operation of the quadrocopter. The project has some pretty obvious military uses, which explains why it was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and the Army Research Office (way to mix up the naming conventions, guys).

At Carnegie Mellon University, one robotics student estimates that there are more robots than students in the department, but in a shameful display of mammalian arrogance, the precise number and type of said robots is unknown. That realization led the student, Heather Knight, to begin the world's first robot census. Knight, a graduate student in robotics (Carnegie Mellon is the only school in the country to offer a degree program in robotics), began by counting the 547 robots present on the CMU campus, not including its government-run satellite lab in which several hundred secret robots are estimated to be languishing. But that was only the beginning. The quest to document robots spread from Carnegie Mellon to the Makers, a community of DIY enthusiasts organized loosely by MAKE Magazine and its accompanying Maker's Faire events. Knight put out word on the census through the Makers, and set up her own online census, which, it should be noted, is far more in-depth than the U.S. government's census.

In April, President Obama announced, to much fanfare, that the government would spend $100 million on a detailed map of the human brain and how its neurons interact. The project is a waste of money. Brain mapping is well funded by public and private sources, and the feds should instead spend your dough on important things that business won't. The brain map was going to happen anyway. For example, IBM has a computer simulating 530 billion neurons; the Blue Brain Project is modeling the rat brain at the cellular level; the Allen Brain Atlas is mapping how genes in the brain turn on and off.

One of RobotsFor.Me's user interfaces, which let you control the lab's robots (a PR2, in this case) through a browser. Sonia Chernova wants you to train her robot. Two years ago, Chernova and some of her fellow roboticists at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Massachussets launched a remote robotics lab called RobotsFor.Me, a site where users can log in and teach robots how to function in physical space. It's both more and less exciting than it sounds. Participants might play a game where they rack up points based on the number of objects they can help the robot pick up in 10 minutes.

Research engineer D.W. Wheeler and Terry Fong, NASA's director of the Intelligent Robotics Group, flank the SPHERES utility robot with the Project Tango smartphone mounted on the side. Robots excel at the tedious, repetitive tasks that bore humans into ineffectiveness. So NASA has tweaked an experimental Google smartphone called "Project Tango" that takes 250,000 measurements per second to create a 3-D map of the environment. The hacked version of Project Tango will help provide navigation information for a utility robot that previously had limited autonomous motion capability, called SPHERES. The robot/phone hybrid will launch in an Orbital Sciences Cygnus spacecraft aboard an Antares rocket on June 10th.

Meier's open-source software is constantly evolving as it is applied in different contexts. For example, it was used to create maps showing population displacement during the humanitarian crisis in Libya. Natural disasters and political unrest trigger torrents of tweets and posts--chaotic snippets of what could be valuable information. Patrick Meier, director of social innovation at the Qatar Computing Research Institute, applies artificial intelligence to this crowdsourced data, organizing digital photos and messages into dynamic maps that can guide real-world relief efforts. Popular Science:__ You work in crisis mapping--what is that exactly?

It's hard for a military to win hearts and minds if none of its members speak the local language. Humans who grew up speaking a language and joined the military are the best solution, followed closely by interpreters recruited locally. For this reason, the military wants a technology that can work as an interpreter in real time--a universal translator, if you will. Last week, the Air Force Research Laboratory put out a solicitation for such a device. Their solicitation says they want to conduct research and development in automatic speech recognition, machine translation, natural language processing, information extraction, information retrieval, text-to-speech synthesis, as well as other speech and language processing technologies.

In robotics, three hands are better than one, in the form of a device that has been developed by Intelligent Automation Inc (IAI) for use as troop support. The Multi-Arm Unmanned Ground Vehicle (MA-UGV) is the name of this device from the Rockville, Maryland, R&D company that focuses on AI applications. The three-armed robot can protect troops by lending its handling skills to carry out backback inspections for explosive devices, for example, and, to use the military term, "disarm" Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). IAI has produced a set of impressive videos that show how the robot, whether cutting wires or tying knots, or extending its mechanical joints for better reach and precision, has capabilities to perform tasks requiring complex manipulation under military-type scenarios. Fingertip positioning and grasp are especially impressive as shown inn the videos; the robot is capable of using a 29 degree of freedom system and the robot is shown deftly handling IEDs.

A new company launched Monday by former NASA chief Dan Goldin aims to deliver a major boost to the field of neural computing. KnuEdge's debut comes after 10 years in stealth; formerly it was called Intellisis. Now, along with its launch, it's introducing two products focused on neural computing: KnuVerse, software that focuses on military-grade voice recognition and authentication, and KnuPath, a processor designed to offer a new architecture for neural computing. "While at NASA I became fascinated with biology," said Goldin in an interview last week. "When the time came to leave NASA, I decided the future of technology would be in machine intelligence, and I felt a major thrust had to come from inspiration from the mammalian brain."

Apple has agreed to pay $24.9 million to a patent holding company to resolve a 5-year-old lawsuit accusing Siri of infringing one of its patents. Apple will pay the money to Marathon Patent Group, the parent company of Texas firm Dynamic Advances, which held an exclusive license to a 2007 patent covering natural language user interfaces for enterprise databases. Marathon reported the settlement in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Tuesday. On Wednesday, in response to the settlement, Magistrate Judge David Peebles of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York dismissed a lawsuit against Apple filed by Dynamic Advances and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, where the natural language technology was created. A trial had been scheduled to begin early next month in Syracuse, New York.