Claire chatted to Dan Nicholson from Maker Forge about creating open source robotics projects you can do at home. Dan Nicholson is a seasoned Software Engineering Manager with over 20 years of experience as a software engineer and architect. Four years ago, he began exploring robotics as a hobby, which quickly evolved into a large-scale bipedal robotics project that has inspired a wide audience. After making the project open-source and 3D printable, Dan built a vibrant community around it, with over 25k followers. Dan shares insights and project details while collaborating with partners and fellow makers to continue expanding the project's impact.

Back in July, I wrote about how Amazon Robotics is using AWS to build the next generation of robots in our warehouses. In that post, I shared how even the most seemingly mundane aspects of a system are crucial to achieving fully functional robots as opposed to just automation. "In the coming years, we will see a rapid evolution of robotic capabilities, reliability, and safety, all driven by the seamless integration of emerging technologies, cloud, and newly connected hardware." Now, the reality is that this isn't so much of a prediction as it as an observation of what's already happening all around us. Robots are becoming more and more commonplace in our world, playing roles in everything from performing surgery, to cleaning the floor, to teaching young children.

It's Ada Lovelace Day and once again we're delighted to introduce you to "50 women in robotics you need to know about"! From the Afghanistan Girls Robotics Team to K.G.Engelhardt who in 1989 founded, and was the first Director of, the Center for Human Service Robotics at Carnegie Mellon, these women showcase a wide range of roles in robotics. We hope these short bios will provide a world of inspiration, in our ninth Women in Robotics list! They are researchers, industry leaders, and artists. Some women are at the start of their careers, while others have literally written the book, the program or the standards.

Facebook has introduced Droidlet, an open-source, modular, heterogeneous embodied agent architecture. The Droidlet platform can be used to build embodied agents using natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics. Now with Facebook Droidlet platform, researchers can build more intelligent real-world robots. In addition, it simplifies the integration of a wide range of state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms and robotics to facilitate rapid prototyping. A droid agent is considered to be made up of a collection of components, which are both heuristic and learned.

The Science Research Council has been receiving an increasing number of applications for research support in the rather broad field with mathematical, engineering and biological aspects which often goes under the general description Artificial Intelligence (AI). The research support applied for is sufficient in volume, and in variety of discipline involved, to demand that a general view of the field be taken by the Council itself. In forming such a view the Council has available to it a great deal of specialist information through its structure of Boards and Committees; particularly from the Engineering Board and its Computing Science Committee and from the Science Board and its Biological Sciences Committee. These include specialised reports on the contribution of AI to practical aims on the one hand and to basic neurobiology on the other, as well as a large volume of detailed recommendations on grant applications. To supplement the important mass of specialist and detailed information available to the Science Research Council, its Chairman decided to commission an independent report by someone outside the AI field but with substantial general experience of research work in multidisciplinary fields including fields with mathematical, engineering and biological aspects. I undertook to make such an independent report, on the understanding that it would simply describe how AI appears to a lay person after two months spent looking through the literature of the subject and discussing it orally and by letter with a variety of workers in the field and in closely related areas of research. Such a personal view of the subject might be helpful to other lay persons such as Council members in the process of preparing to study specialist reports and recommendations and working towards detailed policy formation and decision taking. The report which follows must certainly not be viewed as more than such a highly personal view of the AI field. The author is grateful for the large amount of help and advice readily given in reply to his many requests. He must emphasize, however, that none but himself is responsible for the opinions expressed in this report. They represent mere!y the broad overall view of the subject which he reached after such limited studies as he was able to make in the course of two months. Readers might possibly have expected that the report would include a summary, but the author decided against this partly because considerable material is summarised already in almost every paragraph.

Robots have walked on legs for decades. Today's most advanced humanoid robots can tramp along flat and inclined surfaces, climb up and down stairs, and slog through rough terrain. But despite the progress, legged robots still can't begin to match the agility, efficiency, and robustness of humans and animals. Existing walking robots hog power and spend too much time in the shop. All too often, they fail, they fall, and they break. For the robotic helpers we've long dreamed of to become a reality, these machines will have to learn to walk as we do. We must build robots with legs because our world is designed for legs.

If there's one thing that the future of healthcare can't seem to escape, it's the promise and potential of artificial intelligence (AI). Though the field has been around for quite some time, it wouldn't be until IBM's Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in a series of seven chess games in 1997 that people would really begin taking machine learning and AI seriously. After two decades, IBM would be pushing another AI machine into the public eye, this time dubbed Watson, and presented as a game-changer for healthcare. Unfortunately, the hype hasn't quite lived up to the reality, prompting Chamath Palihapitiya, an influential tech investor who founded the VC firm Social Capital, to call Watson is "a joke" in May 2017 via CNBC. The good news is that, according to David H. Freedman writing for Technology Review, "most of the criticism of Watson … doesn't seem rooted in any particular flaw in the technology. Instead, it's a reaction to IBM's overly optimistic claims of how far along Watson would be by now. In fact, it still seems likely that Watson Health will be a leader in applying AI to health care's woes."

Sony's answer to Lego Mindstorms is a robot-building kit called Koov. It's the first product from Sony's Global Education division, and it's meant to help kids learn to code while they have fun building robots. The company has put the design kit on Indiegogo to gather some $100,000 in crowd-sourced funding while getting valuable feedback on the kits, which include more than 30 hours of kid-friendly coding instruction and multi-colored blocks with sensors and actuators. The project currently sits at almost $5,000 in funding; kits are set to ship out to backers in November. Like Lego's Mindstorms and WeDo, the Koov project aims to help kids develop "21st Century Skills" like creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and communication in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) curriculum areas.

In January, the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament put forward a draft report urging the creation and adoption of EU-wide rules to corral the myriad issues arising from the widespread use of robots and AI--a development, it says, is "poised to unleash a new industrial revolution." It's an interesting read, and a valiant effort to get a handle on how to standardize and regulate the ever-expanding robot universe: drones, industrial robots, care robots, medical robots, entertainment robots, robots in farming--you name it, they're all in there. Beginning with Frankenstein's monster, Prague's golem, and Karel Čapek's robot and ending with a code of ethics for robotics engineers and some daunting lists of "shoulds" for robot designers and end users, the 22-page worry catalog toggles between practical concerns about liability, accountability, and safety--who's going to pay when a robot or a self-driving car has an accident?--and The practical concerns addressed include a call for the creation of a European agency for robotics and artificial intelligence to support the European Commission in its regulation- and legislation-making efforts. Definitions and classifications of robots and smart robots need to be detailed, and a robot registration system described.

Some experts in the field of artificial intelligence and robotics believe that we will reach artificial general intelligence (ANI) and artificial super intelligence (ASI) by the middle of this century. That is both an exciting and terrifying prospect, because it could see the "invention" of, technically, new lifeforms. Artificial general intelligence defines machine intelligence which is indistinguishable from humans in that it can experience complex thoughts, and even emotions, in much the same way that humans do. It also means that unlike artificial narrow intelligence (ANI), a robot could be capable of performing a huge number of different tasks (where ANI can perform limited tasks, such as becoming an expert at chess). When machines are intelligent enough to reprogram themselves to learn and grow, it's quite likely that we will eventually task them with building robots of their own.