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When we first reported on the Willow Garage PR2 robot, it was just a prototype. Earlier this year, Willow Garage started their beta program, which gave eleven lucky organizations two year access to PR2 robots in exchange for furthering work on open source robotics software. Now we've received word from Willow Garage that the PR2 is officially for sale to anyone who wants it. This is not a toy or hobby robot, of course, so don't expect a small price tag. The full retail price is $400,000 per unit. However, if your organization can demonstrate a proven track record in developing open source software and making contributions to the robotics community, you can get a hefty $120,000 discount on your PR2. For more see our previous stories on Willow Garage and the PR2.

When will human-level AIs finally arrive? We don’t mean the narrow-AI software that already runs our trading systems, video games, battlebots and fraud detection systems. Those are great as far as they go, but when will we have really intelligent systems like C3PO, R2D2 and even beyond? When will we have Artificial General Intelligences (AGIs) we can talk to? Ones as smart as we are, or smarter? Well, as Yogi Berra said, “it’s tough to predict, especially about the future.” But what do experts working on human-level AI think? To find out, we surveyed a number of leading specialists at the Artificial General Intelligence conference (AGI-09) in Washington DC in March 2009. These are the experts most involved in working toward the advanced AIs we’re talking about. Of course, on matters like these, even expert judgments are highly uncertain and must be taken with multiple grains of salt — nevertheless, expert opinion is one of the best sources of guidance we have. Their predictions about AGI might not come true, but they have so much relevant expertise that we should give their predictions careful consideration.

Robots have revolutionized the factory. What about the field? Over the past century, agriculture has seen an explosion in productivity, thanks to things like mechanization, synthetic fertilizers, selective breeding, and, of course, pesticides -- lots of it. But it remains to be seen what role robots will play in working the fields. Automation was possible in factories because tasks were repetitive and the environment well-defined. A robot arm welding a car chassis does the exact same job over and over. When it comes to crops, though, everything changes: the environment is unstructured and tasks -- like picking a fruit -- have to be constantly readjusted.

NI LabVIEW Robotics is a software package that provides a complete suite of tools to help you rapidly design sophisticated robotics systems for medical, agricultural, automotive, research, and military applications. The LabVIEW Robotics Software Bundle includes all of the functionality you need, from multicore real-time and FPGA design capabilities to vision, motion, control design, and simulation. Watch an introduction and demonstration of LabVIEW Robotics.

This little helicopter is able to understand you when you tell it what to do. No pushing buttons, no using special commands, you just tell it where you want it to go and (eventually) it goes. Of course, I’m sure it required a bit of work to define where “door” and “elevator” and “window” are, but it’s a much more intuitive way to control a UAV that works when your hands are full, when you’re stressed (think military), or simply when you have no idea now to control a UAV. I don’t have much in the way of other details on this project, besides the fact that it probably comes from the Robust Robotics Group at MIT, and possibly from someone who lives in this dorm. How do I know? Well, one of the research goals of the RRG is “to build social robots that can quickly learn what people want without being annoying or intrusive,” and this video is on the same YouTube channel. ‘Nuff said.

In the 1970s the CIA had developed a miniature listening device that needed a delivery system, so the agency’s scientists looked at building a bumblebee to carry it. They found, however, that the bumblebee was erratic in flight, so the idea was scrapped. An amateur entymologist on the project then suggested a dragonfly and a prototype was built that became the first flight of an insect-sized machine. A laser beam steered the dragonfly and a watchmaker on the project crafted a miniature oscillating engine so the wings beat, and the fuel bladder carried liquid propellant. Despite such ingenuity, the project team lost control over the dragonfly in even a gentle wind. “You watch them in nature, they’ll catch a breeze and ride with it. We, of course, needed it to fly to a target. So they were never deployed operationally, but this is a one-of-a-kind piece.”