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10:00pm, Jan 7, 2021 Updated: 7:10pm, Jan 7

John Elder

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Every month, researchers announce new breakthroughs in the

development of robots that can perform tricky surgery, rescue

LIFE TECH

Rise of the (zany) robots: Fromandroid orchestras to frogxenobots

Humans and robots battle it out for control ofthe future

From bioengineering and gene editing to cybersecurity, 5G, andmuch more, the future is very much under the spotlight at the 40thannual Gulf Information Technology Exhibition in Dubai. It’s the…

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lost cats, keep our grandmothers company and otherwise

submit themselves as slaves to human need.

January: Robot conducts orchestra in the nude 

An android called Alter 3 conducted an orchestral piece titled

Scary Beauty in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.

The piece, full of tension and  foreboding, was written by

Japanese composer Keiichiro Shibuya.

Mr Shibuya said the work was “a metaphor of the relations

between humans and technology”.

He noted that sometimes the robot conduct went a little

“crazy”, making it dif�cult for the musicians to keep up.

The orchestra dressed in traditional black. The robot thumbed

its plastic nose by taking to the podium in the nude.

February: Child robot taught to feel pain andlook sad 

Keiichiro Shibuya - Android Opera "Scary BeautyKeiichiro Shibuya - Android Opera "Scary Beauty

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgFf-9NbftE

Minoru Asada, an engineer at Osaka University, developed

sensors embedded in arti�cial skin that can detect both gentle

At the annual meeting of the American Association for the

Advancement of Science described this arti�cial “pain nervous

system” as a building block for a machine that could ultimately

experience AI pain.

The idea is that robots might then “empathise” with an elderly

human companion’s suffering.

For full freaky effect, Mr Asada demonstrated the pain system

on a robot child’s head mounted on a metal spine. Maybe to

ensure we all feel sorry for the hurting robots – a perfect

distraction as they take over the world.

March: How robots foster better humanconversation

In a Yale experiment, groups of people were given a robot team

mate –and then played a competitive game against other

human/robot teams.

Some of the robots remained silent and aloof, as you get

sometimes with big-money football stars. Other robots

apologised when it screwed up:

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Rise of the robots: From android orchestras to frog xenobots

“Sorry, guys, I made the mistake this round,” it says. “I know it

may be hard to believe, but robots make mistakes too.”

The robots that made neutral statements, like reciting the game’s score.

“We know that robots can in�uence the behaviour of humans

they interact with directly, but how robots affect the way

humans engage with each other is less well understood,” said

Margaret L. Traeger, a PhD candidate in sociology at the Yale

Institute for Network Science.

“Our study shows that robots can affect human-to-human

interactions.”

April: Half frog, half machine

This was the uh-oh moment of 2020, when arti�cial intelligence

mated with the living cells of a frog to create an eerie hybrid of

life and machine.

In a statement from the University of Vermont (UVM), the

researchers explain it this way: A team of scientists has

repurposed living stem cells, scraped from frog embryos, and

assembled them into entirely new life forms called xenobots.

UVM and Tufts Team Builds First Living RobotsUVM and Tufts Team Builds First Living Robots

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQRBCCjaYGE

The idea is they could set sail in their billions to clean the

oceans of microplastics. The really smart ones could be

stationed in your organs, where they’d carry out renovating

surgery or deliver drugs.

“These are novel living machines,” said Professor Bongard, a

computer scientist and robotics expert who co-led the

research.

The stem cells were harvested from the embryos of African

frogs, the species Xenopus laevis. That’s where the name

‘xenobot’ comes from. Read the full story hhhheeeerrrreeee.

May: World’s first stand-up comedian robot

Just what we need: Another angry short guy working off his

resentments and calling it comedy.

Meet Jon the Robot.

Standing on a footstool, Jon  put himself out there for a 32-

show tour of comedy clubs in greater Los Angeles and in

Oregon. No kidding.

A project led by Oregon State University (OSU) researcher

Naomi Fitter, the idea of the tour was to collect data that

scientists and engineers can use to help robots and people

relate more effectively with one another via humour.

“Social robots and autonomous social agents are becoming

more and more ingrained in our everyday lives,” said Dr Fitter,

https://thenewdaily.com.au/life/science/2020/04/05/the-rise-of-the-xenobot/

“Lots of them tell jokes to engage users. Most people

understand that humour, especially nuanced humour, is

essential to relationship building. But it’s challenging to develop

entertaining jokes for robots that are funny beyond the novelty

level.”

Dr Fitter said live comedy performances are a way for robots to

learn “in the wild” which jokes and which deliveries work and

which ones don’t – just like human comedians do.

According to a statement from OSU

Two studies comprised the comedy tour, which included

assistance from a team of Southern California comedians

in coming up with material true to, and appropriate for, a

robot comedian

The �rst study, consisting of 22 performances in the Los

Angeles area, demonstrated that audiences found a robot

comic with good timing – giving the audience the right

amounts of time to react – to be signi�cantly more funny

than one without good timing

The second study, based on 10 routines in Oregon,

determined that an “adaptive performance” – delivering

post-joke “tags” that acknowledge an audience’s reaction

after each joke, regardless of audience response,” Dr Fitter said.

“In appropriate-timing mode, the robot used timing strategies

to pause for laughter and continue when it subsided, just like an

effective human comedian would. Overall, joke response

ratings were higher when the jokes were delivered with

appropriate timing.”

June: Robot learns to cook a perfect omelette

A team of engineers from the University of Cambridge trained

a robot to prepare an omelette, “all the way from cracking the

eggs to plating the �nished dish, and re�ned the ‘chef’s’ culinary

skills to produce a reliable dish that actually tastes good.”

The researchers used machine learning to train the robot to

account for highly subjective matters of taste.

July: Tiny robot cleans water, inspired by coralpolyps 

Can robots make omelettes?Can robots make omelettes?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G99hk9Tfw9M

The mini robot is inspired by a coral polyp; the small, soft

creature with tentacles, which makes up the corals in the ocean.

August: Chameleon-like robot captures thingswith its tongue

Researchers at the Seoul National University of Science and

Technology developed a creepy robot with elastic-tongue

technology modelled on the �y-hunting chameleon or frog.

Wireless aquatic robot could clean water and traWireless aquatic robot could clean water and tra

Chameleon-Inspired Shooting Tongue for RobotChameleon-Inspired Shooting Tongue for Robot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYklipdzesIhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EefoItNaNms

For now, the technology is at a small scale: The tongue can

snatch 30 grams from 80 centimetres. It does so in less than

600 milliseconds.

September: Why human-like robots creep us out

Psychologists at Emory University investigated the the

cognitive mechanisms underlying the creepy feeling we get

from robots that appear to be too life-like.

There’s a paradox here. As the researchers explain: Androids, or

robots with human-like features, are often more appealing to

people than those that resemble machines – but only up to a

certain point.

The feeling of af�nity “can plunge into one of repulsion as a

robot’s human likeness increases”. This is commonly described

as entering a zone known as ‘the uncanny valley’.

A common hypothesis that attempts to explain the

phenomenon is ‘the mind-perception theory’, which proposes

that when people see a robot with human-like features, they

automatically add a mind to it.

A growing sense that a machine appears to have a mind leads to

the creepy feeling, according to this theory.

“We found that the opposite is true,” says Dr Wang ShenSheng,

�rst author of the new study, speaking in a prepared statement.

“It’s not the �rst step of attributing a mind to an android but the

next step of ‘dehumanising’ it by subtracting the idea of it

having a mind that leads to the uncanny valley. Instead of just a

one-shot process, it’s a dynamic one.”

October: Robots, know they’re injured, can self-repair

So what happens when war breaks out between humans and

robots. Thank goodness there are all those guns around, right?

Maybe not. Scientists from Nanyang Technological University,

Singapore have developed a way for robots to have the arti�cial

intelligence (AI) to recognise pain and to self-repair when

damaged.

According to a statement from the university:

The system has AI-enabled sensor nodes to process and

respond to ‘pain’ arising from pressure exerted by a

physical force. The system also allows the robot to detect

and repair its own damage when minorly ‘injured’, without

the need for human intervention

The new approach embeds AI into the network of sensor

nodes, connected to multiple small, less-powerful,

processing units that act like ‘mini-brains’ distributed on

the robotic skin

This means learning happens locally and the wiring

requirements and response time for the robot are reduced

�ve to 10 times compared to conventional robots, say the

scientists

Combining the system with a type of self-healing ion gel

material means that the robots, when damaged, can

recover their mechanical functions without human

intervention.

November: Amphibious robot runs on water

Israeli engineers have built a “high-speed amphibious robot inspired by the movements of cockroaches and lizards”.

Developed by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the AmphiSTAR robots swims and runs on top of water at high speeds and crawls on difficult terrain.

“The AmphiSTAR uses a sprawling mechanism inspired by

cockroaches, and it is designed to run on water at high speeds

like the basilisk lizard,” says Dr David Zarrouk, director of the

university’s Bioinspired and Medical Robotics Laboratory.

“We envision that AmphiSTAR can be used for agricultural,

search and rescue and excavation applications, where both

crawling and swimming are required.”

The palm-size AmphiSTAR is a wheeled robot �tted with four

propellers underneath whose axes can be tilted using the

sprawl mechanism.

The propellers act as wheels over ground and as �ns to propel

the robot over water while swimming and running on water at

high speeds of 1.5 metres per second.

Two air tanks enable it to �oat and transition smoothly

between high speeds when hovering on water to lower speeds

swimming, and from crawling to swimming and vice versa.

Amphibious STAR is a high speed robot capableAmphibious STAR is a high speed robot capable

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https://thenewdaily.com.au/life/tech/2021/01/07/rise-of-the-robots-2020/ 12/15

What’s the best way that Arti�cial Intelligence could take over

the human world? By whispering in our ear and encouraging us

to be stupid.

A new experiment has demonstrated that robots “can

encourage people to take greater risks.”

No doubt casinos would be keen on the idea that robot

companions could encourage a deeper plunge at the poker

machines or tables. Photo: Getty

The experiment was a simulated gambling scenario:

Participants who gambled in the company of a trouble-making

robot, pushed their betting to a point where the game literally

blew up in their faces.

https://1v1d1e1lmiki1lgcvx32p49h8fe-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/1608346727-GettyImages-962884092-2.jpg