Friday, August 30, 2013

Robopocalypse for the Rent-a-cop?

Has a fear of robotics ever kept anyone from robbing banks? I'm not talking about the surveillance systems, laser-armed tripwires, noisy alarms, or automated locks on the doors. I'm talking about actual robots—an evolution of the ROOMBA Vacuum cleaner, but with legs, not cute, and definitely not something you want to rob.

Now, an EU-funded, £7.2 million ($11 million USD) collaborative project, called Strands, is underway in England to develop 4D, artificial intelligence for security and care applications. It aims to produce intelligent robo-sentinels that can patrol areas, and learn to detect abnormalities in human behavior. Could their project eventually replace security guards with robots? It looks possible.

Strands, as Nick Hawes of the University of Birmingham said, will "develop novel approaches to extract spatio-temporal structure from sensor data gathered during months of autonomous operation," to develop intelligence that can then "exploit [those] structures to yield adaptive behavior in highly demanding, real-world security and care scenarios."

link.

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