While Google's bubble-shaped car putters around in California and Tesla's Autopilot guides cars into garages, Georgia Tech is taking autonomous driving to the extreme. A team of researchers from both the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering and the School of Interactive Computing at the university have built AutoRally, an autonomous rally truck that pushes the limits of its performance.
On the internet, you never know who's a robot (or a dog). Computer science students at Georgia Tech were taught this lesson first-hand, when their professor Ashok Goel brought in some extra help to teach his Knowledge Based Artificial Intelligence course. The class already had eight teaching assistants, but as humans they weren't always available to answer questions on the class' online forum. That's where Jill Watson, the A.I. teaching assistant, came in. Since she was an algorithm that lived on a computer, she was available 24x7 to help students. The A.I. was actually so helpful that students started to wonder if Watson was human.
It began, as these stories tend to, with an enthusiastic prankster and a little knowledge of the internet. It ended, fortunately, with a modest legal battle and a lenient judge. In the middle, it put a kid in jail on Christmas eve, 2014. Ryan Pickren, the Georgia Tech student at the heart of this saga, shared his story today on Facebook, and it's as much a cautionary tale about overzealous reactions to online attacks as it is about the danger of pranks.
It takes skill to fall with grace. Not in a metaphorical sense, but in a very real one: emerging relatively unharmed after a tumble is a skill human have and can refine that robots lack innately, often to comical effect. New research by Georgia Tech wants to protect expensive, wobbly robots of the future, by programming them to fall safely and gracefully. In order to test this, first they needed to shove over a bunch of robots:
