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ICYMI: Self-driving taxis, menstruation tech and more
#fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-230093{display:none;} .cke_show_borders #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-230093, #postcontentcontainer #fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-230093{width:570px;display:block;} try{document.getElementById("fivemin-widget-blogsmith-image-230093").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: The self-driving car service Robot Taxi is planning on testing in Japan soon and if all goes well, will roll out legitimate taxi services within the next five years. A new product techs out the cup some women use while menstruating so that the app can tell when it needs to be emptied. And Disney is creating squishy robot skin made for holding delicate things and we are afraid. We all know where this is going, yeah?
Japanese researchers craft "e-skin" to let robots feel
The folks at the University of Tokyo have been trying to create more touchy, feely robots for what seems like ages, and they now look to have made some real progress with their so-called "e-skin," which promises to give robots a more human-like sense of touch. To do that, the researchers created a bendable rubber sheet filled with carbon nanotubes, which lets the "skin" conduct electricity even when it's stretched. When combined with sensors, that would let robots feel heat or pressure, which the researchers say is essential "as robots enter our everyday life." They also, not surprisingly, see a whole host of other applications for the technology, including on steering wheels that could judge whether people are fit to drive and in stretchable displays that could start out as a tiny sheet and be stretched to a larger size when you want to watch TV.
Adgadget: Fantasy fembots market male products
Ariel Waldman contributes Adgadget, a column about the intersection of advertising and technology.Technologically better equipped than booth babes, fantasy fembots seem to be popping up everywhere in ad campaigns these days. Alcohol seems to be popular with the fembots -- they're employed in ads from both Heineken and Svedka -- but Philips is utilizing them in a campaign for an electric razor as well. It's pretty easy to be creeped out by the influx of ready-to-serve robots -- and not just because these fembots could be the beginnings of the Singularity in disguise. (C'mon, what more suitable "smarter-than-human brain-computer-interface" would be better to take over the human race than one that offered kegs and clean shaves as a "gift from the Greeks"? And who better to be behind the downfall of society than advertisers?) Misogynist undertones run rampant throughout all the ads, so it's no shock that feminine cyborgs are used exclusively in advertising targeting young males -- they tap right into stock fantasies of complete feminine subservience.
Skin, it does a robot good
Hang on to your Jimmy hats kids, human skin for robots has just been created in a lab somewhere in Japan, of course. OK, it's not real skin, rather, a 1-cm thick film of elastic silicone covered by a 0.2-mm thick textured layer of firm urethane -- a dermis and epidermis, if you will -- which 10 out of 12 lonely robotics professors swear feels like the real deal. The artificial skin was developed primarily for cosmetics testing in a partnership 'tween Kao Corporation and a research team from Keio University led by Takashi Maeno. Yeah, right, cosmetics. With work already underway to make robots detect their owner's sweat and racing pulse, well, we think it's pretty clear where this is all going, eh?
