Last post for today.

Unfortunately, or fortunately?, this post is also relevant to the theme of military robotics.  The video is self explanatory, and explains how the beetle is remotely controlled via human – and of course Pentagon seems to be behind this kind of research. There has been similar research done on rats and dolphins, and UBC’s yourViews survey on roboethics covered the topic as well. If you haven’t taken the survey, please visit http://www.yourviews.ubc.ca/ to take it.

As you will see when taking the survey, there are some interesting reasons why people oppose this kind of technology. One I found most interesting was how people saw this as a cheap way out from developing real robotics technology – the argument is that this kind of technology is cheaper than building robots, and will slow down the development of robotics.

For more information on the cyborg beetles research, please access the full article from the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics website:

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics: Cyborg Beetles.