Robots are called to perform all kinds of tasks in a more efficient way and at a lower cost than most humans. There are many pros and cons about this replacement of human labor for robotics, depending on who takes the floor and based on which social values support the arguments, but there is one sector in which robotics has a perfect labor market niche: Space exploration. Their endurance, lack of vital support requirements, [...]
When ROS Film Festival, the first robotic online short film festival, started to become a reality, one of the first things we thought we had to do was talking to friends and experts who could give us their particular vision about the robots universe. They are experts from different professional spheres such as Science, Art, Communication or Culture, but they have one thing in common: their relationship to a greater or lesser extent with the [...]
Cinema has helped, from its very beginning, not only to capture real stories, but also to unleash our fantasy, introducing all kinds of mythical characters and fantastic situations. These categories include, in addition to characters from popular culture or mythology, of course, robots or automata, fictional characters product of technology. Already present in classical mythology, the first robots appeared in proper literature in the early 19th century with The Sandman (Ernst Theodore Amadeus Hoffmann, 1817), [...]
He is a writer and a broadcaster at Radio 3 from just before the beginning of this century and, among many other radio jobs, he has lead for over five years Fallo de sistema, a weekly show dedicated to video games, fantasy, science fiction and popular science from the most interesting perspective these issues can be addressed: from wonder. We were with him a few weeks ago at the headquarters of RNE (Spanish National Radio) [...]
We had a chance to talk to the writer and journalist Rosa Montero at Robocity16 about Robotics, Art and Culture, about her concerns towards a foreseeable near future in which our relationship with robots will narrow. When we talked about the ROS Film Festival, Rosa felt excited to join our jury and kindly answered some questions about how she imagines our future with robots. Rosa feels a deep interest in science and is a big fan [...]
Last week we had the opportunity to take part in Robocity16, an event organized by the consortium Robocity2030, which celebrates this year its tenth anniversary and is formed by the University Carlos III, the Polytechnic University of Madrid, the University of Alcalá, the University King Juan Carlos, the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) and the National University of Distance Education (UNED). Research groups presented their novelties while companies, students and other groups shared space [...]
Anyone who lived during the 1980s, the last decade of the Cold War, has felt in their own flesh what it means to be concerned about an imminent war based on sophisticated and powerful missiles between the United States and the Soviet Union. During the presidential term of Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) the US achieved military supremacy over its enemy by a large investment in military technology, paying the price of an impoverished country with great [...]
"An English engineer on holiday in France after Waterloo, discovers looms: programmable mechanisms!". That is the beginning of the last track of “Un dígito binario dudoso” (An iffy binary digit), a record by Hidrogenesse dedicated to the mathematician Alan Turing in 2012, to celebrate the centenary of his birth. Turing is considered the father of artificial intelligence and computing and he was, up to the seventies of the twentieth century, an anonymous hero of the [...]
Thanks to Martine Verhoeven's unprejudiced vision, the film RoboCop (1987) became the icon of science fiction of the eighties and still survives as such. Without her vision, the film might have never been shot. Jon Davison, producer of the project, had contacted all talented directors he knew, but without exception they rejected the offer because they did not want such an apparently simple science fiction story to tarnish their film careers. Its title was, above [...]
The Enlightenment was an exciting time in which the unprejudiced progress of science and thought allowed new wonders to cause great sensation in society. One of them was the manufacture of automata, thanks to the perseverance, creativity and technical and physiological knowledge of its creators, mimicked living beings. Such is the case of the flute player created by the French engineer Jacques de Vaucanson (1709-1782), a lifesize shepherd presented to the French Academy [...]
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