Studioguest: Verena Hafner, a robotics researcher from Berlin’s Humboldt University

"I think we can be pretty sure the robots won’t outsmart us within the next 10 or 20 years. At least our robots - they run out of batteries within 30 minutes."DW-TV: Miss Hafner, you are doing research on robots, on artificial intelligence ... now, it really seems like fun, moving the little robotic fish within a school of fish. But why is this actually important to the world? Verena Hafner: Well, first of all, it's very fascinating, and it's also important to us to understand natural intelligent behavior, which we can do in swarming fish example. Only if we understand natural intelligence can we build artificial intelligence systems which could be applied to all sorts of things. Could you think of an example there where we actually need an intelligent being of a robot somewhere in a swarm? In a swarm, we could stay with our example and have a swarm of animals and robots interacting with each other. For example, you could use a robot to steer an animal swarm somewhere - to steer a flock of birds away from an airport. But to have that, you actually need to endow your robotic fish with something else - at least with certain senses. So what's possible there? That's true. The robotic fish needs to understand the behavior of the other fish, or at least to recognize them, have sensors to judge their distance, to judge the speed of the other fish, and adapt its own behavior according to what the fish senses. And now since a single fish doesn't show much intelligence but a school of fish does - would that also apply to the robots? A single robot might be completely stupid but the swarm has a certain intelligence...? Exactly, the same applies to the robots. And the nice thing is, you can easily test it with robots. So you implement very simple rules for each individual robot and have them interact with them each other, behave in the real world, and then really complex swarm behavior emerges. What would prove to you that it's really...

Channel: Deutsche Welle Video Length: 2m 29s Date Found: Mon, Aug 23 2010 4:27 PM Category: Science Date Produced: View Count: 0