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UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE GENERAL SARMIENTO

INGLS II EXAMEN FINAL LIBRE

APELLIDO Y NOMBRE LEGAJO N:

NOTA: FECHA:

Lea el texto y luego resuelva las siguientes consignas en espaol.

1. Qu informacin suministran el copete y el epgrafe de la fotografa?

2. Podria decirse que el autor juega con las palabras a partir de la utilizacin del termino grasp.

Explique

3. Interprete esta frase del primer parrafo: it could be vital for domestic robots learning how to be useful

around the home.

4. Explique cul es la importancia del perfeccionamiento de la nueva tecnologa mencionada en el

texto.

5. Mencione los diferentes tipos de robot que aparecen en el texto, descrbalos y explique brevemente

qu tareas pueden realizar cada uno de ellos.

6. Cul es el inconveniente que presenta el PR2?

7. Detalle de qu manera funciona el AMT.

8. Cmo funciona el dumb hand gripper y por qu, segn Eric Brown, funciona con tanta precisin?

9. Qu objeta Robert Platt con respecto al robot gripper?

10. Por qu disienten los miembros del proyecto Paco-Plus?

GLOSARIO:

IKEA: una compaaa escandinava que vende muebles de ensamblaje casero.

 Tech
Innovation: Better hands may help robots grasp
meaning
10:25 29 October 2010 by Helen Knight
For similar stories, visit the Robots and Innovation Topic Guides

Innovation is our regular column in which we highlight emerging technologies and predict where
they may lead.

New research could be handy for robots (Image: Nils Jorgensen/Rex Features)
Two recent studies show that roboticists are applying some fresh thinking to the building and
operation of robot hands, and a third suggests why the work is so important it could be vital for
domestic robots learning how to be useful around the home.
Silicon Valley start-up Willow Garage put its PR2 robot on the market earlier this year. It sports two
gripper-equipped arms and has demonstrated its ability to use them to fetch a cold beer or fold a
towel. But it relies on sophisticated sensors and extensive pre-programming to know how best to
grasp an object and how hard to squeeze to maintain a firm grip without causing damage.
Siddhartha Srinivasa at Intel Labs in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and colleagues think they have found
a way to do it without the pre-programming. At last week's International Conference on Intelligent
Robots and Systems in Taipei, Taiwan, his team discussed using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to help
robots pick things up.
AMT is an online service that uses a human workforce to carry out tasks that are simple for people
but difficult for computers and robots to complete unaided. It's already been used to help lost robots
find their bearings, but Srinivasa's team used it to ask people to annotate images of objects the robot
comes across. By adding outlines of objects, and grouping objects, the humans helped the robot to
pick up a range of objects including a milk carton and a box of Pop-Tarts.
Too smart?
This may be applying more intelligence to the task than is really needed. Eric Brown at the
University of Chicago and colleagues have just developed a "dumb" robot gripper that can pick up a
range of unfamiliar and even delicate objects with no prior knowledge of them.
"Our gripper is simpler because it does not need tactile sensing, a computer, or precise vision, other
than the need to know the general location of the object," says Brown, who developed the device
with a team from robot manufacturer iRobot, based in Bedford, Massachusetts, and the Pentagon's
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The "hand" is simply a rubber bag filled with small glass spheres that flows around the object to be
picked up. A pump then creates a vacuum in the bag, jamming the spheres in place and hardening the
robot gripper around the object. Because the gripper moulds itself around the object before
hardening, its force is distributed evenly across a large surface area, meaning it can pick up even
delicate objects like raw eggs without crushing them, says Brown.
Ikea test
Robert Platt of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology says the robot gripper would be great for picking up difficult objects like
small nuts and bolts on an assembly line, for example, or turning a door knob in your home but he
doubts whether a dextrous hand alone will lead to more intelligent robots. "It wouldn't be able to put
together a piece of Ikea furniture," he says.
The members of a Europe-wide project called Paco-Plus might disagree. Co-ordinator of the project
Tamim Asfour at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany says picking up and handling
objects is central to robot learning. The strategy should sound familiar such manual exploration is
used by babies to learn about their bodies, the objects around them and their environment.
"Our robots are able to explore the environment and learn about objects and the actions they can
apply to them," he says. One of the project's robots Armar III has now gleaned enough
knowledge from its kitchen-like environment to learn how to open a dishwasher door, pick up a cup,
turn it upside down and put it into the machine.
Read previous Innovation columns: How to delete corporate logos from view, Online army turns the tide on
automation, What's the right path for indoor satnav?, TV networks to become social networks, CERN collides
with a patent reality, Sunrise boulevards could bring clean power, Hand-held controls move out of sight,
Mobile malware develops a money bug, Reinventing urban wind power.