It's a shame that Sony decided to discontinue their robotics projects. The Sony QRIO humanoid would had been a nice platform for machine consciousness research... Here we can see four prototypes in the dance floor:
There are many problems where the application of machine consciousness would be a valuable advantage. Even in robot wrestling competitions, let's have a look what is the state of the art in this field:
Is machine consciousness a key aspect of strong artificial intelligence (strong AI)?
Can machine consciousness be applied as a pragmatic approach in weak AI?
Are machine consciousness and strong AI the same thing?
Machine consciousness is relatively immature as a modern scientific and engineering interdisciplinary paradigm [1]. Nevertheless, we could try to answer the former questions with a good degree of confidence.
Microsoft Robotics Group has released the first commercial release of Microsoft Robotics Studio. This version can be downloaded from this link.
For those of you who don't know what Robotics Studio is, let me quote Microsoft: The Microsoft Robotics Studio is a Windows-based environment for academic, hobbyist and commercial developers to easily create robotics applications across a wide variety of hardware. Key features and benefits of the Microsoft Robotics Studio environment include: end-to-end Robotics Development Platform , lightweight services-oriented runtime, and a scalable and extensible platform.
For more information, please see the Microsoft press release: