Category: Robots

Well, not exactly. But Make has a piece on their site about some Microsoft engineers that were showing off these BEAM robots at the Maker Faire. Apparently, the Big Soft encouraged all of its engineers with “Make-style hobbies” to show off some of the ol’ corporate joie de vivre at the annual geek-country faire. Several engineers brought photovore BEAMbots, and extremely cool ones at that. Here’s a link to some video footage of the sun-worshipping little automatons (the robots, not the MS engineers!). You can also find some macro shots here.

And, be sure to check out the website of VJ DeLeon, one of the bot-building engineers. He’s got some very juicey stuff here, including most of the info and diagrams you’d need to build the types of BEAMbots seen here. If you successfully build the two solarengine-based bot projects I have in Make No. 6, a bot like this, especially VJ’s FredFly (right), might be a suitable next project.

In December, we reported on the latest in insect-inspired robots, the Insbot, a robo-roach designed to hang out with their organic brethren, trick them into thinking they’re the real deal, and even influencing their behavior. ScienceDaily has an update on the Insbots. Researchers have come a long way in their experiments, using roach pheromones on the bots to get the roaches to do such unroachly things as traveling towards and hanging out around a bright light source. You can lead a roach to a bug rapper, but you can’t [ZZZZZIIIIIIITTTTT]. Oh look, it turns that you can!

Besides being able to lead pesky crawlies to their doom, this sort of technology could be used to influence and maximize the actions of beneficial critters too. Kinda coo, kinda creepy at the same time.

Thanks, Jay!

So many areas of business, entertainment, and sports have a Hall of Fame. Did you know there’s even a Robot Hall of Fame? There has been since 2003. It’s the brainchild of those prodigious crania over at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. The 2006 Inductees have just been announced. They are (…the envelope please): Maria , the art deco fembot from Fritz Lang’s landmark 1927 film “Metropolis,” Gort, the big-boned bot from 1951’s “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” David, the droid that sees dead people, from Spielberg’s/Kubrick’s “Artificial Intelligence: AI,” the Sony AIBO robo-pet, and SCARA (Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm), the increasingly ubiquitous industrial robot. Previous Hall of Famers include Mars Pathfinder, ASIMO, R2-D2, and C-3PO.

The RHF has the two categories “Robots from Science Fiction” and “Robots from Science” to celebrate the robots that inspire us and those we create as a result of that inspiration. The new bots will officially be welcomed into the Hall during a ceremony this June. No word yet on what Maria Metropolis will be wearing, but we think she’d look stunning in anything from the DigiKey catalog.

Oh, I just can’t wait for the day when American politicians start making robots a straw man issue in an election season. If Hello Kitty has her way, she’ll be one of the robots taking over our jobs, at least she will be if Japan’s Business Design Laboratory has anything to do with it. They’ve built a Hello Kitty robot office receptionist that a partner company (called Robot Dispatch) is now renting out to businesses. The 20″ bot can recognize faces, ask visitors for their names, and hook them up with the right person in the office. It also has 20,000 stored “conversational patterns,” songs, and riddles.

I don’t know about you, but I’d be a little spooked if I walked into the office of a reputable company and there was a giant plastic doll on the desk asking me to identify myself and posing me riddles while I waited for my appointment. But as the article points out, a robot might at least be more entertaining than many office receptionists.

Thanks, Jay!

WowWee Toys and Evolution Robotics inked an alliance deal last week. WowWee are makers of Robosapien and a growing number of affordable, surprisingly low-tech, and equally surprisingly, high-function (for the price and tech levels) robots. Evolution is best known for their ER1 robot platforms (which use your laptop as their brains) and their vision, pattern-recognition, and robot navigation systems.

Other robot geeks seem excited by the deal. I’m not as sure. I know that each generation of Robosapien and other WowWee bots are getting more sophisticated, and that’s as it should be. They’re building on top of previously proven technologies to create “smarter,” more versatile robots. Solid bottom-up robot development. So I get a little nervous thinking about marrying the lo-tek, largely analog ingenuity of Robosapien with the relatively complex, microcomputer world of the vision and navigation systems that Evolution trades in. I hope that this represents a real meeting of the minds between Mark Tilden (designer of the Robosapien) and his appropriate technology/BEAM approach and the software-minded developers at Evolution and not one where WowWee thinks they need to go all fussy-tech, with lots of digital bells and whistles, to make the next generation of successful robot buddies. Or do they?

I guess what I’m really wondering (out loud) is what Mark Tilden thinks about this deal and where HE thinks the future of Robosapien and its ilk lie? For sure, it’ll be interesting to see what happens next.

Oh those loveably weird Japanese robot engineers. Just when you thought they might have had their fill of bots that dance, play musical instruments, and flash lights and bleep and bloop along to your iPod, a company called Speecys has announced a robot that can act out Internet content to delight the whole family.

Called the ITR (“Internet Renaissance”), the foot tall robot uses something called RTML (“Robot Transaction Markup Language”) to present Internet contact in a form that the robot can interpret in sound, motion, facial expressions and speech. The company is hoping that RTML will become a standard for Web-to-Bot translation and that robots like the ITR will become a common way for families to get their news, information, weather reports, and entertainment news.

Let’s try a little thought experiment to see how this would work. Here are some of today’s top stories. Imagine a 12″ bot on your dining room table dancing, lighting up, and making grunts and groans while delivering these items in one of those slightly unnerving synthetic voices:

*Delay Resigns from House
*Protestors and Police Clash in Paris
*Saddam Accused of Genocide
*Tom Cruise Gets Candid About His Dyslexia

Actually, now that I think about it, I can’t get one of these robo-clowns acting out my daily news fast enough. Jon Stewart may soon be out of a job.

[Via Pink Tentacle]

If you missed the recent showing of NOVA’s “The Great Robot Race,” about the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, the entire program is available online in seven video chapters. There are also some video interviews with builders, a team database, some techie bits, and other material worth checking out.

For those who only knew combat robotics through the short-lived cult hit Battlebots on Comedy Central, you may be surprised to know that robot wars are still prosecuted in battleboxes all over our Big Blue Marble. One can only hope that, in this IPTV world, fans of bot-on-bot action can find more ready access to this 21st century take on the contact sport. (Hey TiVo: How about deep sixing that unwatchable Rocketboom and give us BotBash instead!?)

One recent event was tthe 4th Annual National Championship of the Robot Fighting League and the ComBots Cup, held at that mecca for robotic combat, San Francisco’s Ft. Mason. Robot magazine has some really nice photo essays and a report on the event on their website. Also be sure to check out the Combots site for additional coverage and video of the event.

I have been asked to be the first guestblogger on Nxtbot, a blog that the LEGO Company has set up to talk about their forthcoming Mindstorms NXT system and consumer/hobby robotics in general. I’ll be tryng to get some dialog going on various issues surrounding personal robotics today, so please drop by and chime in, if so inspired. Here’s an excerpt from one of my first postings:

“MIT’s Rodney Brooks has an adage (to paraphrase): A bunch of working “dumb” bots (i.e. robots w/little computing power that sense and react directly to their environment) is better than one broken “smart” bot (i.e. a robot that maps its world, plans optimal routes through it, etc).

“I propose a corollary: A robot that is actually on the market is better than a bunch of bots that are endlessly demo’d at trade shows. Look at the Hondo P3 and the Sony SDR-4/Qrio vs. the Wow Wee Robosapien and the iRobot Roomba. While Hondo and Sony keep parading around these perpetual demobots but never bring them to market (and Sony just turned the development lights out on Qrio), the Robosapien and the Roomba are proven market successes and are now several product generations in pedigree.

“NEC’s answer to the Honda and Sony demobots is the PaPeRo (”Partner-Type Personal Robot”). While it’s an undisputedly cute little rug-rover, and has enjoyed plenty of ink and electrons since it was first rolled out in 2001, it remains in the prototype stage and there is still no release date. If you ask me, I think there should be a “put up or shut up” statute for such prototypes. If you show off a prototype and it garners a bunch of media attention, and then you don’t bring it to market in, let’s say three years, you gotta retire it; show us a NEW concept robot. Hey, maybe that’s what Sony did on their own. The SDR-4/Qrio couldn’t cut the mustard, so they did the only honorable thing, they took it off the world stage and stopped teasing us with it. So, what’s it going to be NEC? The shelves of my local Target or the wayside on the road to Robotopia?

“And, in case you didn’t notice, the robots above that are actually on the market are of the “dumb bot” variety while the ones in perpetual prototypical stage are “smart bots.” Coincidence? We think not. Discuss.”

While we’re on the subject of crap, we might as well mention the electric pig (a.k.a. the “electric mole”), a German-made robot that’s apparently in high-demand in Europe. It’s being used as part of the more cost-effective, environmentally-friendly practice of solar-drying sewage. The effluent is spread out inside of large greenhouse-like sheds for the sun to dry it out. The “pigs” go to work, stirring the “mud” to hasten the drying process. Once dried, the resulting material is virtually bacteria-free and can be more safely spread on farm-fields.

[Via Robots.Net]