By Evan Ackerman

According to Amazon, “Tekno Pony is the robot Pony that acts just like a real pet pony!” M’kay, try telling that to your kids and see what sort of reaction you get. Tekno is 3.5 pounds of plastic pony marginalness, and looks to stand about two hands high at the shoulder. He can walk around and move his tail, head, and ears, and responds to sound, light, and motion. Tekno’s remote control also tells you what Tekno wants, whether it be an apple or some grooming, kinda like a giant Tamagotchi. Magnets allow him to grip some of his accessories, and he’s also got eyes that light up. Not bad for $55.66 and free shipping, I guess. Oh, and if you buy Tekno from Amazon, you’ll get a free subscription to Cookie magazine, which got me very excited until I found out that the Cookie magazine is not, in fact, about cookies. Damn you Amazon, damn you.

[ Tekno Robotic Pony ] VIA [ Crave ]

Here is the latest version of the face robot developed by researchers from the Waseda University in Tokyo, led by mechanical engineer Atsuo Takanishi. They have been working on the WD series since 2003 and hope to apply the technology to personal robots in the future.

WD-2 not only uses facial expressions, but can change them in such a spectrum of minute details that it can appear nearly human. This is accomplished by manipulating 17 specific facial areas on a mask. Each of these points has three degrees of freedom, giving it a total of 56 degrees of freedom. A shaft moves behind the mask at the desired facial area, which is driven by a DC motor with a pulley and a slide screw. The mask is a very elastic and rigid material called Septom, with bits of steel wool added in to give it strength.

The video is pretty impressive. It has to be seen to truly appreciate the wide range of expression that WD-2 is capable of. Though not 100% perfect by any means, it is so good that it is downright eerie. Looks like Sci-Fi Shape-shifting(Or is that Face shifting?) robots are in our future.

Video and Links after the jump.

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By Evan Ackerman

Robots are notoriously bad when it comes to the unpredictable. This is unfortunate, since most of the environments on Earth are more or less unpredictable. Professor Stefan Schaal from USC Viterbi is attempting to build a robot dog that can autonomously navigate over very rough terrain, and has received $1.5 million from DARPA’s Learning Locomotion program in order to do so. DARPA is interested because a pack of robot dogs would be great at carrying supplies for troops, as long as they’re capable of keeping up on their own. Currently, they have large dogbots in active development that can handle flats and ramps, but nothing more challenging.

Schaal’s LittleDog is designed more as a software and sensor research platform than to be a hardware prototype for DARPA. LittleDog itself is built by Boston Dynamics, and is fairly complicated. Each of LittleDog’s legs is powered by three electric motors, giving them a lot of flexibility. Sensors measure the angles of each joint as well as body orientation and foot/ground contact. The basic strategy for walking over both smooth and rough terrain is “to adjust a smooth walking pattern generator with the selection of every foot placement such that the center of gravity … follows a stable trajectory. To do this, the robot calculates where and how it should proceed, based on the current position, velocity, and acceleration of its legs. If one effort fails, the dog learns from its mistakes and tries another route the next time.”

There are two clips below; the first is an earlier (wired) version of LittleDog dealing with some pretty rocky terrain, and the second clip shows a wireless (and noticeably more evolved) version.

[ Little Dog ] VIA [ USC Viterbi ]

By Evan Ackerman

Robot hands with dynamic grip pressure are certainly nothing new, but thus far, controlling pressure has involved feedback from the object being gripped, and that means you have to first grip the object, the upshot being that if a robot is trying to grip something unknown without either crushing or dropping it, the robot has to proceed very slowly and carefully. Intel Research Seattle has developed a technology called “pre-touch” which uses electrical conductivity sensors to determine where an object is and (to some extent) what it’s made of without touching it. This is a better system than more conventional stereo video largely because the robot’s hand necessarily gets in between the video and the object at close range. Currently, the technology can’t see insulating objects like thin plastic, wood, or paper, but there are other types touchless sensors under development.

[ Intel Research Seattle ] VIA [ Technology Review ]

Sony has a new futuristic egg-shaped music player, complete with flapping wing action, 1 GB of memory and of course, lots of rolling. It plays music through built-in speakers and colored lights flash while it “dances” around. Download some music from your PC and you can set it’s movements. It will go on sale in Japan on September 29th. According to Akihabaranews, it has a battery life of about 5 hours when it plays music from internal memory, and about 4 hours 30 minutes if the music is streamed to the ROLLY using a Bluetooth connection.

The video is priceless if you like flashing, rolling and flapping eggs, mixed with bad human dancing. And who doesn’t? Pay attention to the end for an idea of the Rolly’s scale.

VIA [ OhGizmo ]

So you have a spare Playstation 1 sitting around, collecting dust. You’ve already moved on to Playstations 2 and 3. What does one do with an old gaming console? Put it on eBay? Sell it to an old lady at your next garage sale? Turn it into a robot, silly!

That’s exactly what Harold Ilano did. He took out the game consoles innards and built a cool looking insect robot that has light sensors so it can follow light sources. The video is basically an updated version of a game that many of us have played with our cats or dogs.(Shine the flashlight around the floor and watch them chase it.)

Apparently Harold never thought about just buying a cat. But we thank him for putting a technological twist on an old favorite. For a video and links, hit the jump.

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Here’s an update to the i-SOBOT challenger we showed you last week, from GeStream Tech.

Looks like that was a video of the robot in it’s unfinished incarnation. The difference is night and day. In the old video, he was more or less a metal skeleton, giving him a tough guy look. He also seemed to move with the awkward slowness of a musclebound jock. Now the movements are more fluid, he’s got plenty of energy and in short, kicks a lot more ass! He looks a lot sharper too, sporting a nice coat of gold paint. At 15 cm tall, this is not only the smallest humanoid robot in the world, but it is also the lightest and cheapest. They are selling it as a kit you can build yourself from parts, making it highly customizable. Voice control as well as some different color schemes will be taken care of down the road. Pricing is quoted to be between $185 and $200 and it currently is available for pre-order with stock expected between October and November 2007.

[ Product Page ] VIA [ Waziwazi ]

By Evan Ackerman

I think most people have some general idea of how polluted the Hudson River is… After all, 200 miles worth of the 315 mile long Hudson (from Hudson Falls to New York City) have been designated a Superfund site by the EPA due to PCB contamination. This is exactly the sort of thing that makes the Hudson an ideal testbed for an interconnected network of sensors to monitor the biology and chemistry of the river. The centerpiece of the system (in my opinion, anyway) are the autonomous, solar-powered AUVs that float along the river. They wirelessly relay measurements of temperature, pressure, salinity, dissolved oxygen content and pH back to a central base station, where the data are combined with readings from hundreds of other mobile and stationary sensors to help monitor the flow of pollution. The bots are being built by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and the whole project is being coordinated by the Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries. Their long term plan is to bring this concept to rivers in developing countries around the world.

VIA [ TreeHugger ]

By Evan Ackerman

As far as robots go, Dr. Whippy isn’t fancy. He doesn’t have lots of blinky lights and he doesn’t have any laser cannons. In fact, he doesn’t even move. But I still think Dr. Whippy is the robot that is most likely to solve all of humanity’s problems. Why? Because he gives out free ice cream in proportion to your perceived level of unhappiness:

“Employing voice stress analysis of the user’s answers to specific questions, varying degrees of unhappiness are measured and the counteractive quantity of ice cream is dispensed: The more unhappy you are, the more ice cream you need.”

Wow, how incredibly awesome is that? My only criticism might be that as far as I can tell from the pictures, Dr. Whippy is serving some sort of vanilla chocolate pistachio mix, which doesn’t seem likely to improve the mood of anyone, regardless of quantity. My suggestion? Chocolate chip cookie dough. And bigger cones.

[ Dr. Whippy ]VIA [ We Make Money Not Art ]

By Evan Ackerman

Had enough of robots transforming into cars yet? Of course you haven’t! Cherubim’s transforming maneuver doesn’t involve a nifty little somersault, and it may not make the best car, but it has some pretty good maneuverability as a humanoid and can pull off one heck of a karate chop. If I was a bottle of weird purple liquid, I’d be running for my life right about now.

[ Robot Force (In Japanese) ] VIA [ Robots-Dreams ]