An RP-7 robot, normally used to allow physicians to interact remotely with patients, allowed Army Staff Sgt. Erik Lloyd (stationed in Iraq) to interact (sort of) with his family and 7 day old son at a hospital in Texas. Lloyd had full control of the robot’s movements and cameras, and was able to communicate through a live video uplink with his family and meet his son (albeit virtually) for the very first time.

“It was an awesome experience. I am far from the first father in this conflict who has missed the birth of their child. … However, with this technology I was in a small way allowed to feel more like I was part of a family than I had been … since he was born.”

It’s really promising to see the military using robots in ways like this, since it implies that robots are being allowed out of their box a little bit, and hopefully they’ll start to become more useful to soldiers on an everyday, not necessarily combat basis.

Telepresence is in no way limited to the military or commercial sectors. It’s exactly the sort of niche that the iRobot ConnectR is designed to fill, albeit in a slightly less complicated manner. The Rovio should do more or less the same thing. So far, neither of these are available commercially, I imagine because telepresence is not something that people think they need yet, even in a niche market. Will people need it, and will people be comfortable with the idea? I’m not sure what to think, but we should find out in the second half of this year.

[ DefenseLink ] VIA [ AUVSI ]

SwashBot is what DIY robotics is all about… He may not be the most graceful little thing, but he sure is cute. He’s constructed out of spare R/C helicopter bits, including four servos, a receiver, a battery pack, some LEDs, and little exoskeleton bits. It looks like it takes some coordination on the controller to get SwashBot to go where you want him to, but there’s no denying his slightly spastic charm:

EPIC BATTLE: SwashBot v. KittyCat, after the jump. (Read more…)

This awesome t-shirt has 51 (count ‘em) silhouettes of famous robots from all over the pop cultureosphere. Go on, try and place them all. If you can, I will send you a cookie. Or I would, if I could bake. I especially liked the inclusion of the Wrong Trousers… They’re fantastic for walkies, you know. The only thing is, I’m not sure if Daleks technically qualify as robots, since I’m pretty sure they’ve got creepy little baddies in there. Even the OED says that Daleks are cyborgs, which aren’t completely artificial. Oh well, I’m just being picky, 50 robots and an alien exosuit is still plenty good enough for me.

Buy one (yes, that’s an order) in charcoal, black, or red for $25.

[ Chop Shop Store ] VIA [ SpurtBot ]

Meet Finnegan, a robotic turtle. I’d tell you about him, but MIT’s Stephen Licht does such a good, bite size job that I’m just gonna let him take over:

“Finnegan” is an agile and aggressively maneuvering biomimetic autonomous underwater vehicle, propelled entirely with biologically inspired oscillating foils. The field of biomimetic robotics attempts to observe, adapt and apply the design and behavior of biological examples to improve the performance of man-made devices. Biomimetic propulsion in general, and oscillating foils in particular, have been extensively studied as a possible means for improvement of underwater vehicle agility and maneuverability.

The objective of the work is to prove the ability of rolling and twisting foils to improve the maneuvering performance of AUVs, as defined by the turning radius and turning rate at speed, while simultaneously providing the agility to control six degrees of freedom at low speed in confined space. In developing Finnegan, we take advantage of a growing body of knowledge into the “why?” and “how?” of fish, bird, reptile and mammal swimming to extend the state of the art in underwater vehicles, demonstrating tangible results from a biomimetic approach.

[ MIT Towing Tank ] VIA [ Communist Robot ]

iCat is a social research robot designed by Philips who’s been around since 2005. Most recently, iCat is being used as part of the LIREC (Living with Robots and Interactive Companions) Project which studies social interactions between humans and robots and officially begins today in the EU. iCat has been taught to play chess while giving its opponent emotional cues based on how smart it thinks the move is. If you make a move that makes iCat’s position more favorable (based on a predictive chess algorithm) it will smile at you, and if you make a good move, it will frown. The software uses a scale between -100 and +100 to determine the appropriate expression, and large enough changes will trigger other emotions:

“For example, if iCat has a small advantage in the game (in terms of material or position of the pieces) and suddenly its opponent commits a mistake that allows the iCat to capture her queen, the triggered sensation will be a “stronger reward”, which will lead to an emotion of surprise (the sensation is better than we were expecting).”

The iCat robot itself is fairly straightforward. It’s immobile, with a fixed base that includes two touch sensors, a stereo mic, a speaker, and a USB hub (yay!). The head contains servos controlling the eyes, eyelids, eyebrows, and lips, and the head moves up and down while the body rotates from side to side. There are indicator lights on the ears, along with two more touch sensors and a proximity sensor. iCat comes in yellow or orange, and although he is for sale, you’ll have to ask Philips just how much.

After the jump, check out a movie of iCat playing tic-tac-toe and telling dumb jokes. (Read more…)

This is Cyberdyne’s HAL (hybrid assistive limb) exoskeleton, a powered robotic suit designed to significantly increase the strength of the wearer. Using sensors attached to the skin, HAL senses which muscles you intend to move, and powers its joints at the same rate as you move yours, allowing you to walk around effortlessly while wearing the fifty pound suit. If you pick something up, the suit is able to compensate for a portion of the weight, effectively increasing your strength from 2 to 10 (!) times. The suit can be used indoors or outdoors and will provide power for between about three to five hours before it needs a recharge.

Prototypes of the HAL exoskeleton have been around for a few years, and Cyberdyne just begun to construct a new facility that should be able to produce 400 - 500 suits per year by the end of 2008, ramping up to tens of thousands of suits (!!) over the next few years. The best news is that the suits will be available for individual users overseas to rent (that’s us), for an estimated $1,000 per month which includes $300 for maintenance and upgrades. Is that a sweet deal or what? Sign me up, I’ll take one for Christmas.

[ Cyberdyne ] VIA [ Loving The Machine ]

This Comau SMART NH4 industrial welding robot has been fitted with some kind of spectacularly badass laser system which can instantly spot weld metal from over a meter away:

I want one for my patio. I’d use it to zap mosquitoes. Muahahahaha.

[ Comau Robotics ] VIA [ Communist Robot ]

Last week Popular Science reported that Foster Miller TALON SWARDS armed robots were pulled out of Iraq because of a malfunction where “the gun started moving when it was not intended to move,” which is a potentially very dangerous thing to have happen. I took the position that even if there were some serious bugs to be worked out, it was still worth keeping the SWORDS robots in active development because of their future potential to replace humans in dangerous areas. Now it appears that the problems that the robots were having were seriously overstated… Here is what actually happened, according to Danger Room, who spoke directly to Foster Miller:

“The whole thing is an urban legend,” says Foster Miller spokesperson Cynthia Black, of the reports about SWORDS moving its gun without a command. There were three cases of uncommanded movements, but all three were prior to the 2006 safety certification, she says. “One case involved a loose wire. So, now there is now redundant wiring on every circuit. One involved a solder, a connection that broke. everything now is double-soldered.” The third case was a test were the robot was put on a 45 degree hill and left to run for two and a half hours. “When the motor started to overheat, the robot shut the motor off, that caused the robot to slide back down the incline,” she says. “Those are the three uncommanded movements.”

Just to reemphasize, all three of those movements were prior to the 2006 safety certification. And it’s also worth reemphasizing that these systems are basically complicated remote controlled robots, and they certainly cannot fire their weapons without a human pushing a button. So, what is holding back the deployment of the SWORDS system? National Defense has the answer, after the jump. (Read more…)

Last year’s Baka RoboCup was undoubtedly full of really, really stupid robots. I wish I could have been there, but Japan is a leetle bit outside of our expense account (we don’t have an expense account), especially for such a dumb competition. Thankfully, YouTube has come to the rescue, with this video of Push-Kun, a robotic trashcan on legs:

If you’re wondering what it is or what it’s for, well… you just saw.

[ Push-Kun (In Japanese) ] VIA [ Pink Tentacle ]

We wrote about Orb Swarm in August of last year, when it was still a little bit of a work in progress. I was excited to see a bunch of orbs wandering around the tarmac of Moffett Field at Yuri’s Night Bay Area, which was held at NASA’s Ames Research Center over the weekend. I took some video which explains how the orb swarm works:

The rover, by the way, is a NASA Ames K10 research rover, which have been deployed in a Moon-like landscape up in Canada to test out autonomous surveying technology. Check out a video summary of what it’s been working on, after the jump. Oh, and don’t forget to check out additional coverage of Yuri’s Night (with some cool pics of the orbs at night) over on OhGizmo. (Read more…)