If you’ve ever owned a pet that wasn’t a fish, my guess is that you’ll agree that the sense most important to your relationship with your pet wasn’t sight or sound, but touch. It’s a little weird, then, that touch (and reaction to touch) has been largely ignored when it comes to interactive robotics. There are of course a few exceptions like Paro and Pleo, and if you’ve ever fondled a Pleo, it’s immediately apparent that the way the robot reacts to touch is what makes it so satisfying to interact with.

Steve Yohan, a researcher at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, has taken this idea to its logical conclusion with the creation of the Haptic Creature, a 100% furry robot rabbit that communicates only through touch. The creature has pressure sensors over its entire body, and responds to touching or stroking by making breathing motions, wiggling its ears, or purring. Yohan says that despite the lack of any other expressive features, users were easily able to determine whether the robot was responding in a negative or positive way.

There’s no way to buy a Haptic Creature, so you’ll have to stick with Paro if you want something fuzzy and cute. But my hope is that research like this will get attention of people like Ugobe, who’ll bring us an ice-age edition of Pleo with a thick woolly coat sometime soon.

VIA [ New Scientist ]

It may not be quite as slick looking (or as sinister) as the Cyberdyne exoskeleton, but Berkeley Bionics’ lower body exoskeleton is firmly off the drawing board and into the prototype stage, and you can preorder one for yourself to help kick your status as a 98 pound weakling. The HULC (Human Universal Load Carrier) is able to take up to 200 pounds of load off of your back, augmenting your muscle movements so that you feel as though you’re not carrying anything at all. If you want to go anywhere, it’s still going to take some work to move that extra mass, but the HULC will also help to decrease the metabolic cost of moving a load by 10-15%, which means that you can move more heavier stuff farther.

There aren’t any more details on the Berkeley Bionics website (no price, for example) and the promo video looks like the target users are military rather than civilian. It could be that Berkeley Bionics is just looking to sell some prototype HULC systems to raise a little bit of money, but who cares, now is your big chance to start working on that superhero (or supervillain) cyborg suit you’ve been fantasizing about.

[ Berkeley Bionics ] VIA [ IEEE ]

In February, we learned about Dean Kamen’s amazing Luke robotic prosthetic arm, which is way, way, way better than the current standard for prosthetic limbs. It looks like DEKA has put more than a little work into the arm system since then, focusing on what is probably the trickiest (and most important) aspect: how the user interacts with and controls the system.

The arm itself has 18 degrees of freedom, which is nearly as many as a human arm has. That’s a lot of control, which is great, but it becomes that much harder for the arm to be controlled. For most people, sensors on the arm read muscle signals from neurons in the upper body to determine what the user wants the arm to do. DEKA’s system adapts the arm to the user, rather than vice versa, and also allows for the use of macros to make common or repetitive tasks easier to accomplish. DEKA is also working on arms controlled directly with the brain, and part of the above video shows just how effective such an approach can be, as a man uses his mind to lift a cup to his mouth and take a drink, and then sets the cup down again without conscious thought. Simply incredible.

[ DEKA @ D6 ] VIA [ Gizmodo ]

Never underestimate the brain power of a hungry monkey. Neurological engineers at the University of Pittsburgh have been able to train two macaque monkeys to feed themselves with a robotic arm wired directly into their brain, marking the first time a a brain-controlled limb has done anything more than demonstrate a proof of concept. Researchers first trained the monkeys to operate the arm with a joysick, and watched what was going on in their brains while they did it. The monkeys then had their arms restrained, and electrodes attached to a group of about 100 cells in the motor cortex part of the brain interpreted the signals the monkeys were sending to their biological arm, and used them to control the robotic arm.

The process took some practice, but the monkeys figured it out in only a few weeks, achieving success rates of over 60%. The robotic arm isn’t simple, either, with both shoulder and elbow joints and a grasping hand. One monkey was even able to scarf down treats and control the arm and the same time, even directing the arm around objects or compensating when the researchers moved the food. Currently, this particular system requires all kinds of infrastructure (computers, technicians, etc) to get it to work, but in principle this concept should be transferable to humans.

VIA [ New Scientist ]

A few months back on OhGizmo, we wrote about the Casio EX-F1, a prosumer digital camera/camcorder that can record video at 1200 frames per second. It’s not good video, but it’s video all the same, and it turns everyday occurrences like robot combat into beautiful slow motion ballets. Especially if you add The Blue Danube as a soundtrack. Have a look:

Most of these videos were shot at only 300 FPS, a quarter of the maximum speed of the camera. The Achilles heel (as it were) of the EX-F1 (and all high speed cameras) is that they need oodles of light for decent results. The main arena was lit by 10 500-watt halogen worklights, and it still looks a bit murky at 300 FPS. For only about $1k, though, the Casio is a pretty impressive little toy.

[ Mad Overlord ] VIA [ Boing Boing ]

This robot, designed by University of Illinois engineering student Lei Tian, doesn’t seem to have a name. So I’m going to give it one: weedbot. Weedbot is the ultimate in solar powered weed destruction machines. GPS guided and totally autonomous, weedbot uses stereo cameras to locate and identify weeds for extermination based on image characteristics stored in an 80gb onboard database. If a weed is found, weedbot not only chops it down, he also applies herbicide to the spot ensuring that the weed will not rise again. You know, like cutting the head off a zombie. Or something. Weedbot is 2 feet tall, 5 feet long, and can travel about 3 miles an hour on wheels or little tank treads. Since he applies herbicide so precisely, weedbot is much cheaper and more environmentally friendly than typical agricultural weed management techniques that involve spraying an entire field.

Weedbot is currently confined to experimental fields at the University of Illinois, but I’m hoping he breaks out and finds his way over to my back yard.

[ U. Illinois ] VIA [ Robot Living ]

Why are robots better at repetitive tasks than humans? This video should give you a clue. Instead of building better / faster / stronger robotic hardware, ABB has decided to focus some of their attention on the software that controls the movements of the robot. By making the robot smarter, ABB is able to increase payload by 20%, repeatable accuracy by 35%, and speed by 10%. These are pretty huge numbers when you consider that this isn’t a hardware change; the robot just has better instructions.

I’m not sure whether this demo is more impressive than these incredible ABB FlexPicker robots… True, this example is very fast and precise, but it’s following a preset path and not having to make any decisions. The amount of progress in automation that has been made in the relatively recent past is vaguely shocking, and at this point, the capabilities of robotic systems in situations like this are SO far beyond humans that I’m feeling just a little intimidated.

[ ABB ]

This spunky little robodude is a Panasonic Evolta promotional mascot. He’s 17 centimeters tall and weighs 130 grams, and his reason for existing is summed up nicely in this picture… The two batteries on his back (Panasonic Evolta batteries, of course) were enough to power him up 1700 feet of vertical rope dangling over a cliff into the Grand Canyon. It only took him about 7 hours, which I guess is pretty quick for such a little guy. The Evolta batteries have been recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest lasting AAs anywhere ever, which is good to know, but you can’t actually GET them outside of Japan yet.

VIA [ Pink Tentacle ]

This is it. The pinnacle of modern robotics research. A company called AI Robotics has successfully created an ::ahem:: fully functional robotic woman that will be available for purchase as of June 11. When I say fully functional, I don’t just mean in the bedroom… According to AI Robotics, the robot (named “LISA”) can also cook meals, go shopping, do chores, give massages, and dress and recharge herself automatically. She’s got an IQ of 130 and can make conversation about news, traveling, culture and music. Have a look:

LISA uses proprietary RKS (“Recognition Krax System”) technology, which helps her recognize and respond to vocal, tactile, and visual stimuli. Her skin contains thousands of sensors, she has cameras in her eyes that can rapidly analyze forms, colors, and gestures and relate them all to an internal database, and she has the ability to learn augmented with a dedicated internal wireless internet connection. So, in some respects, she’s actually better than a human, and it won’t surprise you that I’ve already signed up to order one. I wonder if my real life girlfriend will be upset… She’ll just have to wait for the male version, I guess, which should be available soon.

[ AI Robotics ] VIA [ Communist Robot ]

After seven minutes of nail biting trans-atmospheric intensity, the Phoenix Mars Lander touched down in once piece Monday evening and there was much rejoicing. Unlike the Mars rovers, Phoenix is a stationary robotic laboratory, and relies on an extendable arm to take samples of the surface for analysis. Phoenix landed way up in the arctic regions of Mars, and is going to be digging around under the soil looking for water ice and (if we’re lucky) little Martian buggies. The successful landing of Phoenix comes (to be honest) as somewhat of a surprise, since Mars has a nasty habit of eating about 2/3 of the spacecraft that have tried to make it there over the years. See one of the first ever images Martian arctic (in color!), after the jump. (Read more…)