Sylvain Calinon’s robotic portrait artist that we met last December has been upgraded with a mustache, beret, and some spunky dialogue. And although I’m not sure, it kinda looks like it’s been improving on its style, as well:

The Portraitist Robot recognizes human faces in its surroundings and extracts relevant characteristics from them. By using its uncanny artistic talent, it then draws portraits of the participants from the captured images by converting them into vector art and by using inverse kinematics to control the robot’s arm.

I sort of liked the old-world charm of the quill and ink of the previous incarnation of this bot, but I have to say, the new version (which debuted at Google Zeitgeist 2008) is quite a charmer.

[ Sylvain Calinon ]

These days, even the Pope needs a little more than just the standard amount of protection from the heavens. And he’s got it, in France anyway, courtesy of European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company Eagle I MALE (Medium Altitude Long Endurance) UAVs. The Eagle 1s were on station when the Pope visited Lourdes last week, ready to intervene in case of emergency. The robotic surveillance aircraft aren’t currently equipped to toss lightning bolts, but they can use their laser designators to call down some slightly less dramatic but (if I may say so) potentially more effective punishments, such as air to ground missiles. Sinners beware.

[ Ares ] VIA [ io9 ]

Feeling ambitious? The Stanford Engineering Everywhere program is now offering a suite of computer and robotics courses online, for free. You can take the same three course introduction to computer science that imparts intelligence to most Stanford undergrads, and follow that up with Introduction to Robotics, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning.

The complete lecture portions of the courses are available on YouTube or iTunes, and you can download PDF versions of the handouts and assignments (answer keys included). What you can get online is identical to the courses taken by Stanford students, but no, you’re not gonna get credit for it.

[ SEE ] VIA [ Mr. Future ]

I think the picture pretty much speaks for itself on this one. Eric Joyner has a book coming out entitled Robots and Donuts, with 175 pages of full color, robot and donut art for only $23. Two of my favorite things, together at last. Prints of some of Eric’s artwork are available on his website starting at $225… Another yummy picture, after the jump. (Read more…)

This Citroen commercial involving a transforming robot car may not motivate me to buy a Citroen (what’s a Citroen?), but it does make me want to play some Bee Gees really loudly and pretend I know how to dance. Go on, watch this and try and keep your hips from swiveling…

See what the actual car looks like (if you care) after the jump. (Read more…)

If there’s one thing that following robot news for, geez, over a year now has taught me, it’s that the personality exhibited by (or perhaps more accurately, conferred upon) a robot bears little or no relationship to its mechanical complexity or its resemblance to an actual person. Keepon is an excellent example of this, as are the creations of Crabfu. With Crabfu’s servobots in mind, Trossen Robotics sponsored a challenge to design a simple little bot with a big personality:

The challenge: To bring a bunch of hardware the illusion of life and character. This is NOT about AI or fancy software or hardware. It’s not to achieve real character or personality, but the ILLUSION of it. Autonomous robots can enter too, but this isn’t a contest of the smartest robot, but a smartest “looking” and “moving” robot could win. This is about the art of breathing some charm into a bunch of electronics. So the goal is simple, the most characterful robot wins.

Here’s the winner: Darwin, by jes1510.

Second and third place, after the jump. (Read more…)

If you haven’t heard of Woot.com, they’re famous on the internets for selling one single gadgety item at a gigantically discounted price for 24 hours every… 24 hours. Anyhoo, they also do the same sort of thing on a daily basis with booze and t-shirts, and today’s shirt just happens to have an accurate (but not to scale) map of Robot City imprinted on it. It comes in green, green, or green (with pretty pink robots) and can cover you up for a mere $10. Shipped. Not too shabby.

[ Shirt.Woot ]

It was inevitable, I suppose. Sooner or later, just about everything gets Hello Kittyified, and robots are no exception. iRobot Japan will be releasing a very limited edition (only 500) of Hello Kitty Roombas, to go on sale September 30 for about $810. I can’t quite tell what innards you get, but for that price, I should hope it’s one of the professional models.

Okay, are you ready for the obligatory Hello Kitty is evil and is going to kill us all joke? Yeah? Here it is: First the innocent iRobot household vacuums, then iRobot’s tactical division, and then the world! Bwa ha ha ha!

[ iRobot Japan ] VIA [ DVICE ]

Since iRobot hasn’t gotten around to releasing an autonomous robotic lawnmower yet, if you’re tired of crawling around the yard cutting grass with a pair of safety scissors (that’s the way to do it, right?) you might try your hand at building your very own autonomous mowing robot. The Swedes are making it easy for you with a complete lawbot kit, where you get pretty much everything you need for about $700 plus shipping. Here are the specs:

RoboCut is a BASIC Stamp powered robot. Two 12 volt motors with gearbox gives the two large drive wheels good traction and the robot can maneuver in very small areas.

Powersource is a NiMh accu-pack at 12V, 4.1 Ah. One motor gives the cutter disk a rpm of approx. 3500 rpm. A Basic STAMP 2 is the brain in the PCB mounted in the front of the Robocut. This PCB has the following features.

-Two-channel (right/left) Buried Wire Fence (BWF) detectors.
-Two-channel (right/left) active IR obstacle detection
-Two channel (right/left) drive motor control on/off, Forward/Rewerse
-One channel cutter-motor control on/off, MOS-FET 20 Amp
-Charging/accuvoltage measuring with high resolution
-Charger detection On/off
-Optional temperature sensor to check accupack temp during charging.
-prototype area
-prepared for optional “self-charging” and navigating to the charging station via an IR beacon

If it seems like some of those specs are a little bit open-ended, that’s the idea. The designers are hoping that you’ll teach your robot to mow better than they ever could. The whole thing is entirely, awesomely hackable, both in terms of software and hardware. Someone should take mod one of those titanium cutter bars and have a go at my weeds…

There’s a rather dull video after the jump where a Swedish guy explains what’s included in the kit. (Read more…)

It’s always nice to see innovative uses of military hardware designed to -gasp- help people for a change. The South African National Health Laboratory Service has been testing prototype UAVs designed to transport (or even airdrop) testing materials and medical supplies to communities that are otherwise impossible or nearly impossible to get to.

An approach was made by the NHLS to what was then Denel Aerospace Systems (now Denel Dynamics), with a view to the production of a prototype UAV, which NHLS specified should have autonomous takeoff (from an NHLS lab site) and GPS-directed navigation capability, with a payload capacity of 500g and the ability to deliver up to 12 standard-sized sputum jars containing specimen and sterilising fluid over a range of 40km, and to perform a precision autonomous landing at NHLS-defined GPS co-ordinates at the remote site (the rural clinic), where it should also be capable of return launch to base. This aircraft could be used for specimen transport, and is probably ideal for the delivery of urgently required, lifesaving therapeutic agents such as rabies-immune globulin, NHLS antivenoms, two units of whole blood, or critically needed medications…

It’s a pretty slick system, and is designed to work without much in the way of human supervision, even in lousy weather.

I’m especially excited to see these cool little military bots making their way into the civilian market… It just means I’ll be able to get myself one all the sooner. Yeah, one of these guys can’t exactly drop off a six-pack at my house, but I’m okay starting small, as long as I can end up with one of these.

[ NHLS ] VIA [ New Scientist ]