Um, yeah.

Happy Friday, everybody.

VIA [ Suicide Bots ]

Last Friday, we posted about an experimental NASA robot made out of just one single axle. Unsurprisingly, this concept is already in use by SWAT teams and the military in the form of Recon Bot. The tiny little 1.2 pound, 7.4 inch robot is designed to be thrown into action, and can survive a 30 foot drop onto concrete or the equivalent amount of smashing through windows and stuff. There’s no on/off button, it’s actually got a pin that you pull before you throw it, just like a grenade. BADASS!

Recon Bot is operated via a handheld (only one hand is necessary) controller from up to 100 feet away through walls and doors, or 300 feet in the open. It transmits live video back to a 3.5 inch backlit screen on the controller, which incidentally is heavier than the robot itself. An optional IR system activates automatically if it’s dark out. It’s designed to be stealthy, too, with a matte black finish and whisper quiet operation.

250 or so Recon Bots are currently in service around the world, and if you want one, you can’t have the base model for $6000, or the night vision model for $3k more.

Another video, featuring Recon Scout being chucked all over the place, after the jump. (Read more…)

Before you judge the performance of this robotic head too harshly, just remember where the bottom of the uncanny valley really is. Yeah, this one is actually pretty good, huh? “Jules,” developed by researchers at the University of Bristol, creates facial expressions by watching human faces and then trying to match them. Jules has a video camera that watches humans, analyzes their facial structure 25 times per second, and then makes dynamic adjustments to 34 tiny servos underneath pliable skin to try to match the expressions as closely as possible. And it really does seem to work a lot better than simply programming a servo movement sequence for “smile.”

I think the key here is that the robot, by duplicating human expressions, may be able to account for important facial muscle motions that we don’t necessarily directly identify with a certain emotion. For example, we can usually recognize the difference between a sincere smile and an insincere one, but it’s sometimes hard to tell exactly what the physical difference is. And this is exactly what lands androids at the bottom of the uncanny valley: doing what humans do on paper, but not being human about it at all.

Despite Jules’ human-like expressions, he’s still a robot to the core… See a video of Jules justifying the destruction of humanity (and he’s got some good points), after the jump. (Read more…)

I’m sure most of you remember BigDog, Boston Dynamics’ pack-hauling robotic quadruped with the ability to walk around on ice while looking really, really funny. If not, allow me to refresh your memory with one of the most entertaining robotics videos I’ve ever seen:

DARPA, impressed with the BigDog prototype, has ordered up a new robot that I’m just going to go ahead and call BiggerDog. While BigDog can carry about 340 pounds for 13 miles, BiggerDog is going to have to carry upwards of 400 pounds for 20 miles over any and all terrain. It’s also going to have to sprint at 10 mph, carry enough fuel to last all day, operate in freezing cold and blistering heat, and be able to handle puddles and swamps and torrential downpours. And it’s going to have to get a heck of a lot quieter.

And, there’s more. DARPA also wants BiggerDog to be able to autonomously follow either GPS waypoints or a human, and respond to voice and gesture control. This all sounds pretty demanding, but the hardest part (getting a robot to walk on four legs over uneven terrain while carrying stuff) has been done already. Also, my guess is that DARPA wouldn’t ask for all of these specifics unless they were well within the realm of possibility. I can’t wait to see the result, especially if there are some icy surfaces and a few hefty kicks involved.

[ Boston Dynamics ] VIA [ Danger Room ]

The few humanoid robots able to transform into cars that we’ve seen (with the exception of this one) have generally been home built sorts of things, not intended for commercial distribution. If you’ve been hankering for something that can both walk and drive (and has blinky lights), the RCRC robot car should be able to fulfill your needs:

The RCRC features both sports car and truck modes, as well as a humanoid mode where it can “spin left and right, performing a dance as its LED lights shine.” That’s a feature, folks. You’ll get 30 solid minutes of joy before its battery goes dead, and then have to find some other way of filling 4 hours while it recharges itself. $89.95, from Hammacher-Schlemmawhatever.

[ Hammacher ] VIA [ Technabob ]

As per usual, Robots-Dreams has come through with some excellent video footage, this time from the 12th KondoCup Robot Soccer competition in Japan. These humanoid robots aren’t autonomous, of course, but some of the moves that they’re capable of are pretty remarkable and leave lesser robots writing on the ground, reflexively clutching their shin servos. They’re still not quite up to RoboCup’s goal of having an autonomous robot soccer team beat a world class human team by 2050, but I’d say they’re solidly on track.

VIA [ Robots-Dreams ]

The types of power supplies we’re used to here in the macro world don’t tend to scale down to nanosizes very well. YOU just try building a combustion engine that’ll work in the human blood stream. Even batteries and electric motors have some finite minimum sizes. When it comes to cell sized machines, our bodies have a bunch of clever solutions that researchers are trying to steal, not the least of which are nanobot engines based on sperm.

Why sperm? Well, sperm are energetic little guys. They can swim along at up to 3 mm per minute, which is pretty good considering they’re only about 50 nanometers long, and they’re powered by stuff called ATP, which they make all by themselves from simple sugars. It’s this ability to create and utilize energy that researchers are interested in. Sperm have a bunch of bendy twisty proteins attached to their tails that turn sugar (glucose) into ATP (which is what your body uses to store and release energy), and then get rid of the waste products. This efficient system (it’s called glycolysis) has been successfully duplicated on a chip, and researchers think that these little ATP power supplies could be used to run all kinds of things from propellers to medication pumps.

I’m sorely tempted to end this post with all kinds of inappropriate things, but I’m going to be mature about it and just say that I’m all for this kind of research. As long as they don’t waste any of them.

[ MSN ] VIA [ Suicide Bots ]

Listen: they’re called disposable razors because you’re supposed to dispose of them. If you don’t, you’ll go crazy and spend 800 hours cutting up 2,120 disposable razors and gluing them together to make a more or less functional 43 pound robot:

The Amazing Bickford was constructed in 1991 and 1992, and found a permanent home in 1994 at Ripley’s Believe It Or Not in Branson, Missouri. And I’m just going to leave it at that.

VIA [ Dark Roasted Blend ]

Aldebaran Robotics has released a new video of their little humanoid robot, Nao. Designed to be an entertainment robot for the entire family, Nao has all of the bells and whistles that you’d expect to find in a consumer humanoid, including limbs with 25 degrees of freedom, operable hands, stereo vision, voice recognition and synthesis, and a programmable Linux OS. Nao is programmable in either a graphic environment or a code environment, and is supposed to be appropriate for all ranges of skill. Besides adding software and behaviors, you can also customize Nao’s hardware, and swap out his head if he starts to piss you off.

By the end of 2009, you should be able to buy your own Nao, for somewhere between $15,000 and $16,000. Why would you pay so much money for a humanoid robot who’s only 23″ tall? ‘Cause he’s entertaining, that’s why. I mean, he recycles ducks. Doesn’t get much better than that.

[ Aldebaran Robotics' NAO ]

Thanks Andrew!

Helicopter parents are sooo twentieth century. What we need now are helicopter robots to look out for our precious little snowflakes. Helicopter robots with tentacles. And big frikkin’ GUNS. If enough people vote for this design, it’ll get made into a t-shirt, so let’s make it happen. Just not in yellow, please.

[ Kid Robot ] VIA [ Gizmodo ]