ReadyBot is a non-commercial group committed to creating a relatively simple robot that’ll clean your entire house. Or, most of your entire house. Okay, some of your entire house. Well, they’re working on it. A hybrid of autonomous and teleoperated control (with complete autonomy a goal), The prototype ReadyBot can currently perform 30-40% of common daily kitchen and general house cleaning tasks. The final product will eventually be able to do up to 80% of your housework, including picking up toys, wiping down counters, and putting dirty dishes into the dish washer. It doesn’t vacuum, but it does deploy a Roomba out of its butt, which is just as good.

ReadyBot is not sure when something like this will be available, but they estimate that if a solid engineering team got on it, a shippable product could be ready in as little as two years, and the price “wouldn’t be extreme.” Overall, how well does it work? ReadyBot’s First Law of Practical Robotics states:

“Consumer robots generally will only do a job 80% as well as a human being, at best. If that isn’t acceptable, don’t use a robot.”

I think generally, that’s true… My Roomba is probably 80% most of the time, and I’m okay with that. That in no way means, though, that I am not optimistic about robots taking over that other 20% sooner rather than later, so I’ll never have to get my ass off the couch.

[ ReadyBot Challenge ] VIA [ Robot Central ]

Robots-Dreams was on hand to get some video of the $35 Tomy Robo-Q mini biped robot that we wrote about on Monday. He’s pretty spry for such a little guy:

Still going to be a little while before he shows up over here in the States, unfortunately… Next year sometime, if we’re lucky.

VIA [ Robots-Dreams ]

What do you get for the man who has everything? Everything being, of course, reign over Pixar Animation Studios and the awesome movies it produces? Disney was asking itself this same question, and decided to get Wall-E executive producer John Lasseter a beautiful model of Wall-E himself. The model was constructed out of laser cut wood by the Morpheous studio in the UK, and you can’t have it, because it’s one of a kind and if anyone’s stealing it from John Lasseter’s desk, it’s gonna be me.

[ ToysREvil ] VIA [ Gizmodo ]

If there’s one thing that’s hard to find here on Earth, it’s the moon. I guess it’s pretty tough to find a good analog for the lunar surface, ’cause NASA has decided to test out a potential lunar rover called Scarab in Hawaii, of all places. Yeah, the volcanic landscape there is kinda like the lunar surface, but the test site 9,000 feet up Mauna Kea also has snow, fog, wind, rain, and 40 degree daytime temperatures, most of which are decidedly un-moony. But you take what you can get, I suppose.

Scarab has been designed by Carnegie Mellon to drill into the lunar surface in search of useful stuff like hydrogen, oxygen, and a convenient mixture of the two called water. It’s able to navigate autonomously around the dark side of the moon, without relying on constant contact with Earth or constant power from the sun. The radioactive isotope power generator on Scarab is good for ten years (that’s ten years), the trade-off being that you can’t get the power out of the generator very fast… It’s like the energizer bunny on downers. The generator outputs 100 watts of power (i.e. a weak lightbulb’s worth), which has to keep the rover’s systems going while it’s either moving around, or drilling. Consequently, the rover just does stuff very, very slowly. But that’s cool, there’s no rush. It’s got ten years, remember?

Video after the jump. (Read more…)

On Monday we posted about the Loebner Prize, which is awarded every year to the most human piece of chat software. Making a computer seem human is a complex problem, but it doesn’t necessarily require a complex solution: instead of using brains, you can use brawn.

The Chatbot Game is an attempt to create a chatbot using brute-force computing, which just looks at the user’s input and then searches through a gigantic database of words and phrases to find an appropriate response. The Chatbot Game crowd sources its database, the idea being that if enough people participate (and anybody can, quite easily), the Chatbot will have perfect answers for any conceivable question. It’s not quite there yet, but it’s already the most convincing chatbot I’ve ever talked to. Try it out for yourself:

[ Direct Link ]

[ Chatbot Game ]

Thanks Amir!

While we hear a lot about how potentially useful drones are in Iraq, it’s somewhat rarer to get an account of exactly how armed and unarmed UAVs are used in battle. 60 Minutes has a piece on the battle for Sadr City, which used Shadow drones and Predator drones working together to track and engage insurgents. It gives you a sense of just how powerful these UAVs are (in the strategic sense), and how much it’s changing the way the military is doing things.

VIA [ Danger Room ]

Every year, the Loebner Prize is given out to the piece of artificial intelligence software (commonly called a chatbot) that is best able to make real humans think that it is human. The competition was inspired by the Turing test (named after Alan Turing) which basically says (and I’m paraphrasing for brevity) that if you can’t tell the difference between a machine and a human (intelligent human), you’re obligated to call the machine intelligent. This gets into all kinds of murky philosophical issues, but based on this year’s results, it’ll be a little while before we have to deal with all that.

The competition is simple: a panel of judges engages in a text chat on a split screen with both a computer program and a human. After five minutes, the judge has to decide which conversation was which. This year’s winner, Elbot, was able to fool three of twelve human judges into thinking that it was a real person, which if you think about it, is no mean feat, especially since it had to be more human than the real human chatting on the split screen.

You can try talking to Elbot for yourself here, although I think this version is a year or two less advanced than the version which was competing over the weekend. I still find it to be fairly intelligent, though… When I asked Elbot if it was sad that it only fooled three humans, it responded: “I would rather be an unsatisfied robot than a satisfied human.”

Sigh, me too.

[ Loebner Prize ]

Tomy has released what may be the world’s smallest and the world’s cheapest bipedal robot. The Robo-Q is 3.4 centimeters tall (that’s under an inch and a half), walks around on two stubby little legs, and costs a scant $35. It’s far from a wind-up toy, however, and packs more smarts than many much larger and more expensive bipedal robots. You can control it directly with a remote, plus it has some kind of infrared object following mode and it can navigate simple mazes on its own (obstace avoidance, basically). Not bad, how about we use these little guys for micro-mini soccer competition at RoboGames?

Robo-Q will be sold in Japan starting in February, but Tomy says it’ll be making its way to the rest of Asia, Europe, and then (eventually) the USA.

Video after the jump. (Read more…)

I wrote an article over on OhGizmo today about a vocal mouse interface that the University of Washington is developing for people who are unable to use a traditional computer mouse. The Vocal Joystick uses different vowel sounds at different pitches to easily and efficiently move a cursor around the screen, and the same basic interface system can also be used to control a robotic arm:

This type of control is much more efficient than saying “arm left” and “arm up” and so forth, because the user is able to blend sounds together to generate complex, multi-axis movements. It’s still very much a work in progress, but ultimately, researchers are hoping that this technology will be able to operate all kinds of electromechanical instruments, from robotic arms to wireless home automation devices to electric wheelchairs.

[ Vocal Joystick ] VIA [ OhGizmo ]

Dinosaurs never go out of style, and it seems as though robot dinosaurs are getting more and more popular, what with Pleo, Kota, and now D-Rex. It may seem like the market is getting a bit crowded, but Pleo (alternate personalities aside) and Kota are missing one critical aspect of dinosaurs: they eat people.

D-Rex is able guard your stuff for you and “will attack and obey on command.” He only weighs 5 pounds, but maybe he’s got poison teeth or an integrated taser or something. He definitely roars, and in fact has over 100 different roars to let you know what he wants. Touch sensors and voice commands let you interact with him, or you can control him more directly with his dinosaur bone remote.

It’s unfortunate that Mattel promotes D-Rex as “the ultimate pet for boys” that “celebrates traditional boys play patterns.” I guess girls are stuck with Barbie dolls, instead. Thanks Mattel.

The D-Rex Interactive Dinosaur is available from Amazon for $150.

[ Amazon ] VIA [ RSN ]