I’ve got some catching up to do on posts thanks to back-to-back events, travel, and lack of internet, so in the meantime, here’s a Roomba with a kitty on its back:

If you’re wondering what I’ve actually been spending my time doing, check out my coverage of the 2008 LA Auto Show (which took place these last few days) over on OhGizmo… I’ve got some galleries of eco cars, exotic cars, and concept cars, if you’re into that sort of thing. RoboDev coverage will be up over the weekend. I promise.

VIA [ Neatorama ]

I’m spending all day today at the RoboDevelopment Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, CA. Last year was all kinds of fun, so I have high hopes for this year. We’ll be seeing people and robots from Stanford, Festo, and Disney/Pixar, just to name a few. I’m not entirely sure what my posting schedule is gonna be like for the next day or so, since there may or may not be readily available wireless at the expo, and the next two days after that I’ll be in Los Angeles covering the 2008 LA Auto Show. In any case, I’ll be taking plenty of exclusive robot pics and vids, and I’ll stick them up here as quickly as I can get my hot little hands on some internets, so stay tuned!

[ RoboDevelopment 2008 ]

I guess that Hello Kitty special edition Roomba we saw back in September must have actually suckered in some poor hapless obsessive fans, because iRobot is kicking out another 400 unit special edition Roomba 530, this time with a WALL-E theme. As huge a fan as I am of WALL-E, I have to say, the $875 pricetag is just ludicrous. For $875, you could get yourself like four of the superior 535 models and have change left over. For that matter, you could buy one 535, and then commission Pixar itself to paint some WALL-E artwork on it and still probably come out ahead. If I haven’t convinced you how dumb of an idea it would be to buy one of these, you’ll find them at the Disney Store in the Tokyo Disney Resort on November 20th.

Incidentally, WALL-E comes out on DVD and Blu-Ray tomorrow. And if you didn’t catch the BURN-E vignette during the appx. 2 seconds that it was up here, you’ll be able to catch it on this DVD.

VIA [ Robot Watch (Translated) ]

This is one of those kinda lame YouTube videos where the credits are not only in the default white-on-blue Windows Movie Maker style, but they’re longer than the actual content of the clip. Oh well. My roommate just bought a Wii Fit, so I find the idea of using the balance pad to control soccer playing Lego Mindstorms robots far more appealing that the running in place and crap that the actual Wii Fit game suggests I do. This is just another step towards my fantasy of using the Wii Fit to control humanoid robots who will do all of the actual exercises for me. And then somehow, I’d get in shape. I’m just missing the middle bit that the ‘somehow’ refers to, but as soon as I get that figured out, I’ll be good to go.

VIA [ Wired ]

As a robot blogger, I feel it’s my duty to present you with cool and relevant robot news when I find it. So, that’s what I’m doing. Here it is, the short included on the WALL-E DVD that isn’t available until November 18th: BURN-E. But let me just say that I, for one, am waiting to see this on the DVD, because I don’t feel that a low quality video stream can do justice to the awesome teaser screenshots we saw and I don’t want to risk sullying my WALL-E experience even slightly. So, I have only verified that this video starts playing and that there are credits at the end. For all I know, the middle could be stuffed full of robot porn (don’t you wish).

Go on, watch the short. I’m going to sit over here in the corner with my eyes closed and my hands over my ears being secretly jealous.

[ Update- Well, what'd you expect, it got taken down... If you find another source, put it in the comments ]

[ Pre-Order WALL-E on Amazon ]
VIA [ Suicide Bots ]

Robot helicopters are neat little machines, but they’re just that: little. And purpose built, and expensive. Boeing had the bright idea of taking an off the shelf (so to speak) helicopter, the MH-6 Little Bird, and rigging it for both manned and unmanned (either remote or autonomous) operation. It’s suitable for combat, transport, resupply, or just about any other scenario. The coolest part is that the little bird can be controlled from the cockpit of an Apache attack helicopter, as sort of a reconnaissance drone.

FutureWeapons has the skinny:

[ MH/AH-6X ]

Keepon’s recent commercial release left us all a little bit depressed about his $30,000 price tag. GetRobo has an interview with Keepon’s developer, Hideki Kozima, where he discusses why the robot costs so much, talks a little bit about the history and uses of Keepon, and gives some hints about what might be in store for a less expensive, consumer version. Here’s a taste:

Q. After people heard about the news of Keepon being commercialized, some readers asked why the robot had to be so expensive. Why does Keepon Pro cost $30,000?

A. The short answer is the high cost of manufacturing in small volumes and the high-end electronic components that we use.

Since Keepon was initially developed as a tool to conduct psychological experiments to observe voluntary communication behaviors between children and the robot, safety was of paramount importance. Children will not only touch Keepon but they will hit it, sit on it, bite it, etc. The robot had to be safe and also resilient enough that it wouldn’t break easily.

…

In addition to manufacturing costs, we use miniaturized and high-quality components. Keepon has two CCD cameras made by ELMO that cost several thousand dollars each with optics, a high-end Sony microphone, and four actuators manufactured by Maxon of Switzerland that are several hundred dollars each.

So, to summarize, Keepon was initially developed as a tool for academic research and thus it required expensive components to conduct accurate experiments. When I first designed it in 2002, I never dreamed that it would be commercialized. It never occurred to me that people would want it until Marek posted a video on YouTube in spring of 2007.

Q. But you are planning on producing a cheaper version of Keepon.

A. Yes. Our first product, Keepon Pro (which has the same specifications as the original Keepon), costs $30,000. But we are committed to making a more inexpensive model. The newer version will not need the precision to conduct psychological experiments, so the goal is to streamline the manufacturing process without losing the original life-like movements and presence. We are designing a new mechanism from scratch. Customers such as schools for children with disabilities and elderly care facilities will be able to utilize it for their needs.

Click on through for the complete interview… If you’re interested in Keepon, it’s worth the read.

[ GetRobo ]

This isn’t news, per say, but I was just struck by this little blurb from Robots-Dreams, a robotics blog based in Japan:

The Aqua City shopping complex in Tokyo’s Odaiba district has to be one of the most confusing and poorly laid out buildings we’ve ever encountered, so it would seem to be a natural fit for an ‘information’ robot to give directions, point customers to the appropriate shops, and provide general security. Sure enough, we found this robot on the 3rd floor…

Maybe Lem is being facetious, I really wish I lived in a society where if I got lost somewhere, my first thought would be to go find the nearest assistance robot, and then hey presto, there’d actually be one there. Oh Japan, why must you be so much more awesome and robot-y than everywhere else? Sigh.

[ Robots-Dreams ]

Just in case you can’t find yourself a real cockroach for a pet (I know, it’s tough, the poor things are practically endangered), the Biomimetic Millisystems Lab at UC Berkeley has a robot RoACH (Robotic Autonomous Crawling Hexapod) that should make you just as happy. RoACH is the world’s smallest untethered legged robot, and it manages this by not using traditional joints or motors. The entire bot only has two degrees of freedom: thanks to a flexible polymer composite skeleton, it has legs that bend either forwards or backwards, in sets of two on one side and one on the other. By carefully controlling when the sets of legs are actuated, RoACH can move forwards or backwards or turn. Rather than motors, RoACH uses shape memory alloy wires as “muscles,” which allow it to move at up to one body length per second for nearly 10 minutes on an internal battery.

Currently in the works is a sub-$1000 “desktop factory” which will allow you to build as many Roachbots as you’d like with a 2D CAD program and the addition of a simple kit of electronic components. ROACHES FOR EVERYBODY!

[ UC Berkeley Biomimetic Millisystems Lab ]

So, obviously I’m mostly just posting this video for the entertainment value (I think it’s the glasses). This robot is designed to replicate human speech as realistically as possible, employing a 19 DoF vocal system which includes lungs, vocal cords, tongue, velum, jaw, and lips. He makes sounds in exactly the same way you do, by making slight adjustments to all of these organs as air moves over them… He’s just not very good at it, so far.

You might think that the idea here is for robots to be able to reproduce human speech without sounding quite so much like, you know, robots, but that’s actually almost the opposite of what Takanishi Lab is trying to do. Rather, they are trying to get the robot to reproduce human speech so that they can reduce it to mechanical movements, and build that into a cell phone, which would be capable of an extremely high degree of voice compression. I’m not sure how practical that actually is, but it sure is amusing to watch this robot try and figure out how to make it work.

[ Waseda Talker ]