I don’t know what the deal is with French car companies and robot car commercials. Come to think of it, I don’t know what the deal is with the two robot gorilla things today, either. But I guess the combination works well enough for this Pugeot commercial… Or, you know, whatever.

[ Robots Dreams ]

As if your poor kids didn’t have enough toy robot dangers to be worried about, they have no way of escaping from the Prime-8 robot gorilla (::snork::), which is fast enough to run them down. The bipedal robot propels itself forward by rotating its two gigantic arms around at high speed, and according to its creators at Bossa Nova, “it can run as fast as a small child.” On grass, no less. This is supposed to be an excellent way for kids to get exercise, and I couldn’t agree more, especially if the Prime-8 comes with a chase mode and angry ape noises (no details on that). To defend yourself, you chuck balls at it until you hit it in the crotch. I’m not kidding, that’s one of the eight included games.

Prime-8 is partially autonomous, although you can control him with buttons on his body or a remote (thank god). It should go on sale for Christmas of this year for about $140.

VIA [ SlashGear ]

The world needs more giant robots. This is the philosophy of Jaimie Mantzel, who has taken it upon himself to create his own giant robot for the world to enjoy. His plans are to construct a 12 foot tall, 18 foot wide hexapod that a human can sit in and pilot. He has a working model, which you can see in the vid below:

This all seems like a little bit of a pipe dream, and it kinda is, since Jaimie is in desperate need of a bunch of pipe. He’s already put some serious work into the full size robot, though, and you can follow his progress on his website. And if you have any aluminum pipe laying around, Jaimie would really like to talk to you…

[ Jamius ] VIA [ Gear Live ]

Forget cybernetic slavery… It looks like robots are skipping the raping and pillaging and going straight for violence against children. This harmless looking robot toy from Bandai is responsible for 85 complaints and 14 actual injuries to children in Japan. Apparently, as the robot transforms into a tire, it grabs its owner’s fingers and crushes them in its knee joints. Harsh. Plus, you’ve paid about $70 for the privilege. But the scary part? There are 170,000 of these evil toys running around Japan right now, hungry for more appendages to sever.

Excuse me while I go put on my iron underpants.

VIA [ CrunchGear ]

Last April, we covered DARPA’s HI-MEMS hybrid/cyborg insect project, which uses electrical wires to control the nervous systems of insects and steer them around. Researchers at UC Berkeley have recently improved the system, and demonstrated a wireless insect control interface of a Rhinoceros beetle. They implanted a module with six neural electrodes into the beetles when they were still in the pupae stage, and so the beetles mature, they have the electronics already embedded into their bodies. At that point, a battery pack and receiver are added, and by sending radio signals, the beetle can be made to take off, land, fly forwards and backwards, and steer left and right.

The entire electronics package (including the battery) weighs only 1.3 grams. Since the Rhinoceros beetle can lift about 3 grams, that’s a substantial amount of leftover payload capacity, good for small sensors, a camera, a microphone, or how about a couple MAVs? Researchers have already successfully developed remote controllable sharks, rats, and pigeons, but insects are much more relevant for reconnaissance work due to their familiarity and small size. Well, maybe not the Rhinoceros beetle specifically, but you get the concept.

Ultimately, the goal of this research is to use the insect’s own sensors (eyes and such) to collect data, while extracting energy from the insect itself.

[ Maharbiz Research Group ] VIA [ Tech-On ]

These fantastical robots are the creation of University of Tokyo professor and graphic artist Yoichiro Kawaguchi. They’re inspired by primitive forms of life, and are designed to explore “how living things survive in a world governed by the law of the jungle.”

As cool as these robots look, somehow they’re going to be turned into actual working versions of themselves (complete with moving tentacles and eyes that react to external stimuli) in two or three years. A few more colorful picture, after the jump. (Read more…)

Stanford’s STAIR (STanford AI Robot) is a couple years old, but it’s a good illustration of where home and workplace robotics should be (not necessarily is, but should be) heading. STAIR can interpret relatively ambiguous vocal commands, navigate around unfamiliar environments and objects, and reason to a limited extent. It has a sensor suite and a manipulator arm, and is designed to be an easy to use multitasking robot. In the video below, for example, STAIR is told to go get a stapler. It has to interpret a verbal command, navigate around a complex environment, find the stapler, figure out how to pick it up, and then bring it back:

STAIR is designed to be able to do all kinds of things, including doing the dishes, tidying up rooms, assembling IKEA furniture, and even cooking simple meals (although it’s obviously not there yet). This multitasking ability is a significant break from where most home robotics products have been trending lately… You buy one robot to vacuum the floor, one (or two) robots to mow the lawn, and one robot to clean the gutters. These are just examples, and I’m not necessarily suggesting that someone invents a Roombowerj (how cool would that be?), but having one robot that does everything you ask of it certainly seems to be where the future of home robotics lies.

[ STAIR ] VIA [ Robot Living ]

Last year we met Elbot, winner of the 2008 Loebner Prize for successfully convincing three of twelve humans into thinking it was human by chatting with them. Chatting isn’t the only way to test the humanness of software, though, and 2K Games Australia decided to see if bots playing Unreal Tournament could fool human players into thinking that they were getting pwned (or not) by other humans.

The test was simple: a judge played a game of Unreal Tournament 2K over a network versus two other players, which were either moderately skilled humans or bots or one of each. After each game, the judge was asked which opponents were human, and which weren’t. There were some rules going in, like bots weren’t told what maps they were on, where weapons and stuff were located, or even the characteristics of each weapon (the weapons were modified for these matches). The bots had to learn the map, and learn which weapons to use when:

Some of these changes are made to require bots to learn something about the game, as a human can do, rather than simply following predefined scripts. Of course, it’s not necessary for this learning to be perfect! The competition is about making the bot appear human, not about making the bot play perfectly.

In the end, the most successful bot was AMIS, from Charles University in Prague, which was able to fool 2 out of 5 judges into thinking it was a human player. It had a “humanness” rating of 2.4 out of 5, while the least human human was rated 2.6.

Oh, and in the video above, 959 was a human while 228 was a bot. Were you fooled?

[ Botprize.org ] VIA [ KurzweilAI ]

Scientists in Switzerland are using a sweating robot to help them develop athletic clothing that dries quickly, even in cold weather. The robot, named SAM (sweating agile mannequin), has 125 “sweat nozzles” distributed over his head and body. His skin is heated up to body temperature (through hot water circulation via his face, it looks like) and he’s made to move around while sweating, which provides a consistent basis to measure the performance of different synthetic fibers under different conditions. No word on what, exactly, comes out of the “sweat nozzles,” but please keep it far away from me.

Here’s a video… Sorry for the annoying ad. And the sound. I blame Reuters.

VIA [ Daily Mail ]

There aren’t a lot of details available on this, but Boeing has successfully tested a vehicle-portable laser system designed to destroy UAVs. The Laser Avenger was able to track and destroy three UAVs from an operationally significant (but unspecified) range, by burning a hole (over an unspecified period of time) in “a critical flight control element of the UAV, rendering the aircraft unflyable.” So, it sounds like this laser, which is probably a couple kilowatts, isn’t exactly vaporizing the UAVs on contact. But the big advantage is that the laser beam is invisible, so there’s no way to track the destruction of a UAV back to the Avenger platform.

Boeing says that UAVs are posing an increasing threat (whether direct or indirect) to US troops, which will make the Laser Avenger relevant in the near future. I hate to say it, but I think they’ve got a point. UAVs are by far the cheapest and safest way to monitor territory, and a bunch of other countries have sophisticated UAV recon systems of their own. It’s not that big of a step to put some basic but effective armament on these platforms (as we proved with the armed Predators), but even the unarmed drones are assets that military powers take, and deal with, quite seriously.

[ Boeing Press Release ] VIA [ GoRobotics ]