Most of the world may not quite be ready to give up their infants to soulless robots, but Japan has no problem with it. And why should they? The Suima robotic crib lets you have your cake and eat it too, promising both you and your baby a full night’s sleep. Alright, perhaps that was not the most appropriate metaphor, but anyway… The crib listens to your infant, and if it hears crying, will start to swing itself back and forth every 1.8 seconds, approximating (they say) a parent’s heartbeat, until the infant falls back to sleep.

Looks like a pretty nice crib, but it’s not cheap: in Japan, you can rent the Suima crib for $100 a month or buy it for $5000ish. For that amount of money, you could quite easily (I’m pretty sure) set up an equivalent noise activated rocking mechanism by yourself.

[ Suima (Translated) ] VIA [ CrunchGear ]

AR and KAR are what you get if you take the University of Tokyo, Toyota, Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Sega, and Olympus, and tell them to get together and develop some home assistance robots. AR (stands for Assistant Robot) and KAR (Kitchen Assistant Robot) can get together and do the dishes and the laundry and sweep the floor. Although the functionality is pre-programmed, the robots can adapt to new objects and locations… For example, KAR can handle dishes it’s never seen before, and AR can find bits of laundry on its own, even if it’s never been in the room before. As with any badass robots that actually make life easier, commercial introduction is a decade or two away.

[ University of Tokyo ] VIA [ Physorg ]

Need to weird out someone special? In just six weeks, a Japanese company called Little Island can ship you a smaller and more robot-y version of yourself based on a picture you send them. The 40cm high robots include a 500 mHz computer running Windows XP on an 80 gig solid state disk, a webcam, a speaker, touch sensors, multiple servos, and a power cord and ethernet cord coming out of the butt. The computer powers voice recognition and speech synthesis software (which emulates your voice after you teach it), and the robot will read you RSS feeds or you can even make VOIP calls with it.

The whole setup will cost you about $2,215, and Little Island is currently “very interested” in overseas customers.

[ Little Island ] VIA [ Robots-Dreams ]

Looks like it’s steam week (or something) here on BotJunkie… After posting about EATR and the Strenco ST-2, commenter “D” reminded us of the Steamworks section of Crabfu‘s website. Among the multitude of steam powered tanks, walkers, rovers, centipedes, and just about everything else that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to be powered by toasted water is R2S2, a steam powered version of R2D2… Thanks to Robots-Dreams for the following video:

To make R2S2, Crabfu stripped the electronic guts out of a Hasbro R2D2 Interactive Droid and replaced them with a boiler and dual steam engines. The result is a radio controlled steam droid with 10 minutes of runtime and plenty of wood, brass, and leather seampunk accents.

There’s tons more steam driven bots on the Crabfu Steamworks website, and after the jump, take a look at an actual steam powered robot arm. (Read more…)

John from Society Of Robots was at the 2009 Singapore Robot Games last month, and has a bunch of awesome video footage of some of the events. The above video shows hexapod and quadraped line following races, and the video below is of some robo-soccer games:

After the jump, some line following racing robots that use rotating cams instead of wheels. (Read more…)

According to an article over at Wired, there’s some mixed news coming from Ugobe, makers of our favorite robot dinosaur. Unsurprisingly, Ugobe has been suffering due to the recent economic downturn recession, and they’re having trouble maintaining solid sales of their unquestionably adorable and unquestionably spendy robotic baby dino. About 100,000 Pleos have been sold, 60% in Europe and 30% in Asia and only 10% in the US… This sounds like a lot, but Ugobe has been forced to close its California offices and trim its workforce amidst a bunch of upper management resignations, and now is not the greatest time to be looking for new funding.

But all is far from lost, according to Ugobe president and COO Doug Swanson:

Ugobe still has a few robotic rabbits that it can pull out of its hat, says Swanson. The company is working on a pipeline of new products, including an update to the Pleo later this year. And the company has begun “very definite engineering moves” for a product that will come out in 2009, Swanson says.

“Not only are we alive but we are busy,” says Swanson.

I myself am not a Pleo owner. It’s an extremely innovative, responsive, and cute little robot… But it’s several hundred dollars, which is an amount of money that I can (and did) spend instead on a robot that vacuums for me. Pleo, for all its charms, doesn’t (to be blunt) do anything. And it’s not supposed to, it’s great at what it is. But at the moment, it’s kinda hard to justify paying what it costs for what it is. That said… If it helps keep Ugobe innovating and releasing new products, I might just have to buy one. I’m sure I won’t regret it.

Pleo is currently available at Amazon.com for $280.

[ Ugobe ] VIA [ Wired ]

Getting tired of your puny human arm? Now you can replace it with a new arm that is probably nowhere near as good but is much more robot-y. The Edge robotic arm kit from ThinkGeek does require about two hours worth of snap-together assembly, but once you’ve got it put together, you’ll have a robot grabber arm with five motors, five degrees of freedom, and a wired control panel with five controls on it. It rotates and bends all kinds of ways, can reach out 13 inches and up 15 inches, lifts up to 100 grams, and comes with an LED to illuminate what you’re trying to pick up. It’s only $50 at ThinkGeek.com

[ ThinkGeek ]

Don’t get me wrong, I think steam powered robots are way cool. But when we posted yesterday about the EATR robot that uses available biomass to power a steam generator, I kinda wondered about just exactly how practical it would be. You know, for a surveillance robot. After seeing this steam powered Strenco ST-2 robot in action (if you can call it that), let’s just say I’m still skeptical. Have a look:

The Strenco ST-2 has a boiler in the top half of his chest, and a firebox in the bottom half. You fill him up with water, put a fuel tablet in, light it up, wait a while, and then give him a push when he starts to boil. Like I said, way cool, but not so much for a surveillance bot. Only 300 Strenco ST-2s were built and there are only 9 left at the moment… It’s yours for just over $500.

[ Strenco ST-2 (Translated) ] VIA [ Geeky-Toys ]

When size is a factor, surveillance robots generally seem to fall into one of two categories: small enough to perform relevant tasks but still be portable, or absolutely as small as possible. Meso-scale is one step above the as small as possible MAVs, but significantly smaller than most conventional robots. The compromise is designed to allow for favorable scaling and low costs, and back in 1999 Stanford took a crack at developing a centimeter scale rotary surveillance platform called the Mesicopter.

Although part of Stanford’s funding came from DARPA, their conception for the Mesicopter was more for environmental surveillance than tactical surveillance. For example, swarms of these low cost and low weight robots would be ideal for collecting atmospheric data, or exploring Mars. The Mesicopter was designed to use a lithium ion battery with an energy density of 130 mWh/g, which would have given the prototype a flight time of 30 minutes. However, the propellers didn’t end up being quite efficient enough, and although the Mesicopter was able to lift itself using off-board power, it ultimately wasn’t strong enough to lift its own batteries.

Keep in mind, though, that this was ten years ago… I imagine that if someone were to try to make this work again they’d have a much easier time of it, due to increased power to weight ratios of motors as well as energy density increases of batteries. Of course, I also imagine that someone has done this already, they just can’t tell anyone about it or guys in black suits will come and take them away.

[ Stanford Mesicopter ] VIA [ Neatorama ]

Artist/typographer Jonathan Yule has taken that old standby, Helvetica, and transformed it into a “typographic illustration” of a robot. As far as I can tell, every component in the bot is made out of a different character or symbol. The shirt is available in red, charcoal, or cranberry for $25 from Chop Shop (the same guys who brought you this still awesome shirt).

[ Chop Shop ] VIA [ swissmiss ]

Thanks Andrew!