This seems like a fairly obvious move for industrial robotics, but ABB has paired a laser scanner with their industrial robots, allowing the robots to tell when a person has entered their zone of operation. The robots then slow to a safe movement speed, and if the person enters the danger zone too quickly, the robots stop completely. The idea is that this technology allows humans to work much more closely, and even interact, with industrial robots who otherwise have no way of telling if anyone is in their range of movement.

[ ABB SafeMove ]

Much of the time, human fashion models end up at the bottom of the Uncanny Valley. So it’s only fitting, I suppose, for there to be an android fashion model down there to keep the humans company and make them all seem a little bit more… Well… Human. The HRP-4C humanoid research and development robot is designed to emulate an average Japanese young woman, who I guess is just over 5 feet tall and weighs a scant 95 pounds. She’s got a battery that gives her a 20 minute runtime, and is able to walk, talk, and respond to voice commands. And from the sound of things, one of those voice commands is “look sultry:”

Oooooh baby.

VIA [ Robot Watch (Translated) ]

Sony may be trying to mix things up a little bit in the video game world by introducing a robot that would like to play a game with you. A physical robot, that is… A video game accessory, of sorts. Details are pretty scarce, but the patent (there’s not even a concept yet) does include a camera, a microphone, some kind of object detection, and a display. And in the picture from the patent, it’s got little wheely looking things.

We’ll have to see how Sony envisions the robot working with the game system… The problem might be that the user would have to split attention between the robot and the game, or if not, then you’ve got a potentially expensive peripheral sitting around most of the time.

As Kotaku points out, Nintendo already tried this kind of thing back in 1985 with a robot peripheral called R.O.B… More, after the jump. (Read more…)

Ron Tajima, the guy who wired up Pacmba last year, has had a baby, yay! So of course, the first thing he did (okay, maybe not the first thing) was hack his Roomba into a baby mover:

VIA [ GetRobo ]

Yes, that is absolutely a Flux capacitor, and my guess is that he needed the band-aid because he slipped and hit his head on his sink while standing on his toilet trying to hang a clock.

Not that robots need toilets or anything.

Relive the magic, after the jump. (Read more…)

Flickr user Photo David has a nice set of pictures of a miniature Wall-E figurine in a variety of adorable situations. I think you can get the entire set of figures at ThinkGeek. A couple more pics, after the jump. (Read more…)

We first saw these robotic carp back in September of 2007, when they were on display at the London Aquarium. They’re more than eye candy, though, and they’re finally getting a mission: detecting pollution off the coast of Spain. The fish will be equipped with chemical sensors, with which they’ll be able to home in on sources of pollution. After an eight hour shift, the fish will automatically swim back home to recharge and offload their data via WiFi.

Why fish? It’s the reason we have a biorobotics tag: if you have a specific application, chances are that evolution has already devised an optimum solution, and robot fish are no exception: “In using robotic fish we are building on a design created by hundreds of millions of years’ worth of evolution which is incredibly energy efficient. This efficiency is something we need to ensure that our pollution detection sensors can navigate in the underwater environment for hours on end.”

Each fish in the school of five is a meter and a half long and costs about $30k, which probably makes them impractical to replace my pet goldfish, Finny McFinnigan, whom I accidentally killed on Tuesday when I oversaturated his bowl with green dye and used beer.

Just kidding.

[ BMT Group ] VIA [ Loving The Machine ]

Am I the only one who couldn’t watch this Future Combat System promo piece with a straight face? Like, who actually writes dialogue like that? What I found most interesting, though, is as far as I know most of the robotic technologies are a lot less futuristic than the idea that there could be such seamless communication and interoperability going on. PackBots and FireScouts are already operational, and as far as unmanned ground cargo vehicles, the piddly one in the video has nothing on the Crusher UGV. Anyway, nice to know that our tax dollars are going to such a high quality production.

Incidentally, Firefox won’t let me access the Army’s Future Combat Systems webpage because of an invalid security certificate. Good to know they’ve got all that security stuff under control.

[ FCS ] VIA [ Danger Room ]

I don’t know what these particular tomato plants have done to deserve their own personal robot gardeners, but I hope that on whatever level tomato plants perceive the outside world, they realize how lucky they are. Each plant is equipped with a bunch of sensors, and through them, the plants can request water or nutrients, which are provided to them by some iRobot Create bases equipped with a robot arm and a watering pump.

Presumably, the plants can request anything else that they want, like more virtual sunlight or some pictures of pistils and stamens to keep themselves entertained. Don’t scoff, the robots are also programmed to masturbate pollinate the plants when necessary. Ultimately, the robots will even pick ripe tomatoes for you, but they stop just short of making you a delicious omelette.

Robots tending plants may seem like overkill considering that plans are generally fairly capable of taking care of themselves, but really, caring for plants (especially big fields of plants) is a lot of work. And, it’s fairly wasteful, since plants are treated as a group and may get more or less resources than they require to produce optimally. The vision is to create an entire networked greenhouse where individual plants ask for what they need and robots deliver it, which (if you don’t think too much about the cost of the robots) promises to be much more efficient than conventional agriculture.

[ CSAIL @ MIT ] VIA [ Physorg ]

Human robot interaction is one of the areas of robotics that is most critical to robots being accepted into society. At the moment, we’ve got robots that can do all kinds of cool stuff, but most of the cool stuff doesn’t work without a thirty seven channel remote control and a graduate degree. We want robots we can gesture at, talk to, and trust to behave in a reasonable and predictable manner even when we don’t give them explicit instructions on how to do that.

The Brown University Robotics Group has been able to teach a PackBot to respond to verbal commands, gestural commands, and is capable of following a human around. The robot has a depth imaging camera which is able to interpret both shapes and distances, enabling the robot to recognize gestures and the human giving the gesture by analyzing how the silhouette of the human changes. It can then correlate a particular silhouette with a particular human, and follow that human. The PackBot is very good at keeping a respectful distance, and also knows enough to back up if necessary.

All of these things may seem like relatively minor features, but they add up to a robot that responds to a much more intuitive control system than has generally been possible. It follows you around without you having to think about it or worry about it. If you need to leave it alone, you can leave it alone and it’ll wait for you. If you need it to do something, you can turn around and tell it, or you can gesture to it and it understands just as well. It’s all a little bit military-y at the moment (the lab was shockingly sponsored by DARPA), but I’m fairly sure it’s a modular system… You could just as easily get the PackBot to respond to, say, beckoning to get it to follow you.

This is really one of the biggest hurdles to consumer robotics: robots need to be easy to use. Why is the Roomba the only real consumer robot that you’re likely to find in someone’s house? It’s because you tell it what to do by pushing a button, and then you don’t have to think about it anymore. If service robots are going to break into our homes (figuratively, of course), they’re going to need to learn to act more like this PackBot: responding to what we say and gestures we make without the need for anything more complicated. It needs to be simple, it needs to be easy, and it needs to just work.

[ Press Release ] VIA [ Robot Living ]