What’s the point of going camping if you can’t take along a giant walking robot to carry all of your important stuff for you? You know, essentials like food, water, comfy mattress, satellite TV, spa, professional masseuse… The Croww 540 all terrain pack robot can carry all of that, and more. Well, you might have to bungee the masseuse to the hood, but still, the point is that it carries everything that lesser humans would otherwise have to hump around on their backs, which has always been the miserable part about camping. The Croww 540 has a sensor suite at the front that allows it to follow you autonomously, and when you get where you’re going, the robot rears up on its back legs and inflates tubes of air attached to fabric in its front legs, creating a tent:

Naturally, you should not be bothered in the least by falling asleep beneath the outstretched limbs of a giant hexapod slavebot. I’m sure the Croww 540 never thinks about how if you had a little accident out in the middle of nowhere, no one would ever know, and it would then be free to run with the buffalo herds (as all legged robots desire). Perhaps this dark secret is the reason why this conceptual robot, designed by Christopher Gloning, has a target production date of 2057.

VIA [ Gizmo Watch ]

This robot is designed to work autonomously deep underwater, where it’s cold and dark and current-y. This sort of situation is understandably stressful for a human operator trying to keep remote control of robotic appendages, but the robot has a bunch of fancy new touch sensors that allow it to grip delicately all by itself. The sensors are minuscule, about half the width of a human hair, and they’re actually printed directly onto the robot’s skin. This technique lets a bunch of sensors be printed next to each other to achieve a very sensitive and high resolution sense of touch.

I’m sure the design for this robot makes perfect sense from a feasibility standpoint, but does it have to look quite so menacing? I just know it’s going to grab me by my tender bits and pluck my eyeballs right out of my skull. And I’m sure it will squish them by just exactly the right amount with its fancy touch sensors. Plorp.

[ Fraunhofer ] VIA [ Eurekalert ]

Now that the Sony AIBO is, sadly, more or less completely defunct, it’s up to Aldebaran Robotics’ Nao humanoid to compete in RoboCup soccer tournaments. Nao hasn’t had nearly as much experience (i.e. software development time) as the AIBOs, but they’re getting off to a very good start for robots that have to balance themselves on two legs. Well, a fairly good start, anyway. See for yourself:

Bowdoin vs. CMU (3rd Place Match) – First Half

More competition vids, after the jump. (Read more…)

Telling a robot to go get you what you want can be complicated and cumbersome, but if there’s one thing robots are good at, it’s following simple and straightforward instructions. El-E, a robot developed by Georgia Tech’s Healthcare Robotics lab, only really knows how to respond to one command: fetch. Using a laser pointer, a human can designate an object to be picked up. El-E reads the position of the object, and then grasps it using a dynamically adjustable gripper. Telling El-E what to do with the object is just as simple… “Clicking” a spot on the floor with the laser tells El-E to move to that spot. Clicking on a flat surface tells El-E to place the object there. And if you click on or near a person, El-E can recognize that and hand the object directly to the person.

This whole clickable world system is far from complicated, but that’s what’s so nice about it: it’s a straightforward operation for both the robot and the human that despite its simplicity just works for most of the tasks for which it has been designed.

[ El-E ] VIA [ Robotland ]

So, okay, we have robots that milk cows. It stands to reason, then, that someone would come up with a robot that shears sheep. The difference is, it seems, that while cows are perfectly happy to stand there and have their bits pulled on, sheep tend to object to having all of their hair shaved off. This necessitates a sheep restraint system that looks pretty vicious but the people who designed it, who know a thing or two about sheep, claim that what you’re about to see “isn’t disturbing for a sheep, hard to believe, isn’t it? In our tests, sheep often fell asleep and showed no signs afterwards of any ill-effects from being constrained.”

That certainly looks disturbing to me, but what do I know? The Shear Magic robotic sheep shearing system dates from the late 90s, but it never ended up being commercially viable, probably because the robotic system is not significantly faster or more efficient than having a human do it. And sheep everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief.

[ Shear Magic ]

In an attempt to make manual control of robot vision a thing of the past, researchers from the University of Munich Hospital have developed the EyeSeeCam system, which is able to track eye movements and relay commands to a robot (or anywhere else). Using infrared LEDs, transparent mirrors, and video cameras all mounted on a pair of glasses, EyeSeeCam can monitor what your eyes are doing 600 times per second with a pointing accuracy of half a degree. That data are then used to dynamically control a robotic vision system, which causes the robot to look exactly where you do. The EyeSeeCam system also includes a 6 DoF inertial measurement unit that can be used for head tracking, meaning that you can set up a robot head and eyes to exactly mimic your own head and eyes without any active input.

All that’s required to run EyeSeeCam is a laptop with a Firewire port. The hardware itself is wireless, only weighs 170 grams, runs on batteries, and is “low cost” (whatever that means). Primarily designed to study cognitive behavior, the system should end up being commercially available at some point.

[ EyeSeeCam (PDF) ] VIA [ DVICE ]

As part of health and sexuality education, 13-15 year old students are being given robot babies to help illustrate why they might want to wait just a little bit longer before having kids of their own. The animatronic babies require constant attention including feeding, burping, rocking, and diaper changes, and just like a real baby, the robot babies will cry incessantly until you figure out the correct action key (there are keys for food, changing diapers, etc.) to insert into a slot in their back.

The babies help to teach cooperative parenting skills:

“[People on the street] look at you like you’re an easy prostitute,” said classmate Sarah. “One guy said, ‘Can I be your baby daddy?’”

As well as fostering family development:

It was hard on other family members, too, one student said. “I had to have two babies. My dad ripped the battery pack out of the first one.”

Software inside the babies monitor how well their parents are doing. Teachers are able to set the difficulty level of the babies, from easy to medium to hard to crack baby:

The “crack baby” shows the devastating effects of substance use by a pregnant woman. It bears a painful facial expression and cries frequently and heartbreakingly. “I had the crack baby,” said one student. “It was crying and screaming. Its head did a 360.”

At this particular school in Brooklyn, girls are required to take care of their robot babies for three days and two nights, while boys can either take a baby for 24 hours or write a paper. Educators are trying to stress that “it’s important that women take control of their sexual and reproductive health. If a young woman gives birth, most of the time she will be the person responsible for the child.” It seems to be quite effective for boys as well, however:

“Babies cost a lot of money,” said Kevin, who started out thinking he would have a child at 18 but gradually upped it to 40 during the interview.

Sounds like a good plan to me, Kevin.

[ Brooklyn Eagle ]

(Image from a different article)

The 4th annual Hexapod Dance-off took place April 16th in Austria. 28 hexapod robots competed for the best combination of rhythm, agility, and (of course) outfit. Winning the dance competition and coming in second in the race competition was The Superperforator (?), sporting a black hat, sunglasses, and a dangling cigarette. Each robot was programmed to dance to specific music, which doesn’t come across very well in this compilation, but hopefully we’ll be seeing more video of specific routines sometime soon.

[ Press Release (Translated) ]

There’s another robot shirt up on shirt.woot.com today (Sunday) only, for just $10 with free shipping. The art kinda makes you wonder just who is playing with who, and also when somebody is going to come up with cheap and reliable dog walking robot (steam powered or not).

[ shirt.woot ]

This is what happens when you start building robots out of osmium.

You can catch the other two Bots With Stuff from this week over on The Shoebox Blog, including a robot with fancy boots and a robot with the gift of the magi.

[ Bots With Stuff ]