A week or so ago, when writing about Trossen Robotics’ Hagetaka mech, we commented that “you don’t have to know much about servos to know that at nearly $300 each, [RX-64] servos are extraordinarily fast and powerful.” Trossen thoughtfully put together this little video illustrating just exactly how powerful a $300 servo is:

If you’d like to see 14 of these servos take on other, probably lesser mech robots in combat, be sure to come to RoboGames this June. Or if you can’t make it to San Francisco, don’t worry, we’ll be there to cover it in person, making sure to keep our fingertips well away from this monster’s nasty bits.

VIA [ Trossen ]

See this picture of Albert Einstein? Leave it up on your monitor and walk away. When you get far enough, it’ll change into a picture of Marilyn Monroe (click here for a video of this happening if you’re too lazy to get up). The trick to this is that there are two pictures there: one of Einstein in a high spatial frequency, and one of Marilyn in a low spatial frequency. Our brains tend to focus on high frequencies close up and low frequencies further away, which is why this picture morphs back and forth as your perceived distance from it changes… And the cool bit is that you can tell just about exactly when your brain switches from high frequency perception to low frequency perception.

So how is this related to robots? Well, robot vision is a messy business. Humans have the ability to look at a scene and intuitively separate relevant information from irrelevant information. Like, when you enter an unfamiliar room, you sort of get an overall impression of it, and then you can focus on specific details. Robots, on the other hand, generally have to look at all the details when confronted with an unfamiliar scene and then decide whether each one is relevant or not. Understanding how our brain makes the transition between high and low frequency information and how we’re able to visually interpret a scene may help us figure out how to make robots with more human (i.e. more efficient) vision systems.

More hybrid images can be found at MIT professor Aude Oliva’s website here.

[ MIT Museum ] VIA [ Wired ]

One day? It’s already happened!

VIA [ io9 ]

BotJunkie does not endorse Denny’s except between the hours of 11pm and 4am.

GeckoSystems’ CareBot mobile service robot is a semi-autonomous telepresence system designed for the elderly as an alternative to a nursing home. It’s pretty much just a way, way less slick version of an Anybots QA, except that it’s got a reasonably sophisticated AI under the hood. CareBot is capable of understanding spoken language, interpreting commands, making suggestions based on a known schedule, and even holding various levels of conversation.

Rumor has it that the price of the CareBot is comparable to, but still more than, the price of a small car. Unfortunately, as good of an idea as a CareBot may be, most consumers aren’t going to be willing to blow that much on a robot, preferring instead to opt for the more expensive and less convenient human caretaker.

This, in a nutshell, is kind of where the whole consumer robotics industry is stuck. Most of the time, it’s still faster, cheaper, and easier to have some kid mow your lawn (for example) than to blow hundreds or thousands of dollars on a robot that’s going to need some servo holding to get the job done. And until it becomes just as cheap and easy (or, ideally, cheaper and easier) to get a robot to do it than a human, robot industry growth is going to revolve around the jobs that are either too hard or too dangerous for humans to do at all. Which is great, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t really help robots get into your home to make your life easier. We’re still waiting for the killer app (so to speak) to get that to happen.

[ GeckoSystems ] VIA [ Gearlog ]

It’s that time of year again! Time to start getting PUMPED for the largest robot competition in the WORLD: RoboGames. Three days of mayhem, featuring 70 different events, from 340 pound R/C combat to autonomous micromice to 11 v 11 robot soccer. And more, so much more. RoboGames runs from June 12-14 at Fort Mason in San Francisco. Advance (i.e. discounted) tickets for RoboGames are already on sale, you can (and should) buy them here.

We had a little taste of some cool bots last night at the California Academy of Science, including some of our old favorites like OrbSwarm and Chapek. We’ve got a couple pics, after the jump. (Read more…)