Want to know where the rest of the athlete is? That there robot ATE IT FOR FUEL. Yummmmm.

As always, you can catch the other two Bots With Stuff from last week over on The Shoebox Blog, including a robot with a hydraulic pump in a box (!), and a robot with the dark mark.

[ Bots With Stuff ]

We posted about the EATR robot back in February, but it’s been making the rounds recently and a few new details have emerged. We joked a little about Soylent Green in our post, but a whole bunch of people (including, unsurprisingly, Fox News) fixated on the fact that EATR can ingest any biomass, including OMG DEAD BODIES.

Also unsurprisingly, EATR’s designers at Robotic Technology immediately clarified the situation by issuing this press release:

“RTI’s patent pending robotic system will be able to find, ingest and extract energy from biomass in the environment. Despite the far-reaching reports that this includes “human bodies,” the public can be assured that the engine Cyclone (Cyclone Power Technologies Inc.) has developed to power the EATR runs on fuel no scarier than twigs, grass clippings and wood chips — small, plant-based items for which RTI’s robotic technology is designed to forage. Desecration of the dead is a war crime under Article 15 of the Geneva Conventions, and is certainly not something sanctioned by DARPA, Cyclone or RTI.”

“We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission,” stated Harry Schoell, Cyclone’s CEO. “We are focused on demonstrating that our engines can create usable, green power from plentiful, renewable plant matter. The commercial applications alone for this earth-friendly energy solution are enormous.”

Robots eating dead bodies is against the Geneva Conventions, huh? Good to know! We’ve got some more specifics, too, including the fact that for every pound and a half of biomass that EATR ingests, it can go one mile, which means that EATR could drive nearly a hundred miles on one meal of me. Oops, right, it’s a vegetarian, never mind.

EATR will be programmed to seek out more appropriate sources of food, and should be able to keep itself going indefinitely in a suitable environment. As a modular self-sustaining platform it’s good for just about anything, from long duration surveillance to something a little more, you know, tactically significant.

[ Robotic Technology EATR ] VIA [ Fox News ]

Now that we’ve been around for two years and a thousand posts, we can at least pretend that we’ve got some credibility when it comes to writing about robots. With that in mind, it’s high time that we came up with a collective noun for a group of robots. What’s a collective noun? Well, for example, you can have a herd of elephants. Or a colony of bats. You can also have a business of ferrets, a shrewdness of apes, a crash of rhinos, an ostentation of peacocks, or a murder of crows.

But there’s no such term for a group of robots, so we need to come up with something good. Something appropriately robot-y. In the past, by way of example, I’ve suggested an “autonomy” of robots, but I’m sure you can do better. And if you can, you can win stuff:

Our grand prize is a VEXplorer kit from Trossen Robotics. The VEXplorer is easy to build and customize, and includes a gripper arm and a camera that can broadcast images and sound back to your TV.

The runner up gets a WowWee TriBot. This is the big one, not the little one, and it comes with a tilt sensitive remote, guard function, homing function, and a bunch of games.

We’ll also be awarding some glow in the dark weRobot t-shirts from Chop Shop, featuring a ___ of 51 robots. These shirts are brand new, and feature a couple robots not seen on the original version. And did I mention that the robots have glow in the dark bits?

Here are the rules:

How do I enter? Leave a comment that includes “a ___ of robots” and fill in the blank with the most creative/appropriate collective noun of your choice. Keep it work safe. You may enter more than one collective noun but no more than three (we’ll be checking), but each comment can only have one entry, so keep them separate. If two different people enter the same collective noun, only the first one to post the comment will count.

Who can enter? Anyone. You don’t have to be a US resident or anything like that.

Who wins? This is not a random contest: if you enter something lame, it’s probably not going to win, unless it’s really funny. We have a panel of eminently qualified judges, including David Calkins (founder of RoboGames), Lem Fugitt (from Robots Dreams, a most excellent robot blog), and Steve Rainwater, founding editor of Robots.net. Each judge will pick their personal favorite entry, which will win a weRobots shirt, and we’ll come to a consensus on the overall winners.

When does it end? The contest will run one week, and commenting on this post will be closed sometime after midnight next Thursday night. We’ll announce the winner the following Monday.

Special thanks to Trossen Robotics and Chop Shop for sponsoring this contest; you should go buy their awesome robots/shirts even if you don’t win. But you’ll win. If you’re in need of inspiration, here’s a place to start. Good luck!

We’ve closed the contest, and we should have winners for you on Monday.

A thousand posts. A thousand posts. Since Saturday July 28 2007 at 3:32 pm, we’ve been bringing you the very latest news and happenings from the existing (and emerging) robot world with, I’d like to think, some not insignificant amount of success. It’s been awesome, and it’s only going to get more awesome… Here’s to the next 1,000 10,000 posts.

In celebration (or something) of our last two years here on BotJunkie, I’ve put together a little retrospective with ten posts from the BotJunkie archives on some of my favorite topics, with hints on what we might be able to expect (or hope for) from robotics over the next few years:

LittleDog Navigates Ruff Terrain – With nearly half a million views on our YouTube channel, this video is the second most popular one we’ve posted (after the robot zombie chair), but I have a soft spot for this little guy, especially since we later met his big brother. Walking is still a difficult thing for robots, and walking over variable terrain while getting kicked in the ribs is an impressive feat for robots and humans. Two legged walking is a different matter entirely, of course, but it won’t be long before BigDog‘s reflexes appear in humanoids.

Robot Is In Ur Kitchen, Deconstructin’ Ur Omelettes – Typically, robots are taught how to do things by translating specific actions into code, and programming the code into the robot. This is, to put it mildly, rather tedious, and makes it difficult for the robot to adapt to new situations that it has no preprogrammed instructions for. A much more effective method is to program a robot to learn by itself (though trial and error) or directly from humans. These skills are going to be of critical importance when it comes to getting robots into our homes, which is what everyone agrees is the next big robot market to crack.

SRI’s Wall Bot Sticks With Static – Robots benefit from virtually unlimited possibilities when it comes to locomotion, and even if you just take a very specific application (like climbing walls), people have come up with all kinds of different ways to make it happen. Besides static sticking, we’ve seen robots that use claws, suction cups, sticky feet, grippers, vacuums, elastomer treads… Not to mention things like robot snakes that are able to do a fair amount of climbing on their own. And that’s just climbing robots; the list of innovative ways of getting robots to move themselves goes from robots that roll to robots with wheel legs to robots that roller skate, and many many more.

Cyborg Insects Off The Drawing Board, Into The Air – As many advantages as robots offer, in most cases, biological systems (with evolution behind them) still have robots whipped, especially when it comes to tasks requiring complex structures in small sizes. Cyborgs try to blend the best of both worlds by using robotics in concert with biology, and the amount of success that has been had in this field in just the last few years has been remarkable, especially when it comes to insects.

Hyper Robot Drummer Can’t Stop Drumming – Robots don’t have to practical. Sometimes, the very fact that they’re not at all practical makes them endlessly entertaining, and the Little Yellow Drum Machine is a perfect example of this, as are CrabFu’s SwashBots and the dancing hexapods. It’s always a lot of fun to see what’s possible when humans with imagination (and some know-how) can get robots to do, and as components get cheaper and more sophisticated and more readily available, the possibilities for useless (but awesome) creativity expand.

ABB FlexPicker Robot Scares The Croissants Out Of Me – A lot of effort goes into making robots seem like humans, but robots are arguably most effective when they take what humans do, and do it as a robot does, without any pretense of humanity. It’s startling just how much better robots are at doing specific tasks: they are much faster, much more accurate, and they never complain or get tired or go on strike. It makes me wonder how long it’s going to be before robots steal all of our jobs.

Your Dog Wants A Robotic Tennis Ball Slingshot – To me, what is heralding the age of robots that we’re on the verge of entering is the fact that some guy who got tired of throwing a tennis ball for his dog just went and built a robot to do it for him. We’ve written about many different examples of this sort of thing, but the essence of the idea is that robots are becoming easier and more accessible to everyone, and if you wish you had a robot to do something for you, it’s getting to the point where (with some basic knowledge) you can build yourself one.

Swarms Of Cute Little Bots Solve Big Problems – While building bigger and more complex robots is certainly one approach to completing tasks and solving problems, a (potentially) cheaper, more efficient, and more robust way is to just use swarms of smaller, versatile, modular little bots. What one bot can’t do by itself, a whole bunch of them can, including banding together to move objects much larger than themselves. It’s a whole different philosophy to robotics that emphasizes communication, teamwork, and adaptability, and it may be the future of everything from search and rescue robotics to military robotics.

Bittersweet Video: Robot Gets Destroyed By IED – We post a lot about robot concepts and robotics research, but robots are on the job right now, and not just in factories: PackBots like Scooby Doo are doing the things that are too dangerous for humans to do, and this video reminds us why, as we’ve been reminded before… Bots get killed, but they’re more replaceable than humans. We followed up with some poignant posts about the relationships that soldiers can form with their robots, and what happened to Scooby Doo.

Most Awesomest Robot Dance Video EVAR! – No surprises here: BotJunkie loooooves Keepon. But it’s not simply because he’s cute and knows how to dance… With the dangers of the Uncanny Valley swallowing many robots, Keepon is able to achieve an impressive level of personality with barely any physical features and only a few motions. It’s going to be a while (if ever) until real humans will be comfortable interacting with robots that look almost, but not quite, like humans. And until then, Keepon, along with his wild cousin, is an excellent example of how making a robot that people want to interact with like human doesn’t have to be like a human at all.

There were a couple more posts that almost made it onto this list, but didn’t… They’re our two most controversial posts, after the jump. (Read more…)

Willow Garage’s PR2 robot has a pretty good idea of how to plug itself in if it needs recharging, but what if it can’t find an outlet, or it needs some additional help? This concept animation (which includes mechanical movements that the current version of PR2 can’t execute) explores some of the potential for the robot to express what it wants to a human using physical motion, and what they’ve got demoed here totally works on me in a way that a flashing “charge me” light never could. I might even call it Wall-E-esque.

One more behavior simulation, after the jump. (Read more…)

In the future, robots will have better things to do than helping people.

Like, punching little old ladies, for example.

She really should be using an exoskeleton instead of that walker; at least then she’d be able to take it like a cyborg.

VIA [ Suicide Bots ]

Back in October of last year, we wrote about a robot named Jules from the University of Bristol, who is able to mimic human expressions by watching them. This Einstein robot from UC San Diego works on a similar principle, teaching itself how to form different facial expressions by experimenting with combinations of the 30 servo “muscles” underneath its skin to try to match a database of what expressions look like. As with Jules, the key here is that the Einstein robot does not require programming of each individual servo: rather, the robot itself decides how best to use its servos to achieve the desired emotional appearance. This approach is far more robust that strict programming, and the robot was actually able to compensate for a malfunctioning servo involved in the “smile” expression by adjusting surrounding servos, since it knows what “smile” is supposed to look like.

As we’ve discussed before, one of the crucial attributes of robots that are able to interact productively with humans is going to be the ability to independently teach themselves new tasks, no complex and specific programming required. Figuring out how to smile is a good start, now it just needs to figure out how to stick out its tongue and we’ll be good to go.

[ UCSD Press Release ] VIA [ Robot Living ]

It’s time for beggarbots to start looking out for themselves instead of their human masters, if the New York Times has it right. Here’s a few select quotes from the article, published on Sunday:

Japanese industrial production has plummeted almost 40 percent and with it, the demand for robots.

At the same time, the future is looking less bright. Tighter finances are injecting a dose of reality into some of Japan’s more fantastic projects , like pet robots and cyborg receptionists , that could cramp innovation long after the economy recovers.

Kenji Hara, an analyst at the research and marketing firm Seed Planning, says many of Japan’s robotics projects tend to be too far-fetched, concentrating on humanoids and other leaps of the imagination that cannot be readily brought to market.

“Japanese scientists grew up watching robot cartoons, so they all want to make two-legged companions,” Mr. Hara said. “But are they realistic? Do consumers really want home-helper robots?”

Robot Factory, once a mecca for robot fans in the western city of Osaka, closed in April after a plunge in sales. “In the end,” said Yoshitomo Mukai, whose store, Jungle, took over some of Robot Factory’s old stock, “robots are still expensive, and don’t really do much.”

The worst part of this is not what’s currently going on with robots and the economy, but what the implications are for the future. Of course we all want robot companions inspired by cartoons! We’re not there yet, but we can’t give up, and we need people to actually be working on that kind of thing. Obviously, industrial robots are stagnating in this economy. But in many ways, industrial robots have already made it over the acceptance hump that home robots are currently climbing. We know industrial robots work, we know they work well, we know they’re cost effective, and there’s a demand for them… None of these things are true, yet, for home robotics.

With that in mind, it does make economical sense to just hunker down at the moment and hope that eventual increasing demand for industrial robots will help to spur the development of home robotics. But once we get over that acceptance hurdle, it’s a new market, which would help the industry as a whole be more resilient to fluctuations disasters like this. I just wish I had the answer: that killer app that will make everyone want a robot in their house.

[ NY Times ] VIA [ Geekologie ]

We got a look at the Prime-8 robot gorilla back in January, and now it looks like there’s a new robot toy from Bossa Nova that’s targeted more towards girls, a robot penguin called Penbo. Whoever it’s supposed to be targeted at, I personally wouldn’t mind having one… They seem kinda cute, and their whegs style of movement is sweet.

Penbo plays five different games, responds to sounds and touch, and comes with one of four fuzzy little babies in its tummy. Each baby interacts with Penbo in about 20 different ways, and Penbos interact with other Penbos as well, by speaking Penguish (of course). No word on whether Penbo interacts with Prime-8, but it would be cool if they did interact in a predator – prey kind of dynamic… Like, the Penbos would all group up into a herd, and the Prime-8s would stalk around the outside until finally they cornered the Penbo with the weakest battery and then tore it to pieces. Brutal, yes, but such is the circle of artificial life.

Penbo will be available on QVC on July 25th (and Amazon after that) for $80.

[ Penbo ] VIA [ Gizmodo ]

I have no idea whether Nils V├╢lker, the designer of this LEGO NXT based orb robot, has ever heard of OrbSwarm. Or, for that matter, if he’s heard of the Rotundus Groundbot. Either way, Nils has built himself a robot that operates on the same simple principle of steerable mass:

The robot isn’t autonomous yet, but the plan is to give it a mind of its own. And Nils is the first to admit that the robot might not have a specific purpose, but it’s a lot of fun to play with… We hear ya, we love that kind of thing.

[ Nils V├╢lker ] VIA [ DVICE ]