This, apparently, is what you get when you cross this robot with these robots. Why you’d want to encourage your chef robot to pick up a knife is beyond me, although I imagine it does cut down on soup theft.

VIA [ CNET ]

The 12th annual AUVSI AUV competition took place last month down in San Diego, California. For those of you not up to date on your acronyms, AUVSI is the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, and AUVs are Autonomus Underwater Vehicles. The AUV competition puts fully autonomous mini-subs through a complex obstacle course where they have to navigate, detect objects, and perform tasks all on their own, without sinking or being eaten by sharks. In addition to recovering a briefcase which was full of either secret documents or a school of mackerel, the robots had to fire torpedoes at a target or drop bombs on a series of vehicles and structures inexplicably located underwater.

The overall winner was Cornell University, who managed to autonomously complete all of the course objectives in the allotted time. This isn’t entirely surprising, considering the experience CMU has with autonomous vehicles. (Yeah, I’m an idiot. -Ed.)

Video from the final competition day, with spectacular footage of a robot sub firing its torpedoes, after the jump. (Read more…)

Earlier this week we covered several different incremental improvements in robot AI, including grasping and object recognition. In the video above, ASIMO is demonstrating another (arguably more) important aspect of robot intelligence: the ability to navigate around a dynamically changing environment. It’s not likely that ASIMO will find itself in a situation where it needs to avoid stepping on whirling pink blades of death, but at some point (soon, please) we’ll have ASIMOs walking around our homes, and they’ll need to be able to not accidentally crush our toes/children/pets/Roombas.

Currently, it seems as though the system depends on a camera with a view of both objects and robot, as well as some fairly heavy off-board processing. Obviously, the hardware is all going to need to get integrated into the robot itself for it to be practical, but there’s no reason that this can’t be done, and there’s another video after the jump which shows an HRP-2 robot (a more primitive but less freaky version of these) planning navigation from on-board vision data. (Read more…)

Now that Willow Garage’s PR2 robot has learned to plug itself in, you may be worried that it’s lost all dependency on humans, leading inevitably to a robot uprising and the eventual extermination of the entire human race. It’s a valid concern. With this in mind, Willow Garage has put together this handy list of ways in which you can personally defeat an uprising of PR2 robots with simple household items:

1. Lay 2x4s across the ground. The PR2 is highly maneuverable on inclines up to 5 degrees, but it cannot drive over sharp obstacles like a 2×4. The PR2 can also be turned away by anything that’s at least 3cm tall.

2. Always keep a supply of liquid nearby to toss on any advancing robot. We have Naked and Odwalla fruit juice fridges in a central location and restock them frequently.

3. Stairs are the enemy of cows, Daleks, and wheeled robots.

4. Black power outlets are like Ninjas: invisible to the PR2.

5. Use round door knobs. The PR2 can only enter homes that are ADA-compliant

Stairs. Door knobs. Fruit juice. Looks like we’ll be pretty safe from rampaging assemblages of household robots for the near future… Or will we.

[ Willow Garage ]
Comic from PHD Comics

iCub, that creepy drum-playing robot baby, is doing its best to develop cognition skills on par with those of a 3 year old human. In this demonstration, iCub has been taught to learn to recognize objects placed in front of it, and then focus attention on those objects if it sees them later.

Like the robot hand we posted about earlier today, this is one of those little tricks that we do without thinking but are necessary for intuitive human interactions with robots. This particular cognitive skill, for example, might help home robots learn directly from you in the same way a person would: show them an object and give them instruction related to that object, and they won’t have to bother you about it again… Which is more than can be said for most humans.

Incidentally, it’s kinda amazing how much of a difference eyelids make when it comes to de-uncannifying a robot:

[ RobotCub ] VIA [ PopSci ]

Picking up an object is one of those things that humans do without thought, but it’s a complicated task for robots, involving all kinds of pressure sensors and dynamic grip adjustment. Willow Garage, while working on the gripper for their PR2 robot, discovered that it’s not so much pressure that causes damage to gripped objects (like eggs), but rather momentum, so if you get the gripper to slow down as soon as it makes contact with an object, you can hold it more securely without breaking it. This may not seem like a big deal at all, and I guess it’s not, but it’s another one of those little pieces that robotics researchers are gradually getting figured out on the way to making robots just as capable as humans.

And +2 to whoever had the idea of putting the egg in a bag first.

[ Willow Garage ]