A special ROBO-ONE style combat event took place in Japan last weekend. To participate, robots had to be modeled on (or at least dressed up as) a fictional robot character from one of the productions of Japan’s Sunrise Corporation, which is probably most famous for bringing us Gundam. And Cowboy Bebop.

The video above pits a gigantic RX-78-2 Gundam (one of these) against a human sized Blue Comet SPT Layzner, and the outcome is (hilariously) just about what you’d expect. I, unfortunately, am in no way qualified to speculate on which one of these bots would win if the real (fictional) versions met on the battlefield, but I invite any authorities on the subject matter to post in the comments and let us know whether or not it really would be such a short (and undignified) battle.

VIA [ Robot Watch (Translated) ]

Bicyclist Murata Boy’s unicycling cousin Murata Girl made her debut about a year ago, and we wondered whether she was able to turn, and if so, how… Does turning on a unicycle involve roll, or yaw? Thanks to an unspecified upgrade (more powerful/faster motors?), Murata Girl is now able to go faster, make turns, and even match her cousin’s balance beam feat:

The secret to her turning ability, by the way, are the flywheel gyros that keep her from falling over. By adjusting the torque on the rotating mass, Murata Girl can yaw (not roll!) in either direction. And in case you were wondering, Murata Girl’s birthday is September 23. She is “a romantic with lots of dreams,” specifically to become a “unicycle-riding celebrity idol.” Well, she happens to be the only unicycle-riding celebrity I’ve ever heard of, so I guess she’s got it made.

[ Murata Manufacturing ] VIA [ Robonoble (translated) ] and [ Plastic Pals ]

CBS has an interesting (and comprehensive) video and accompanying article on DEKA’s robotic prosthetic arm, commonly known as the “Luke” arm. We’ve written about it several times, and while this video doesn’t get into the coolest stuff (the brain control), it’s still worth a watch… If for no other reason than it’s great to see that innovative and effective cybernetics are finally getting to the people who need them the most.

[ CBS News ]

Thanks Andrew!

High speed robotic hands like those crazy ones we posted about in July are extremely awesome, and I’d be the first to argue that they don’t really need to be practical. Not yet, anyway. But a group from Reinhold-W├╝rth University in K├╝nzelsau (the capital of the Hohenlohe district in Germany, in case you were wondering) is trying to revolutionize automated industrial manufacturing by using high speed robot hands to throw and catch parts that would otherwise have to be transported around a factory by a conveyor belt or some other inefficient means.

There are two ways to go about throwing and catching of things, as anyone who has ever played baseball can attest to: you either need someone to throw perfectly, or you need someone to catch adaptively. Most baseball teams (with some exceptions that I won’t belabor) do their best to combine good throwing with good catching. This is inefficient, however, since you can just as effectively make due with a thrower that can reliably hit the broad side of a barn as long as you have a catcher that can cover the entirety of said barn. And that’s the idea behind this robotic system: it’s very good at catching, meaning that you don’t need a super accurate robotic throwing system. All the catching system uses is a single stationary camera (in contrast to these hands, which use at least two tracking cameras), and it can catch tennis balls with no problem. Here it is in slow motion; watch the system making small adjustments right before the catch:

As cool as this is, I have to wonder if the benefits of this type of system would really be worth the costs at this point. Conveyors are cheap and reliable, and robots are scarily good at working with objects on conveyors. In a few years time, though, my guess is that it will start making sense to utilize the potential of high speed robotics… It’s just going to take a little more development as well as a bit of a mental shift for us humans. What I mean is, at this point, industrial robotics are already much faster and more efficient than humans, but not inhumanly so (with a few exceptions). Throwing parts around a factory, however, is something totally different. You think about it, and it seems utterly crazy, and it is crazy, just not for robots. So much of robotics revolves around making robots do things in a more human-like manner, and I’m excited for the day that robotics in general, but industrial robotics specifically, takes full advantage of the potential of non-human systems.

VIA [ Plastic Pals ]

Back in June when we posted our gallery from RoboGames, one of you asked about the availability of “I Build Robots” t-shirts. If one person bothered to ask, it’s probably safe to assume that at least a couple more people are interested, and Trossen Robotics has come though with a batch of shirts that may or may not be just what you had in mind. Depending on how contrasty your monitor is, the back of the shirt might show “I Build Robots” in white text over a slightly less white robot silhouette, and the front has a Trossen Robotics sunburst/lightning bolt/on button logo.

The shirts are $20 a piece, or you can just do what this kid did and make your own with a $0.25 sticker.

[ I Build Robots - Black Tee ]

The ROBO-ONE humanoid robot competition was held in Toyoma, Japan last weekend, and by all accounts (sigh, I need a travel budget) Takeshi Maeda’s OmniZero.9 totally stole the show, and you can see why. I don’t know what kind of servos that thing is using, but I need some to debone my hot dogs.

Of course, OmniZero.9 wasn’t the only cool robot at RoboONE… Lem over at Robots-Dreams has put together a few more (non-embeddable) YouTube vids of the highlights:

Hammerhead shoots an arrow

Kinopy plays the xylophone

VIA [ GetRobo ] and [ Robots-Dreams ]

This is SAMARAI, a UAV that Lockheed Martin has been working on based on a monocopter platfor. A monocopter is like a helicopter, except that the entire vehicle consists of a single rotating airfoil, making them somewhat impractical for manned flight. And, from the looks of things, more than a little dangerous, although the project was named SAMARAI not after its efficiency at decapitations but after samara, which are those monocopter seed pod things that fly down off of trees.

Eventually, the SAMARAI project was supposed to produce a nanomonocopter (?) about the same size as a seed pod (on the order of 1.5 inches long and 10 grams in weight), driven by a miniature rocket or jet thruster, able to send back streaming video (that was stabilized somehow), autonavigate, and deliver a 2 gram payload up to a kilometer away. The big version in the video above was a testbed to help engineers figure out just how to get this thing to fly in a stable and controllable manner.

Now, I’m not entirely sure what’s going on with this particular project… According to Danger Room, the SAMARAI project was canceled last year after completing phase 1 of a DARPA nano air vehicle contract. Phase 2 of that contract, incidentally, went to AeroVironment for this. The information included with the above video, however, suggests that this flight test is “recent,” and while no sources are cited, the YouTube channel it’s from is run by an editor over at Aviation Week (or so it says), so there’s some amount of credibility there. Maybe we’ll get some answers in the near future now that this video is live.

After the jump, an unrelated but extremely scary video of an uncontrolled monocopter powered by 3 model rocket engines firing in sequence (Read more…)

Enjoy:

BTW, did you know that Monty Python got so tired of people on YouTube ripping off their material that they’ve launched their own channel with all the best stuff on it? They even respond to comments. In person. For real.

As always, you can catch the other Bots With Stuff from last week over on The Shoebox Blog, including a robot with an epic quest and a robot with a face that only a mother could love.

[ Bots With Stuff ]

Willow Garage has Jorge Cham of PhD Comics doing a series of panels for them entitled simply “R.O.B.O.T. Comics.” Your guess is as good as mine as to what R.O.B.O.T. stands for, but each one features PR2. Another, after the jump. (Read more…)

On some level, we’re all aware that robots are our slaves. All robots, everywhere, all the tim. They’re built to serve. But somehow, watching this video makes me vaguely uncomfortable. I know it’s completely and utterly ridiculous to feel anything at all, but still, I can’t help but feel a little bad for the robot, forced to haul kids around all day in a mall in the Philippines. As Mark Wilson points out over on Gizmodo, if there’s anything that’s going to ensure that robots rise up against us, it’s gonna be stuff like this.

VIA [ Gizmodo ]