“TAIPEI , The world’s first panda robot is taking shape at a cutting-edge lab in Taiwan where an ambitious group of scientists hope to add new dimensions to the island’s reputation as a high-tech powe.

The Centre for Intelligent Robots Research aims to develop pandas that are friendlier and more artistically endowed than their endangered real-life counterparts.

“The panda robot will be very cute and more attracted to humans. Maybe the panda robot can be made to sing a panda song,” said Jerry Lin, the centre’s 52-year-old director.

Day by day, the panda evolves on the centre’s computer screens and, if funding permits, the robot will take its first steps by the end of the year.”

It’s like panda 2.0! Who needs the real thing when you can just build a bunch of robot ones that are friendlier and can sing panda songs? And they won’t have to worry about being shot by poachers… Not because they’re robots, but because they’re armed:

“You can imagine a robot shooting down balloons, like in the wild west, using two revolvers, or three, but much faster than a person. Some things robots can do better than humans with the aid of technologies,” Lin said.

Now, for the record, the article in no way implies that the gun shooting robots and the panda robots will be related in any way, but the mental picture made me giggle. Good times.

VIA [ Physorg ]

Obviously, they’re making some progress on this whole robot pet thing, and the lifelong battery is great… But it doesn’t seem to do much, and obviously the audio module and the command interface aren’t really working yet. Meh, I think I’ll probably wait for version 2.0.

This is, of course, a joke. Some of what they’re joking about, however, isn’t. ToyBots is working on a hardware and software platform for socially networked robot toys, and they made their first presentation at the TechCrunch50 conference (we had it on Twitter a few days ago). We’ve got a video of that, which describes the system and demonstrates a fuzzy prototype toy called Woozee (an actual prototype, I promise), after the jump. (Read more…)

As cool as Mech Warfare is, the barrier to entry (in terms of both skill and money required) is relatively high, since (for year one, anyway) pretty much everyone had to design and construction their robots from scratch. With this in mind, Lynxmotion (remember them?) is working on a biped Mech kit that includes everything you’ll need right out of the box, from a camera system to airsoft guns. Here’s what they’ve got so far:

Pretty awesome, huh? It’s supposed to be “low cost,” but when it comes to robots, that could mean just about anything… We’ll keep you posted.

[ Lynxmotion Forums ] VIA [ Trossen Robotics ]

You may have seen this Pet Care robot concept around the internetz in the last few days. It’s sort of interesting, and certainly weird looking, but what I really like is the innovative battery charging syste. Like many other robots, the Pet Care robot uses a dock that it can find by itself. The dock, however, is not for recharging the robot… It’s for recharging the robot’s battery packs, independently. So, instead of sitting at the dock and being useless when it runs out of batteries, the robot just goes over to the dock, swaps out a spent battery for fresh one, and keeps on going:

Good idea? Obviously. Will it ever happen? Well, it’s a concept, so it’s probably one of those things that turns out to be much more complicated than it looks.

Aside from that, the Pet Care robot is a general telepresence robot that is designed (conceptualized, rather) specifically to play with your dog. The robot features stereo vision and a little ball that is actually a robot itself, that can be controlled separately. The Pet Care robot can also guard your home for you, but unfortunately, it can’t do much more than alert you to an intruder. The designer says: “I would love to equip the robot with more weapon-like modules, such as tranquilizer gun and tazer gun, but unintentional trauma may occur.” Personally, I’d be willing to accept whatever risk would be involved if my snail robot would taze anyone who manages to break into my house.

[ Mintpass 1, 2 ] VIA [ Geeky Gadgets ] and [ DVICE ]

I don’t know exactly how, but Willow Garage has programmed a gripper to be able to tell whether or not a bottle is full, empty, open, or closed just by squeezing. I’m not sure I could do this with 93% accuracy, could you? If I had to guess, I’d say that with a fine enough measurement of back pressure from the bottle, you might be able to get a pretty good idea of what its state i… For example, the bottle that resists gripping pressure the most is probably full and closed. After that would come (probably) empty and closed or (maybe) full and open, followed by empty and open.

As cool as this is, if it’s how it works, it’s a fairly restrictive method, relying on a compliant bottle and with a binary lid that doesn’t exhibit states like “closed but not sealed.” But still… That’s a heck of a lot of information out of a little squeeze.

Speaking of grippers, the PR2 robot has also been outfitted with a new quick-change end effector, i.e. a system to quickly and easily swap out “hands” to adapt to different tasks, something that pretty much every single sci-fi robot has but has been somewhat elusive on real robots. Video of that, after the jump. (Read more…)

Commenter DaveX asked about the ball bouncing robot from yesterday’s video of RoboDays 2009, and after a little digging, I was able to find out all about it. It’s called Blind Juggler, so named because it manages to juggle balls without any sort of sensors. It’s all mechanical design, and math.

I’ll do my best to explain how it works (with diagrams!), after the jump. (Read more…)

We first heard about the Precision Urban Hopper back in May, as a jumping robot collaboration between Sandia Labs and Boston Dynamics. This video is the first time we’ve seen the thing in action, though, and it seems to be pretty well on track to fulfilling the design concept. I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch to say that the easy (easier) part is done; that is, creating a robot capable of launching itself 25 feet in the air in a specific trajectory with a piston. The thing that doesn’t appear to have been figured out yet is the ability to stabilize the jump. Certainly, the robot works fine as is: it’s durable enough to jump, crash, and keep on driving. But it would be very handy to have a robot capable of making stable jumps, which would allow it to return useful in-flight video… For example, if you want to see what’s over a wall, send this little guy over and have him jump up and take a peek. There are already solutions for this exact problem, but the Precision Urban Hopper offers more flexibility, since the hopping package can be used for both surveillance and movement.

Delivery is still scheduled for late 2010.

[ Sandia Labs ]

This (fake) advertisement for Able Mable the robot housemaid comes from a BBC program programme called Tomorrow’s World, which presented developments in science and consumer technology, often years (or decades) ahead of the game. They introduced the CD in 1979, for example, but I think they’re still ahead of the game when it comes to Mable here.

The show was canceled in 2003, but apparently it’ll be coming back on the Discovery Science channel in 2010.

[ BBC Archive (UK only) ] VIA [ TechRadar UK ]

Fritz Lyneborg, the unequivocal genius behind Wall Racers and the Yellow Drum Machine, was invited to the RoboDays Festival in Denmark last week and took some excellent video of one of his creations going to town on everything it could find:

From what I saw, the Yellow Drum Machine managed to beat on the ACM-R5 amphibious robot snake, Pleo, Keepon, and a whole bunch of other awesome looking robots that I have no way of identifying. You can see another video of a bunch of robots from the event here, but again, there’s no information with them. Arg. If you can identify any that we haven’t posted about before, let us know in the comments!

[ Let's Make Robots ]
[ RoboDays ]

Marek from BeatBots wrote in to let us know that he and Keepon were at the RoboDays Festival in Odense, Denmark last week. The promo video for the event is… Well… It’s not the type of promo video that you’d see here in the states, to say the least. It’s got a robot in it. And a urinal. And I’m just going to leave it there and let you decide whether or not it’s in your best interests to hit play, but I will say that it’s definitely funny, as opposed to gross.

Um, I think.

[ BeatBots @ RoboDays ]
[ RoboDays ]

Thanks Marek!