In a sort of cross between Robovox and the Kuka CalligraphyBot, Voicebot is a Kuka robot arm that is designed to sit in the UK’s Parliament and write out questions from people to their representatives (or whatever it is they’ve got over there).

Although the website asks you to “keep it clean” and “speak from the heart,” the robot seems quite happy to write “balls” eighteen times in a row, although at some point the submissions will be vetted before actual delivery to someone who might not appreciate the sentiment. The robot will start transcribing questions this October, and run until October 16.

[ Vinspired Voicebox ]

Thanks Adil!

This is episode 2 of what looks like is going to be a whole series of Vecna Robotics’ BEAR robot demonstrating various tasks in a combination of prototype video and CGI. Most of this stuff we saw in the first vid, except for BEAR chopping a baseball bat in half with its fist, which you can skip right to at about 2:00 in.

[ Vecna Robotics BEAR ]

SPARK stands for Starter Programs for Advanced Robotics Knowledge, and it’s iRobot’s new program to help improve robotics education for students in elementary school through college. While not too much seems to be happening at the moment, SPARK does have a lot of promising partners, including FIRST, CMU, BeatBots, Topobo, and even Paro… There’s a lot of potential here, and of course we here at BotJunkie are wildly in favor of anything that makes robotics more accessible to students, especially younger students who may not even realize that robotics is something they can learn how to do.

All too often, programs like this don’t get past the concept+slick website phase, which as far as I can tell, is where SPARK currently is. But hopefully with the backing of iRobot and its partners, something substantial will become of this program. We’ll keep you posted.

[ SPARK ] VIA [ RSN ]

As if hobby robots don’t already have enough expensive bits, Craft House in Japan has just released a new $600 add-on for humanoids: these delicately beautiful five fingered hands:

Called “Melissa” hands, the hands are each controlled by a single servo and can easily grasp small objects. They’re not really cut out for fighting, and as BRN points out, “it is necessary to attach protector such a glove when robot fights with the hands.” Robot boxing, anyone?

[ Robot Watch (Translated) ] VIA [ BBG ] and [ Biped Robot News ]

It’s great that my Roomba can vacuum the floor, but you know what? So can I. I know how to vacuum. Vacuuming is not a problem for me. Folding clothing, on the other hand, is (as far as I can tell) a science (or is it an art?) that human brains simply cannot master. This little robot named Foldy gets the job done with the aid of a ceiling mounted camera and a PC, and is able to fold everything from pants to shirts to… uh… pants. If it could only do laundry and put the folded clothes away, it could enjoy a life of non-stop busyness on the floor of my room.

Shockingly, the point of Foldy is not really to fold clothes, but to demonstrate “an interactive graphical editing interface that tells intelligent robots how to complete tasks in dynamic environments.” Basically, you show the robot (on the computer) how you want it to fold something, a learning technique that can be applied to all kinds of other household chores… Although, how anyone knows enough about folding things to competently teach a robot is utterly beyond me.

VIA [ Plastic Pals ] and [ Robots Dreams ]

This is not the first dinosaur / robot um, interaction we’ve seen (NSFW link), but these prints of dinosaurs fighting robots are (slightly) classier and available for purchase. Each stencil is 1′ x 2′ on a masonite panel, and costs $25.

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Additionally, the artist will “gladly create new images based on any species-o-dinosaur (or robot) you like.” Hmm, I’m thinking something along the lines of a Quetzalcoatlus Northropi (which, incidentally, is already a robot) up against an X-47. That would be totally badass, albeit rather hard to render artistically, I imagine.

[ ExcapeArtist ] VIA [ io9 ]

PS- While wandering around Wikipedia looking at dinosaur stuff (which I spent several hours doing because I like dinosaurs), I found a link to the New Mexico Museum of Natural History. Researchers there took a high resolution CT scan of a parasaurolophus (duck-billed dinosaur) skull, modeled the air chambers inside the crest, and then got a computer to simulate the sound that the dino would have made using the crest as a resonator… Click here to listen. Awesome, right? More info and the original WAV file here.

In the September issue of Popular Mechanics, CrabFu has the much deserved honor of being named one of ten Backyard Geniuses. PopMech features CrabFu’s Swashbot, but don’t forget about all of his other amazing creations.

We’ve posted about two of the other Backyard Geniuses; Christian Ristow and his giant robot hand as well as Matt Denton and his CNC Hexapod. Congrats to all of you geniuses, but this only means that we’ll be expecting more spectacular stuff from you in the future.

[ Popular Mechanics ] VIA [ Neatorama ]

In the tradition of uncertainty, confusion, and general “huh?”-ness incarnated in the Sony Rolly comes the AU iida Polaris, which, if anything, manages to be just a little bit stranger than the Rolly. It appears to be a cell phone that comes with a little round robotic cradle. Place the phone in the cradle, and it… Uh… Can move around. And maybe play music or something. And it can go over to your TV and get it to display the weather. The coolest bit, as far as I can tell, is that the robot can close itself up into a little ball, but seeing as it’s most likely not robust enough to kick, I’m not sure what the point is.

The AU iida Polaris is currently just a concept prototype, and I’m 99% sure that it’s going to stay that way. Akihabara News has a little video, and there seems to be something else about it on the Flower Robotics website.

[ Flower Robotics ] VIA [ Akihabara News ]

Keeping robots clean is a big deal for NASA. After all, any bacteria you accidentally take with you to another planet could potentially screw up any scientific discoveries, or (worst case) decide that they like their new digs, multiply out of control, evolve, develop a death ray, and then come back to Earth and kill us all.

To keep this from happening, NASA is practicing its techniques for robot sterilization (which still doesn’t keep this from happening). The robot in the picture is Cliffbot, which NASA took to Svalbard to do some exploring. Using a seven step cleaning procedure involving distilled water and hydrogen peroxide, they managed to keep Cliffbot’s sample collectors completely free of biological contamination.

Cliffbot is designed for planets like Mars, which have lots of exciting craters and cliffs and volcanoes that are generally inaccessible to wheeled robots. By using two anchorbots (you can see them in the pic above), the 18 pound Cliffbot is able to descend and ascend rocky slopes of up to 85 degrees. The little axle robot that we wrote about last year works in generally the same way, but Cliffbot has the added advantage of being able to work in a team with other robots in other scenarios like cooperative construction projects.

[ Sample-Return Rover ] VIA [ Popular Mechanics ]

Researchers at places like MIT have been using Boston Dynamics‘ LittleDog robot for years now as a testbed to teach legged robots to learn how to traverse variable terrain on their own. This video shows some highlights of a “dynamic double-support gait,” which means (as near as I can tell) that LittleDog is supporting itself, at times, on only two of its four legs. This is a substantially more efficient way of negotiating terrain than we first saw two years ago. LittleDog also demonstrates some markedly biological ways of negotiating obstacles (with the possible exception of the belly flop on the Jersey barrier)… I especially liked how it pranced in place slightly before tackling each stair. All this stuff is obviously a lot of work for a little bot, since poor LittleDog completely collapses at the end of every test.

LittleDog, remember, is teaching itself the most efficient way to negotiate these surfaces. Overhead cameras examine the terrain and plan out LittleDog’s route by computing a ‘cost’ for each step, which takes into account the distance moved towards the goal as well as the potential for a fall. After a lot of trial and error, LittleDog figures out how to best compromise between progress and stability, and the lessons it learns could be propagated up to other, larger quadruped robots.

This video is from Phase 2 of DARPA’s Learning Locomotion program… MIT’s LittleDog team was awarded funding for Phase 3 of this program back in 2008, so we’ll keep you updated.

[ MIT Robot Locomotion Group ]
[ 2006 Abstract ]