You’ve seen Eyebot. You’ve seen Handbot. The third and final piece of EPFL’s Swarmanoid project is, you guessed it, Footbot. Footbot looks to be a similar type of robot to another EPFL swarm project, employing the same mobility and docking technology. The idea behind Swarmanoid as a whole is that instead of having one robot with hands, eyes, and feet doing all those things you’d expect a humanoid robot to do, instead you’d just have whatever piece of a humanoid you happened to need for a particular task.

Most of the time, we humanoids (and humanoid robots) aren’t actively using all of our functional modules. Like, we’re either going somewhere, or looking for something, or performing some task with our hands. So really, there’s no need to have a complicated and expensive robot with integrated technologies that enable it to do all of these things at once. If you split all of these things into separate robots, as Swarmanoid does, you (hypothetically) retain all of the capability while expanding the versatility. Need a hands? A Footbot will bring you a Handbot or two, and there you go. And when you have the hands you need, the Footbot can go off and help someone else.

The biggest advantage, I think, of system like this is that you can easily (and, let’s hope, cheaply) replace or upgrade any component (read: robot) in the swarm. And by the same token, if any component fails, the swarm overall is largely unaffected. Compare this to a traditional humanoid: if one component fails, the entire robot is often rendered useless. There are also disadvantages, of course… It doesn’t seem likely that Swarmanoid will ever really manage to be nearly as creepy as androids can.

[ Swarmanoid Project ]

This may not look like the most promising design for a robot, but there’s a lot of potential to be had with robots that can change their shape. These robots, from Ritsumeikan University in Japan, are constructed with spherical shells of spring steel attached to an inner core (which contains the power source and electronics) via shape memory alloy wires. Applying voltage to the wires causes them to contract, deforming the shape of the robot. By doing this, the robot can change its center of gravity to roll in any direction, and by contracting the spring steel enough, the robot stores up enough energy to jump.

The big limitation at the moment is that shape memory alloys only really work in one direction: applying a voltage heats the wire, causing it to shrink, but in order for the wire to unshrink, it has to radiate that same amount of heat, which takes a little while… So the robot can deform to roll or jump, but after it does, it needs a cool-down period.

Even with this (surely surmountable) limitation, jumping robots have an advantage over both ground and flying robots: they can move around without respect to terrain without having to expend energy staying airborn. ‘Course, they’re not as efficient as a ground robot, or as versatile as a flying robot, but they’d be perfect for things like planetary exploration where reliability and versatile mobility are more important than speed.

More info is available in this paper (*.PDF).

[ Ritsumeikan University ]

We first heard about these little animal robots from Tomy back in April. As it turns out, our guess that they’d be able to chase balls and avoid obstacles was dead on, since that (and pretty much nothing else) is what they can do. The only other feature to speak of is that they can sing tunes (of a sort), and if you put two of them together, they sing to each other. There isn’t any sort of remote control, but it appears as though you control the robot by tapping out simple patterns… Some kind of audio recognition, is my guess.

$20 is pretty inexpensive for a deceptively capable robot. I mean, if you look at it strictly, these robots have more “brains” (or more autonomous capability, anyway) than most hobby humanoids. They’re cheap enough that you could easily afford to buy a couple, rip them apart, and harvest them for parts. If you do so, I bet their cute little ears won’t wiggle anymore, but that’s a small price to pay for obstacle avoidance and object following hardware.

[ Brando ] VIA [ technabob ]

Man, that is one sexy robot. It’s the beard, I think. What a turn-on .

As always, you can catch the other Bots With Stuff from last week over on The Shoebox Blog, including a robot with hoops & yoyo, and a robot with more cowbell.

[ Bots With Stuff ]

Castrol, one of the sponsors of FIFA World Cup, has decided that it would be kinda cool to develop the world’s fastest kicker robot, capable of kicking soccer balls at over 200 kph, or about 125 mph. The robot, called Ichi-GO, will be powered by an engine (lubricated with you know what) that drives a flywheel attached to a steel kicking leg, and the final concept is, apparently, for the whole thing to be movable so that it can take corners as well as PKs.

Just by way of comparison, the fastest/hardest kick ever recorded was 114 mph, by David Hirst playing for Arsenal in 1996. Typical really damn fast kicks travel at more like 80 or 90 mph, so a 125 mph kick is something that, it’s safe to say, isn’t going to care in the least whether or not you have your hand over your crotch.

[ Castrol Ichi-GO ]

Thanks Takahiko Wada!

Kitties love Roombas, but Mental_Floss has proof that other animals do too:

Okay, so maybe that bunny wasn’t on there entirely by choice, but still, cute!

VIA [ Mental_Floss ]

If you couldn’t make it to the closed set filming of the latest season of BattleBots and your cable package doesn’t include CBS College Sports (a channel that I didn’t know existed), the BattleBots YouTube channel at least gives you a taste of what kind of action BattleBots has to offer and how it differs from similar events like RoboGames.

The BattleBots TV season is tentatively scheduled to kick off in December of this year, and BattleBots is already location scouting for a 2010 season in Miami, San Francisco, and, uh, Buffalo, with filming to begin in March or April.

[ BattleBots ]

Kiva Systems is working hard with companies like Amazon and Zappos to ensure that humans everywhere have early retirements to look forward to… With robots on the job, you don’t need lights, you don’t need heating or air conditioning, and you don’t have to worry about theft. And it’s good for the humans, too… Those that remain, at least. And don’t think that you’re safe just because you’re a ballet dancer; Kiva’s got it in for you, too.

More info on Kiva’s laser-powered ‘magic shelf’ system, after the jump. (Read more…)

Yesterday’s post about a slime mold robot (or apparently, more accurately called a “plasmodium”) got me curious as to whether or not all the stuff that the researchers were talking about is, realistically, at all possible. As it turns out, this bizarre non-animal non-plant goop is way, way smarter than it looks.

Back in 2006, researchers from the UK and Japan used a dollop of physarum polycephalum slime to directly control a hexapod. The slime likes dark, moist places, but it doesn’t just happen to grow there, it actually seeks out environments it likes by moving away from light sources. The slime was grown in a shape with six points on top of a circuit, and when light was shone on one of the points, the circuit sensed the slime trying to move away and activated that leg of the hexapod, causing the robot to move in the same direction, turning light-sensitive slime into a control system for a light-sensitive hexapod.

Slime molds have also been shown to be able to solve mazes; read more about that here.

[ PDF Paper ] VIA [ New Scientist ]

I don’t know where Nao got its hands on a Surface table, but I’m insanely jealous. My nonexistent knowledge of French makes me think that Nao is probably saying something like, “wow, this thing is awesome! Too bad you don’t have one!” The fact that Nao can use the table at all, though, is a good example of one of the advantages of Surface: it’s not touch sensitive, but rather uses an array of cameras underneath the semi-transparent tabletop to track fingertips and other objects, letting you manipulate things in all kinds of nifty ways.

If you’re interested in what else Surface can do, I’ve posted a video after the break from CES 2008, where I got a hands-on demo of Surface. If you want to play around with it for yourself someplace outside of Vegas, some AT&T stores have them, but it’s not likely they’re set up for gaming. Shame. (Read more…)