With all due respect to Professor Hiroshi Ryu of Chiba University in Japan, if you’re going to come out with a little flying robot and call it a ‘hummingbird’ robot, it’s much less impressive if you do so six months after the AeroEnvironment flapping wing NAV that actually looks, and operates, exactly like a hummingbird. But still, this robot (which looks a bit more like an airplane) does flap its wings, although it can’t yet fly backwards. It weighs only 2.6 grams and is controlled via infrared. By 2011, it should be able to carry a little camera, at which point it will probably look a lot like this:

That’s the DelFly Micro, a flapping wing ornithopter that we wrote about in July of 2008, when it was flying around capturing footage with a built-in wireless color camera. Oh, and it looks like a slightly larger version has figured out how to flap around autonomously, avoiding walls and obstacles:

Awfully clever, I’d say, and this video is nearly a year old. What’s been going on with the DelFly since then? I’m not entirely sure, but I hope we find out sometime soon… If we don’t, what that means is that you won’t find yourself looking at one of these unless you’re in a lot of trouble with the secret police. The Dutch secret police.

VIA [ Physorg ]

There are two things that are notable about this robot vacuum from Asus, and sadly but unsurprisingly, neither of those two things have anything to do with its fundamental design or method of operation… It’s just another rip-off of iRobot’s Roomba. The first notable thing about this robot is that it’s $150. This is cheap, yes, but not cheaper than you can find a lower end latest generation Roomba for, if you spend a little time looking. And it’s not like you’ll have any other option if you live in the US, since there’s no chance that the Asus robot will ever be available here.

The other notable thing, I guess, is that it has a UV light to disinfect the floor as it cleans. And, uh, it has some kind of slot that emits fragrance (nice fragrance, I assume). And a remote. In other words, some gimmicks. And I’m sure it vacuums adequately.

What I don’t really understand is why, when a robot like this comes out, everybody talks about it in terms of competing with the Roomba. This IS a Roomba, which is why it’ll never be sold in the US. iRobot put a bunch of energy into developing a reliable and effective design for a household vacuum robot, and if companies outside of the us want to copy them, fine… But competition is something like the Neato XV-11, something that says, “we’ve got our own ideas about what makes a good vacuum robot.” If you want to pay $150 for a bootleg Roomba, then by all means, do that… But it’s still a bootleg Roomba.

[ Taiwan Economic News ] VIA [ RSN ]

Qatar’s Public Works Authority and the Qatar Science Club are cooperating to develop solar powered robots that will help guide traffic around road construction sites. They’ll be replacing the people who hold the reversible STOP and SLOW signs when two lanes have been reduced to one by a backhoe or something. This makes sense, I guess… It’s something a robot would be good at. But on the other hand, it’s an unnecessary upgrade that is probably going to directly or indirectly put a human out of a job. Hypothetically, this isn’t a bad thing. Hypothetically, giving a robot a job that a robot would be good at allows humans to move on to jobs that humans are better at, which implies something more interesting, or at least something with more variety. Hypothetically.

This doesn’t seem to be the way it actually works, unfortunately. What happens is that the robots take your job, and you’re unemployed all summer, or worse. I’m really not sure what the right answer is here… I’d like to just say, “yeah! Let the robots do all the work while we sit back and sip martinis!” But martinis are expensive, especially when you’re unemployed. I think that there are some jobs that robots are great at, and great for, but at the same time, just because a robot can doesn’t always mean a robot should. Have some sympathy on us humans. We’re fragile and poor.

[ Peninsula Qatar ] VIA [ Ecofriend ]

If we ever find ourselves with our own household robots, they’re going to need to be able to learn from us, because there will be all kinds of wild and crazy stuff that we want our robots to be able to do that the robot designers won’t have thought of. So, the ability to teach robots new tasks is rather important. But even more important is teaching robots to generalize one thing or task and apply it to many different variations on that thing or task. Back in September, we wrote about an ASIMO that learned to generalize different types of objects: show it a chair, and ASIMO could figure out what other objects were chair-like.

PR2 has taken this concept of generalization a step further by applying it to actions, not just things. When you teach PR2 an action (by providing an example of the action), PR2 can understand the fundamental components of the action and apply them to different variations of the action. So like, if you teach PR2 to pour a beverage out of a can into a cup, it then doesn’t matter what kind of can or what kind of cup or where they are relative to each other or if you move them around in the middle. This is hugely, hugely important for robots to be able to do, because having to teach a robot an action for “pour from can into cup on counter” and then a separate action for “pour from can into cup on low table” isn’t just tedious, it’s one of those things that is going to keep anyone from wanting to be involved with the robot at all.

There are a lot of major obstacles to surmount when it comes to creating a robot that can be practical and useful around people who know nothing about robots… From stuff like plugging into a normal outlet to recharge to not squeezing things too hard. It’s awesome to see Willow Garage and PR2 tackling these critical objectives and finding solutions that work.

[ Willow Garage ]

We wrote about Nils V├╢lker’s rolling orbital Bluetooth operated thing back in July, and since then, he’s been busy developing this light drawing robot (among, I assume, other things). The principle behind this bot is simple: moving lights + long camera exposure = cool. Very cool. It’s tricky to do, though, especially if you’re trying to draw anything with precision. But robots are great at precision, and if you want a light drawing made up solely of straight lines, Nils’ robot does a bang-up job:

[ Nils V├╢lker ] VIA [ Designboom ]

Believe it or not, the woman in the picture above is not real. She’s an android named Aiko (which means “love child”), and was built by Canadian Le Trung for something like $50,000. $50,000 so far, anyway, because Aiko here isn’t done ye. At the moment, she can recognize people, understand conversations, and respond with a 13,000 word vocabulary. She’s 5 feet tall with measurements of 32, 23, 33, which is “perfect” according to the Daily Mail. What Le is working on next is to try and get Aiko to walk, although apparently her upper body is functional to some degree, because “like a real female she will react to being touched in certain ways, if you grab or squeeze too hard she will try to slap you.” Don’t worry about that, though, because ‘Aiko is always helpful and never complains. She is the perfect woman to have around at Christmas.’

Unfortunately, Aiko has put Le into massive amounts of debt, and he’s moved back in with his parents. He’s also had a heart attack from, uh, working on her so much. Despite what you may think, Aiko is actually designed for the elderly. No, really. As a home help robot.

With perfect measurements.

Just don’t squeeze her too hard.

VIA [ Daily Mail ]

This is why I can’t bring myself to watch gymnastics on TV. It’s just too stressful.

VIA [ Robots Dreams ]

Happy holidays from all of us here at BotJunkie. Here’s hoping your robots get all kinds of cool upgrades this year, and if you’re very lucky, you might even get something as well. Like parts to build more robots.

Or money for parts to build more robots.

Or other things that you can sell for money for parts to build more robots.

If you don’t get any of that stuff, don’t be sad, you can still enjoy these holiday robot videos, and that will make everything better.

Let’s start off with a robot built by a student at Taku Ayumi Yawata high school in Japan playing Jingle Bells, via Robot Watch:

Next we have a Toyota Partner Robot playing (actually playing) a Christmas Medley on the trumpet, via GetRobo:

Here’s RobotGrrl’s MANOI robot putting on a “Holiday Extravaganza…” Be sure and check out the training, the warm-up, and RobotGrrl’s blog.

And finally, we have a team of robots from RoboBuilder performing a Christmas themed synchronized dance routine for some kind of Korean TV game show where the audience ultimately has to try and emulate the robots’ moves… Thanks to Robots Dreams for this one:

And as for me, I’m off to go help my Roomba open her presents. I’m pretty sure she didn’t get me anything this year (besides cleaner carpets), but that’s okay, ’cause I have another year of awesome robot news to look forward to, and that’s all the presents I could ever want.

Besides a Keepon, of course.

Hint hint. :)

This innovative robot from the Tokyo Institute of Technology uses two sets of… Honestly, I don’t know what to call them… Lifting stair things (?) to slowly and steadily burrow under obstacles. Steadily is the key to this process: as it moves, the robot maintains support under the obstacle and doesn’t cause any jerking, which is important if you’re dealing with heavy and unstable things like you might find in the middle of (say) a collapsed building. LEDs and a small camera on the front of the bot let controllers see what it sees; the primary use for the robot will be searching for survivors in the aftermath of earthquakes and explosions.

VIA [ Diginfo ]

This illustration is from a children’s book called Hello, I’m Robot! which was published in the Soviet Union in 1989.. . Notice the evolution from abacus to digital calculator in one generation. Check out more images after the jump, although the one above is the best one, I’d say

[ A Journey Round My Skull ] VIA [ BB ]