Paxshikai may have hit 100 i-SOBOT YouTube videos last year, but apparently he’s not out of good ideas, as this latest firefighting i-SOBOT shows. That little guy has a surprising amount of strength in his arm servos, don’t you think?

[ Paxshikai @ YouTube ]

Poor Spirit. I do so wish there was something we could do. $16 from ThinkGeek, and zero percent of the proceeds go to the Bring Spirit Home fund. Incidentally, here’s the latest update on Spirit:

NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is now parked for the winter. The rover team is commanding Spirit this week to make additional preparations for the Mars southern hemisphere winter season. The team does not plan further motion of the wheels until spring comes to Spirit’s location beside the western edge of a low plateau called Home Plate.

Spirit will spend the coming winter tilted 9 degrees toward the south, an unfavorable attitude for the solar panels to catch rays from the sun in the northern sky. Spirit’s parking positions for its previous three Martian winters tilted northward. Engineers anticipate that, due to the unfavorable tilt for this fourth winter, Spirit will be out of communication with Earth for several months.

Spirit may enter a low-power hibernation mode within a few weeks, shutting down almost all functions except keeping a master clock running and checking its power status periodically until it has enough power to reawaken. It may go in and out of this mode a few times at the beginning and at the end of an extended hibernation period.

I’m not going to buy this shirt for the simple reason that wearing it would keep me on the verge of tears all the time. Proud tears, but still, that would totally ruin the manly image that I am so used to projecting.

Poor little robot :’(

[ ThinkGeek ]

I’m not sure that either the internet (or robots) actually existed 10 years ago, but somehow, that’s when GoRobotics.net got their start. 10 years is a looooong time for a blog to be around (I got pretty excited when BotJunkie turned 1, myself), and to celebrate they’re giving away a bunch of cool stuff.

Congrats to William Cox et al!

Also, GoRobotics is starting a new website called RobotBox, which a cross between a community website and portfolio for robot builders. It looks pretty cool, take the tour here.

[ GoRobotics ]
[ RobotBox ]

Just a few days ago, we covered the Telecomunicator T1, a telepresence robot being designed by a Japanese firm. Well, the folks at Willow Garage have put together a telepresence ‘bot of their own: Texas, a nifty robot that lets an employee telecommute from hundreds of miles away.

It’s interesting to watch the video, and understand just how simple and effective these robots can be. The robot receives control data sent via wireless internet access from the controller. This means that as long as you and the bot have an internet connection, you’re good to go.  But what really strikes me is that this isn’t some big project that Willow Garage is working on- it’s not their attempt to market “the next big thing.” No. Texas is a side-project, a hobby, something that they did because it was easy for them (well, they do work with robots), and it made sense to use company time to make this bot, allowing one employee to do his job better.

Maybe I’m reading too far into this, but that really strikes me. In a world that’s requiring more and more connectivity between people around the world, telepresence is becoming easier and easier, and Texas from Willow Garage is a fine example of the trend.

[ Willow Garage ] VIA [ AI Robotics ]

The NY Times posted an article online on Tuesday about food serving robots. We’ve already covered pretty much all of the bots in the article here on BotJunkie (like Snackbot, Motoman, Chief Cook, ramen bots, sushi hand, and that octopus balls robot)

But, there was this interesting quote:

Dr. Heather Knight, a roboticist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said that the industry is trying to change “the perception of robots.”

“The Japanese have always been more comfortable with it, but particularly in the West, there’s this whole Frankenstein thing that if we try to make something in the image of man, to make a new creature, we’re stealing the role of God, and it’s going to turn out wrong because that’s not our role,” she said.

Dr. Knight goes on to suggest that having robots serve people food will get people to like robots, ’cause people like food. Maybe that’s true. I’m not entirely sure, though, about the premise that service robots in general (or perhaps humanoid service robots specifically) make people uncomfortable because of this Frankenstein effect involving humans, uh, overstepping our bounds (I guess?) when it comes to creating things. I’m inclined to believe that it’s something more straightforward: robots are foreign to our general experience, and that makes people uncomfortable. You could argue, I suppose, that this is just semantics, and that robots are foreign to us because we’re not ‘meant’ to be creating them, but I wouldn’t want to suggest that because something makes us uncomfortable there’s something inherently wrong about it. Really, it’s just a matter of education (and cultural education), and you can cite any number of historical precedents to this. Anyway, it’s an interesting thing to think about.

Dr. Knight gave at talk at Ignite LA last fall on social robotics, here’s the vid:

This brings up another interesting issue, that of trust… I feel like it might be possible to trust the current generation of robots in the same way that you trust a business partner, but social trust is another matter entirely. It’s going to be hard to make that happen, since social trust is such a nebulous thing, and it’ll take a lot of hard work by social roboticists to make it happen.

[ NY Times ]
[ Dr. Heather Knight ]

You can buy a shirt with Franken-Bot on it here

Thanks Stark!

We posted last week about MIT’s FlyFire project, which takes swarms of little flying robots and uses them to create dynamic 3D images. Last September, Julia Tsao put together a conceptual project for her graduate thesis that embodies a similar set of ideas… Using swarms of small robots working together to form displays. She took the concept to a few different places, though, by enabling the robots to interact with other objects both directly and indirectly. ‘Course, it’s easy to get robots to do whatever you want in a concept video, but there are some interesting ideas here. My third favorite part of the project is the conceptual remote control:

My second favorite part is the conceptual kill switch:

And my favorite part of all are the warning labels:

I can’t quite make out that last one… Something about diving into a swimming pool if the bots are trying to murder you? Sounds like it might actually work, good plan!

[ Curious Displays ] VIA [ Boing Boing ] VIA [ Robot Living ]

When we first saw PR2 Alpha plugging itself into a standard wall socket last year, it was a sort of hit and miss behavior where the robot would stab at the outlet a bunch of times until it actually made a connection. As they say in the video, this is a “sub-optimal” behavior. I commented at the time that:

This is one of those situations where developing a robot that’s able to plug into a socket 20% of the time (but try over and over) is (I imagine) much more efficient than developing a robot that’s able to plug into a socket 100% of the time.

Now, I’m not sure whether I’m exactly wrong about my assertion… There are many significant hardware differences between PR2 Alpha and the PR2 in the above video, and undoubtedly a lot of programming was necessary for the one-shot plug-in. This stuff is a big investment of time and money. As a programmer myself, I totally understand how when something is sub-optimal, you want to optimize, and the improved behavior is certainly beneficial to PR2. However, my question is (still) whether the amount of resources invested in getting PR2 to hit that outlet 100% of the time is really worth it when a much lower percentage of success is still perfectly adequate when it comes to getting the robot to charge itself.

Either way, optimal is optimal, and the same library of behaviors that allow PR2 to plug itself in which such accuracy and precision will certainly come in handy when it tries to do other stuff, like tying my shoelaces for me ’cause I’m too lazy to bend over.

[ Willow Garage ]

You may think that all of those crazy robot competitions that we like to cover are just fun and games, but there’s a serious side. Really, there is. For reals. Mindful of this, ROBO-ONE held the second annual Humanoid Helper Project last weekend, where teleoperated human-sized robots completed (or attempted to complete) three seemingly simple tasks, including pouring liquid from a plastic bottle into a cup, carrying ping-pong balls on a tray, and a 30 minute endurance race. I don’t know about you, but the last two would be a bit of a challenge for me, and they certainly were for the robots:

Keep in mind that these are not huge companies (or even small companies) with robots that cost millions (or even tens of thousands) of dollars. These are hobby robots. Big, fancy hobby robots, but still hobby robots. The winner was the robot with the round head, who showed a remarkable (and consistent) amount of dexterity. Now if they could only start running ROS, they could start a bottle squeezing competition too.

[ Robo Helper ] VIA [ GetRobo ]

Back in 2008, we introduced you to Care-O-bot 3 from Fraunhofer IPA, the lovable lil robot that’s missing a limb. Well, Fraunhofer IPA recently open-sourced their software:

The Care-O-bot 3 software platform was recently ported to ROS and is fully available as open source. You can now go to the ROS.org wiki and find documentation on the many software packages that they’ve released.

This is great news! Developers will now be able to collaborate in making these robots do some truly amazing things, like accurate object recognition, which is becoming increasingly prevalent in consumer robotics as technologies develop. In Care-O-bot 3’s case, objects are first scanned in 3 dimensions via a camera in the head. Once the bot has a 3d image saved, it can compare that saved image to live images from its camera, to determine which object is which:

Congratulations to Fraunhofer IPA! It’s hard not to win in open sourcing software, wouldn’t you agree?

[ Fraunhofer IPA ] VIA [ Willow Garage ]

Ooo baby, that’s hot stuff. Hot stuff. Like, when you pull it out reeeeaaaaal slow and there’s that spark… Excuse me, I need to go recharge my Roomba.

$18.

[ Go Ape Shirts ] VIA [ Fashionably Geek ]