So, as you may or may not know or care, I also write posts for OhGizmo.com. Obviously, BotJunkie is way more awesome, but sometimes I just have to suck it up and write about consumer electronics and gadgets and stuff. It’s one of those days, since the Game Developer’s Conference is going on here in San Francisco. If you’re interested in Sony’s new PlayStation Move motion controller or a music game that uses a real playable guitar instead of a plastic thing with buttons, please feel free to swing by over there. Meantime, enjoy a couple more vids from Cybernetic Zoo and I’ll be back here with our usual robotyness in a day or two.

Odex-1. The creepy music is not helping.

This is the Adaptive Suspension Vehicle, a product of Ohio State University and DARPA in 1984. It weighs 2600 kg, has 1.4m ground clearance, and can cross a 1.8m ditch. When you turn it off, it lies down on its belly, which for some reason I find to be incredibly cute.

[ Cybernetic Zoo ]

On a side note, just another shout-out to commenter Cynox. All these awesome retro robot posts were derived from his Pop Sci tip. If you find something cool, let me know… We’ve got an occasionally flaky contact form, or feel free to email me directly: e v a n @ b o t j u n k i e . c o m , without all the spaces of course.

Another gem from Cybernetic Zoo is Alpha, a robot created in 1934. Here are some excerpts from a contemporary article from Time magazine:

Last week Alpha, the robot, made its first public appearance in the U. S. One of the most ingenious automatons ever contrived by man, a grim and gleaming monster 6 ft. 4 in. tall, the robot was brought to Manhattan by its owner-inventor-impresario, Professor Harry May of London, and installed on the fifth floor of R. H. Macy & Co.’s department store. The creature had a great sullen slit of a mouth, vast protuberant eyes, shaggy curls of rolled metal. In one mailed fist Alpha clutched a revolver.

Professor May, a dapper, blond, beak-nosed man in his middle thirties, signaled his assistant who drew a curtain behind the stage, revealing the massive control cabinets to which the robot was wired.

Said the crisp British voice of Professor May: “Wake up!”

The eyes of the automaton glowed red.

“Stand up!”

The robot clicked and whirred. Pivoting at knees and waist, it slowly stood up.

“Raise your right arm.” Alpha gave a tremendous Nazi salute.

When commanded, the robot lowered its arm, raised the other, lowered it, turned its head from side to side, opened and closed its prognathous jaw, sat down.

More, after the jump. (Read more…)

Nick Donaldson and his little robotic shoulder monkey were frequently seen around RoboGames, but somehow MechRC has gotten their hands on the design and has turned it into a full-on production toy. Called Cheeky Monkey, the robot is controlled by a remote that’s hidden in your pocket. He has a velcro butt that sticks to your shoulder to keep him from escaping, and infrared sensing eyes to help him fix on the people he’s being cheeky at. When you’re not commanding him to perform one of 16 different actions, he’ll amuse himself, and there are apparently also a few easter eggs in his programming for you to discover.

Cheeky Monkey should be available in September for a mere $25.

[ MechRC ] VIA [ I4U ]

On yesterday’s retro robot article, David Buckley provided a link to Cybernetic Zoo, a website with a whole bunch of incredible pictures and information on early robots from all over the world. You can easily spend a few hours (or days?) paging through all of the bots, but here are some of my favorites:

Arok, an American robot designed by Ben Skora in 1975. Arok can lift 125 pounds and move at 3 mph. It’s radio controlled, and that freakish head is a Frankenstein mask.

More, after the jump. (Read more…)

Commenter Cynox was browsing through the 137 years of Popular Science magazine which are now available online, and he noticed this robot in the September 1984 issue. Called Odex I, it was developed by a (now apparently defunct) company called Odetics. Odex was six and a half feet tall, had six legs, and was fully capable of walking. Although it only weighed 370 pounds, each of its legs could lift 400 pounds. It could dead lift some 2100 pounds, and carry 900 pounds while walking at normal speed (which was about 18 inches per second). Odex used a tripod gait, and the fishbowl thing on top contained sensors that helped it avoid obstacles. It was one of the first robots with an onboard computer that helped coordinate all of its limbs. Since the limbs could articulate themselves in several directions independently, Odex was able to rapidly change its limb configuration to squeeze through tight spaces, move quickly, or lift stuff. It was able to climb into the back of a truck through a combination of automated step behaviors and teleoperation, which was pretty damn good for 1984.

Odex was called a “functionoid,” which implied that it was good for multiple tasks, as opposed to the single function robots that were in use in factories. There were a lot of potential applications for Odex, from coal mining to seafloor exploration to nuclear inspections to military operations, but despite some potential partnerships with NASA and the military and a huge amount of spending on robotics research in the late 80s, Odetics stopped working on robots by the early 90s and pretty much vanished a few years later. In light of how things went, it’s interesting to read some of the quotes from the time when Odex represented a huge technological advance:

“We believe that when historians recount the evolution of walking machines, Odetics’ research will be considered an important part of the development of this technology.”

This may actually be true, for all I know, even if the advances made by Odex I and Odetics aren’t directly associated with them anymore.

If anyone else sees any cool robots from the Pop Sci archives, please post ‘em in the comments.

[ Popular Science ]
[ Odex @ TheOldRobots ]

Thanks Cynox!

Google, and companies like Google, are out there to help us. They take the personal information that we give them, and make sure that it’s as available to us as conveniently as possible in as many forms as we like and from wherever we may be. Problem is, Google can’t be everywhere, so sometimes there are questions that it can’t answer… Questions like, “where did I leave that book I was reading last night?” Wouldn’t it be great if you could just Google that?

You can’t, yet. But you can Gåågle it, with your very own GåågleBot. “GåågleBot” is pronounced just like “Googlebot,” which is Google’s automated web indexer. “Gå” means “go” in Swedish, and the GåågleBot is a go-go mobile indexing robot created from a Roomba. GåågleBot goes about its normal vacuuming business, but as it does, a camera mounted on the front sends images back to a webserver via a wireless card. Using some optical character recognition software, the images are scanned for text, and anything that shows up is added to a searchable index.

At the moment, searching the index only returns the relevant image. So, if you’ve lost your book, GåågleBot can tell you whether it’s seen it, but not exactly where, although the picture it shows you might provide some clues. Problem is, without some modification, Roombas have no idea where they are in a room (beyond what information they can gather from their dock and virtual walls), but if you were to turn something like a Mint Sweeper or a Neato XV-11 into a Gååglebot, it might actually be able to tell you that the book you were reading last night is partially hidden underneath a stack of magazines. Uh, robotics magazines. Yeah.

You can find all the code to make your own GåågleBot at the link below.

[ GåågleBot ] VIA [ GoRobotics ]

Last August, we posted about ECCE, an “anthropomimetic” robot designed to attempt to duplicate the muscular and skeletal functionality of a human. Kojiro is a robot from the University of Tokyo’s JSK Robotics Laboratory which was built based on the same kinds of ideas. At this stage, Kojiro’s highlight is his spine, which can bend and flex like ours do to allow the robot to move its torso. While it’s true that Kojiro’s spine doesn’t offer a range of motion that’s significantly different from (say) a couple axes worth of conventional servos, the big advantage at this point is that having a structure of artificial muscles, tendons, and bones makes the robot much more forgiving of impacts to both its own structure and whatever it may be trying not to crush. The disadvantage, however, is that such a complex structure is tricky to get to move just exactly the way you want it to, since you’ve got all kinds of different artificial muscles tugging different ways at the same time.

All of this research is focused on building robots that are more human-like, but I’m still wondering just why this is such an appealing thing to roboticists. I totally understand why learning from biological systems is important, but most of the successful applications that I’ve seen are bio-inspired rather than biomemetic, taking elements of biological design and using them to build better robots as opposed to building robots that are modeled on their biological counterparts. As both EECE and Kojiro show, humans are ridiculously complicated inside, and as research towards a potential anthropomimetic endpoint, it’s a good goal. My question, though, is that as a development perspective for practical robotics, are we better off (at this point, anyway) just letting robots be unapologetically robotic?

[ JSK Robotics Lab ] VIA [ IEEE ]

Somehow, the M3-Neony comes from the same lab that inflicted the CB2 robot child on the world. But obviously, they’ve learned from their questionable design decisions of the past and have moved on to research robots for cognitive development and motor learning that don’t look utterly freakish. The M3-Neony is the same size, shape, and weight as a real baby, and just like a real baby (as far as I know, anyway), it has 22 motors, 2 cameras, 90 tactile sensors, and an integrated computer. It’s fully autonomous, and is designed to wander around on its own, after figuring out how to stand and walk based on your programming. Hypothetically, the process of programming M3-Neony to learn to walk will provide insights into how humans figure out the whole process.

This other robot is called M3-Synchy, and it’s kinda like the bot we wrote about yesterday in form, although rather than being a telepresence robot it’s designed to study how humans communicate with multiple robots, specifically using non-verbal means. Seems like it would be pretty cool if these two bots teamed up. Or, like, fought each other. Either way.

[ Osaka University (Translated) ] VIA [ GetRobo ]

Despite the fact that plastics are used everywhere, especially in products which are intended to be disposable, the recycling rate for plastics compared to metal, paper, and glass is utterly abysmal. It’s at like 6%, which means that 94% of potentially recyclable plastics end up in landfills or the tummies of sea turtles. The problem, as you have probably noticed, is that it’s a gigantic pain in the butt to do the obligatory pre-recycle sort with plastics. Yeah, there are recycle numbers stamped on most plastic containers, but I’ll bet you didn’t know that plastics with the same number often can’t actually be recycled together. Basically, it’s a mess.

Mitsubishi Electric Engineering Corp and Osaka University are tackling this problem with a robot, as well they should, since we humans have proven ourselves to be absolutely no good at plastic recycling. As you might expect, the the robot has some capabilities that we don’t, namely five lasers of different wavelengths that can be used to determine the reflectivity index, and therefore composition, of most plastics. The robot will automatically sort plastics into six different types, which takes the hard work of manual identification out the whole plastic recycling process.

There aren’t any details on how much plastic one of these robots can sort through every day, but there is a commercial version in the works, which should be available (at some point) for around $55k. At that price, it’s not going to be resource neutral anytime soon, but at least it will make you feel better about your recycling habits. And the sea turtles will thank you.

[ Osaka University ] VIA [ Telegraph ]

Most telepresence robots (with a few exceptions) aren’t especially presence-y, in that you can see people, and people can see you, but you’re pretty much just a head on a screen on a robotic stick with wheels. MeBot, a project from the Personal Robotics Group at MIT, adds a little bit of personality to telepresence by providing ways for users to communicate non-verbally, through things like head movement, arm movement, and posture:

The clever bit is that you, as the user, don’t need to tell the robot to do any of the expressive stuff that it does with its screen. It watches what you’re doing with your head, and duplicates those socially expressive movements with the robot. Is it effective? You bet:

We conducted an experiment that evaluated how people perceived a robot-mediated operator differently when they used a static telerobot versus a physically embodied and expressive telerobot. Results showed that people felt more psychologically involved and more engaged in the interaction with their remote partners when they were embodied in a socially expressive way. People also reported much higher levels of cooperation both on their own part and their partners as well as a higher score for enjoyment in the interaction.

Even though it has those little 3 DoF arms, MeBot isn’t designed to do anything in particular with its additional axes of motion. You currently control them sympathetically using a second set of arms, the positions and movements of which are duplicated by the arms on the robot. Conceivably, you could add some grippers to the robot and a more comprehensive control system on the other end, but that would defeat a large part of the purpose (and the beauty) of MeBot: it’s designed to be purely expressive, implying a natural simplicity that requires no extra effort or skill. It just does its thing while you do yours, which is how all the best systems (hardware and software alike) tend to function.

Another vid with a few more details, after the jump. (Read more…)