To kick off Hannover Messe (an industrial fair in Germany) last month, ABB taught one of their industrial robots to beat on stuff. Musically.

The robot percussionist was accompanied in its performance by a “real” cellist who commented “the industrial robot is a congenial partner and dominated his instruments with some virtuosity”.

The robot wasn’t an autonomous musician, at least not entirely… It looked like the guy controlling the robot was telling it what sequence of pre-programmed movements to make. If I’m not mistaken, he’s doing some stuff with a Tenori-On also, but I have no idea what… Maybe mixing background loops on the fly?

I love it when companies who build serious industrial robots take a step back and say, “let’s just do something cool,” because robots are cool, and they’re good for much much more than just totally taking over from us humans.

[ ABB ]

Thanks Maanasi!

In February of 2008, we covered an RHex-type robot at Georgia Tech learning how to move through loose sand. UPenn’s Kodlab has taken one of their RHex robots out to Mojave desert to teach it how to move through desert sand and and mountainous, broken terrain.

The robot received a significant overhaul in preparation for the trip, outfitting it with sensors and electronics to collect important locomotion data, as well as designing and installing a robust shell to endure the difficult environment. A white shell made from both polycarbonate and carbon fiber greatly helped in protecting the RHex robot from the harsh desert environment during tests.

Kodlab isn’t just out there taking notes, though… The robot is programmed with algorithims that allow it to learn as it goes, adapting its gait to move efficiently over different types of terrain. RHex offers the speed of a wheeled robot with the robustness of a tracked robot, except with even more adaptability thanks to its ability to change how it moves depending on what it’s moving over.

[ Kodlab ]

It’s that time of year again! The dancing hexapods are back for their annual competition of skill and style in Austria… I’m not sure who won, but my money is on the light-up disco ball, ’cause it’s shiny.

Another video, after the jump. (Read more…)

If there’s one thing that robots are absolutely fantastic at, it’s solving Rubik’s Cubes. The task plays to their strengths: brute computing power coupled with fast and precise manipulation. A traditional cube is 3x3x3, but the MultiCuber is capable of solving cubes that are significantly more complex, up to 5x5x5.

The robot itself is built entirely out of LEGO including a Mindstorms NXT kit and Vision Command webcam. Both the solver application running on the laptop and the embedded software running on the NXT were written in C++. The laptop communicates with the NXT via USB.

The application uses a generic algorithm that can solve a cube of any dimension limited only by RAM and time. It has been tested with software models of cubes up to 100x100x100.

The physical robot can’t quite handle a 100x100x100 cube, of course… But, a version has been created that can solve 6x6x6 cubes, which have about 157 152 858 401 024 063 281 013 959 519 483 771 508 510 790 313 968 742 344 694 684 829 502 629 887 168 573 442 107 637 760 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 possible permutations. Next, they should start working on a robot to solve cubes with extra spatial dimensions, ’cause that would be pretty cool to watch.

Thanks David!

Well, I didn’t get one, but ten eleven research groups are getting their very own PR2s to mess around with as part of the PR2 Beta Program. Out of 78 submissions, Willow Garage was forced to (somehow) choose only ten eleven, and those lucky sods will get a PR2 for a couple years. The goal is to generate a whole bunch of new ROS libraries that other robots running ROS will be able to use to do everything from the laundry to the dishes. And, you know, other stuff.

There are going to be some fascinating developments coming out of this program. And since it’s all open source, if you have a robot capable of running ROS, you may actually directly benefit from what these groups come up with. Summaries of all of the accepted proposals, after the jump. (Read more…)

Holonomic wheels are those wheels-within-wheels things that give normal wheels an additional axis of motion, allowing robots that use them to translate or rotate in place. The BallP (Ball inverted Pendulum) robot adds yet another axis of sorts by balancing a set of holonomic-type wheels on a bowling ball covered in rubber. BallP is able to translate in any direction, and it’s also able to spin in place like a conventional holonomic base. The advantage that BallP has, however, is that it can do all this in a tiny footprint (or ballprint, I guess)… The disadvantage is that BallP is inherently unstable and has to stay powered up to keep from falling over.

It’s cool to see how three of the BallP robots working together, with a human, are able to deal with large and heavy objects by acting as passive supports. The creator of the robot, Dr. Masaaki Kumagai of Tohoku Gakuin University, is currently working on ways to get the robots to actively cooperate in more complex tasks.

[ RDE ] VIA [ IEEE ]

Last year when SparkFun Electronics hosted their first autonomous vehicle competition, 2 robots (out of 8) managed to compete the course. This year, there were 18 teams, and the competition was fast and furious, with the winning ground vehicle making it around the SparkFun building autonomously in 1 minute 55 seconds. The fastest UAV generated its own wormhole and finished the course in -4 seconds… Either that, or it got 30 seconds free for an autonomous landing. Here’s a highlight video:

[ SparkFun ]

The Indoor Aerial Robot Competition was held at Drexel University last week, featuring a bunch of the chubbiest fully autonomous robots you’re ever likely to see. The bots were tasked with locating and retrieving small boxes, and doing search and destroy on hapless red balloons:

Incidentally, if you like the blimps, you can buy one in a kit for under $100 (with some autonomous capabilities, even) from Make, here.

[ IARC ]

Ryan Calo is contributing a chapter on robots and privacy to a new book being published by MIT entitled The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics. You can download the entire chapter here, and I’ve posted a few excerpts below:

It is not hard to imagine why robots raise privacy concerns. Practically by definition, robots are equipped with the ability to sense, process, and record the world around them Robots can go places humans cannot go, see things humans cannot see. Robots are, first and foremost, a human instrument. And after industrial manufacturing, the principle use to which we’ve put that instrument has been surveillance.

…

The home robot in particular presents a novel opportunity for government, private litigants, and hackers to access information about the interior of a living space. Robots on the market today interact uncertainly with federal electronic privacy laws and, as at least one recent study has shown, several popular robot products are vulnerable to technological attacks—all the more dangerous in that they give hackers access to objects and rooms instead of folders and files.

Okay, so, should you panic? Probably not. More, after the jump. (Read more…)