There are big plans in store for those ten eleven PR2s that Willow Garage is donating to worthy institutions worldwide. It’s a good thing that someone over there is writing up exactly what each one is going to do, since if they didn’t, I’d feel like I had to. The first installment on this presumably ten eleven part series is on Georgia Tech’s proposal, “Assistive Mobile Manipulation for Older Adults at Home.”

Robots like the PR2 may be able to help older adults stay in their homes longer with a high quality of life. The Georgia Tech team aims to make progress towards this long-held dream.

Rather than try to guess what seniors want, the team will work with older adults to better understand their needs and how robots can help. The team will also write code to make the PR2 perform helpful tasks at home. By working closely with seniors throughout the research process, the team hopes to better meet real needs and accelerate progress. To make everything more realistic, the robot will spend some of its time in a real, two-story house on the Georgia Tech campus, called the Aware Home. This will enable older adults to work with the robot in a convincing environment, and will give the software developers a good place to test their code.

Lots more details, plus video of Georgia Tech’s presentation, at the link below.

[ Willow Garage Blog ]

Quadrotors are getting smarter and more talented, but besides surveillance, their usefulness is a bit limited due to their size. Where one little helicopter fails, however, an assemblage of little helicopters might be able to succeed. The Distributed Flight Array is a project from the Institute of Dynamic Systems and Control at ETH Zurich that aims to combine a bunch of different little autonomous helicopters into a big glob of autonomous helicopters. Each helicopter unit has its own motor, computer, and sensors, and can wirelessly communicate with all the other units. In addition to flying, they also have little motorized wheels underneath to let them crawl around the ground.

The especially cool bit is that the helicopters can also autonomously dock with each other, which enables them to team up to do things like steal children.

There are all kinds of ways in which a distributed flight array could be useful. One of the most obvious is heavy lifting… Got something heavy? Call in a bunch of robots to combine and lift it. Got something heavier? Call in a bunch more. If one robot breaks, it’s not a big deal, since you can just swap in another one. The robots are even able to adapt on the fly to keep the entire array stable, so adding and removing individual robots is relatively straightforward. Still, getting the robots to reliably dock with each other in mid air is probably easier said than done… We’ll definite be looking forward to seeing some video of that in action.

[ DFA ]

You can do some pretty incredible things with quadrotors in a precision motion capture environment. Angela Schöllig, Federico Augugliaro, and Raffaello D’Andrea from the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control at ETH Zürich in Switzerland have taught a pair of robot helicopters to dance in sync with a techno remix of the theme from Pirates of the Caribbean. Why? Well, why not? I imagine, though, that this demonstration is part of a larger research path towards enabling cooperative (or swarm, if you will) behaviors.

The environment that these quadrotors are dancing in is a 10m square box with netting on the sides and padding at the bottom, which allows for crazy moves with minimal risk to either the robots or nearby humans. At the top of the box are eight high speed cameras that are able to provide localization information with millimeter level of accuracy at a frequency of 200hz or greater. This means that you’re not likely to witness moves like this outside of a controlled and besensored space… At least, not until vision sensors and inertial measurement units get accurate enough, small enough, and cheap enough to put on the copters themselves.

[ IDSC ]

Now that we’ve reviewed both the iRobot Roomba 560 and the Neato XV-11, you’re probably wondering which one you should get. There’s no easy answer, but in this post we’ll highlight the features of each robot and the differences between them, so that you can decide which one is right for you.

If you haven’t read our individual reviews of each robot, you can get lots more detail at the following links:

BotJunkie Review: Neato Robotics XV-11
BotJunkie Review: iRobot Roomba 560

And, there will be jousting, after the jump. (Read more…)

When we posted our reviews of the Neato XV-11 and iRobot Roomba 560 robot vacuums, you had some questions. Well, Neato and iRobot have some answers. We also gave Neato the chance to respond to our iRobot interview… We’ve got it all for you, after the jump. (Read more…)

Well, it’s official. Crabfu is a Modern Marvel:

Congrats!

[ Crabfu Steamworks ]

Catching fish just got a whole lot easier. Researchers at NYU-Poly’s Dynamical Systems Laboratory have found that schools of golden shiners have no problem letting robot fish take over leadership roles when it comes to schooling, as long as the bots don’t look (or act) in ways that strike the fish as, you know, fishy.

Yeah, I went there.

Professor Maurizio Porfiri and his colleagues figured out that the real fish decide whether or not to school based on visual cues as well as how the water is moving. If the conditions are right, the fish will look for a big, decisive fish to follow, and they don’t care at all if that fish is a robot. This particular robot fish uses ionic polymers that swell and shrink in response to electrical stimulation to power its tail, resulting in reliable, silent, lifelike motion.

Researchers suggest that this technology could be used to steer schools of fish away from hydroelectric turbines. And, you know, that’s nice and all, but let’s think outside the tank for a minute… We now have the capability to use robots to control schools of fish. We have come to a point, as a society, where we can choose to use these powers for good, or for evil. Will fish robots lead schools of mackerel into out nets to feed humanity, or will they lead schools of piranhas into our swimming pools to kill us all? Either way, I smell a feature film.

[ NYU-Poly ] VIA [ Futurity ]

Thanks Dirk-Jan!

We posted about three different telepresence robots yesterday: the Anybots QB, the Willow Garage Texai, and the Vgo. Telepresence is great in concept, but as Erico Guizzo discussed a bit, it’s a strange combination of being somewhere and not being somewhere, and interactions with people are different in ways that range from subtle to drastic. Willow Garage has been using Texai in their office for quite a while; one of their employees, Dallas Goecker, ‘commutes’ daily from Indiana to California via Texai. So, they’ve been figuring out some of these social rules as they go, to the point where some things are now a part of the Texai communication software:

Here are a few built-in bits of etiquette:

Texai Rule #1: If you see me, I see you. Explanation: It’s about two-way communication. Implications: The cameras face forward because the screen faces forward. The pilots are only allowed to drive the Texai once they’ve shared their video stream.

Texai Rule #2: Texai do not record audio or video. Explanation: It’s about face-to-face communication.

More, after the jump. (Read more…)

We go to go to Willow Garage’s PR2 graduation party last week in person, but Erico Guizzo over at IEEE Automaton was even luckier: he attended in person, in a Texai telepresence robot. Erico wrote up a great post on his blog about the whole experience, and it’s definitely worth a read.

You just use the mouse to hold and drag a little red ball and the robot moves. You can also make the head camera point in different directions, or switch to an auxiliary camera that shows the robot’s wheels, to help while navigating through furniture and feet.

Learning how to drive is easy. But safety first! Willow makes new Texai users watch a video showing all the things you should not do with the robot — drive down a stairway, let children ride on it, stick a screwdriver into its body.

Sounds like an exciting video.

Incidentally, we found out that Texai will be available for purchase later this summer (followed by PR2 in the fall). They wouldn’t specify a price, but I would expect it to be somewhere between the $6000 Vgo and the $15000 QB.

Read more over on IEEE Automaton, where you’ll find out which Mythbuster couldn’t stop laughing at the Texai.

[ IEEE Automaton ]

In what may be (but probably isn’t) just a coincidence, a third telepresence robot has made a (pre) commercial appearance in as many weeks. This robot is called Vgo, and… Well, it does telepresence. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but you get on your computer on one end, connect to the robot, and then drive it around while looking through its cameras. Sensors keep you from running into stuff or falling down stairs, and it’ll run all day on one battery charge. The biggest news, at this point, is that the Vgo is only supposed to cost $5000. Plus a mandatory support contract of $1200 a year. So, $6000.

The Boston Globe has a nice piece on Vgo… There aren’t many more technical details, but I did find this interesting:

Two analysts I spoke with differed on the potential for robotic videoconferencing. Rob Enderle, a technology analyst at the Enderle Group who has written about the slow spread of traditional videoconferencing systems, said that “the closer we get to simulating being there, the better an alternative to travel it will become.’’

But Dan Kara, president of the publishing company Robotics Trends in Framingham, said, “I’m not quite sold on mobile telepresence. How is it that much better than having someone at the remote site carry around a netbook computer with a free copy of Skype on it?’’

The whole minion+laptop+Skype thing is exactly the point we made back when Anybots’ QA was introduced at CES for $30k. Obviously, a telepresence robot is much better than minion+laptop+Skype, but the question is, is it really that much better in terms of cost effectiveness? At the $6k price point, perhaps. Or maybe that’s not the question… Maybe the question should be, how much hardware is required to simulate being somewhere else to the extent that is necessary to make paying for a robotic telepresence solution a practical idea? I don’t have the answer, but hopefully the consumer market will, now that there are (or soon will be) three different telepresence robots available for people to purchase.

[ Vgo ] VIA [ Boston Globe ] VIA [ Texasalpha ]