The 2010 International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition took place last week, and the very first thing that happened was that everybody decided that they’d much rather spend their time building robot subs as opposed to gasping out the name of the competition, so it’s now just called “RoboSub.” These RoboSubs are autonomous (not remote controlled), so the competition operates kinda like the DARPA Grand or Urban Challenge: you push the go button, and then your robot is on its own, and you can do nothing but sit back and have an anxiety attack.

As you can see from the vid, the bots have a lot of fairly complicated tasks to perform, and I imagine that being underwater causes a whole host of sensor issues… For example, several tasks require the robots to differentiate colored objects, and colors change underwater depending on depth as the red light gets filtered out. Not to mention the whole water not mixing with electronics thing…

Day 2 and the day 3 final, after the jump. (Read more…)

A bunch of you have been wondering what the deal is with the Neato XV-11 robot vacuum, since it was a month ago that Neato said they’d started shipping their pre-orders. We got in touch with Neato, and they’ve confirmed that the robots are shipping to people who placed a pre-order. If they seem to be moving kinda slowly getting the bots in the mail, it’s for a good reason: they’ve had an “overwhelming response” to the pre-orders that “exceeded expectations” and they’ve run into a bit of a backlog. Neato says that they should be caught up before the end of August. If you want one, it’s worth noting that they won’t bill your credit card until the robot actually ships.

Anybody get theirs yet? Please post if/when you do!

[ Neato Robotics XV-11 ]

Quadrotors: they can do everything you can do, only better. Way better. Markus Hehn and Raffaello D’Andrea at the Institute of Dynamic System and Control at ETH Zurich have gone from dancing quadrotors to a quadrotor that can actually balance an inverted pendulum in flight. Impressive, yes. Useful? Maybe… If you have quadrotors that are trying to lift something unbalanced, for example, being able to compensate for that could certainly come in handy. Of course, all of this comes with the caveat that you need a pretty swanky external vision system to get it all working properly, but maybe if you mount that on a couple other quadrotors, you’d be good to go.

[ IDSC FMA ]

Anybots is now taking pre-orders for what’s (realistically) the first self contained commercial telepresence robot available to the general public, QB. A $1500 pre-order (don’t get too excited, that’s just a 10% down payment on the total cost of $15k) gets you into the “100 Club,” which is good for:

o Access to the first 100 Anybots’ serial numbers
o Invitation to a reception at Anybots headquarters
o VIP Anybots test drives for you and five friends
o Access to on-going perks as Anybots rolls out additional products and services
o A November 2010 Anybot (the rest of the pre-orders ship in 2011)

QB is designed to be very easy to use… You log in to the robot from any computer, and you get a video feed and directional audio to let you interact with other people, plus driving controls. The robot has a LIDAR system built into its base to help you avoid obstacles, and it automatically corrects for the fact that you suck at driving robots. Thankfully, although it’s a Segway-type 2 wheel balancing robot, it has a “tail” that keeps it from falling over and crushing your pets and/or kids if it loses power. Not that it’s likely to crush much of anything… At 35 pounds, QB is borderline anorexic (just look at that figure!) and can be easily lifted up and down stairs into a car or something like that.

I hope (I really do) that QB becomes (if not hugely popular) at least commercial successful. Or at the very least, commercially not a total failure. Big, expensive, commercial robots that don’t build stuff haven’t really found a market niche, and this is not the greatest economic climate to introduce something like QB (although I’m sure Anybots would argue that QB will save you lots of money in the long run, and they might be right). In any case, there are several other telepresence robots who will be watching QB closely, and for the sake of this whole industry, I hope this launch goes well.

Check out a FAQ full of tasty info here.

[ Anybots QB Preorder ]

In what probably isn’t a tribute to Spirit (which drove backwards from March of 2006 on due to a broken wheel) Curiosity took its first drive test on Friday at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where it’s undergoing assembly. Powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, the SUV-sized rover will be carrying a much larger science payload than the current Mars rovers are able to. Scheduled to arrive on Mars in August of 2012, Spirit is now officially one meter closer to its destination.

One meter down, only 188,500,000,000 meters to go.

[ MSL ] VIA [ Discover ]

A week or so ago, we posted about a 2008 study suggesting that humanish robots are a bad, bad idea. However, it’s definitely true that human facial features are great at communicating emotional information to humans, so there’s certainly something to be said for incorporating things like eyes and eyebrows into a robot. Flobi, a robot from Bielefeld University, is a good example of a conscious decision to make a humanoid robot head that is capable of recognizable human expressions while avoiding the Uncanny Valley.

Flobi relies on expressive elements that are almost cartoonish in their simplicity: 18 actuators move the eyes, eyelids, eyebrows, and mouth, and there are LEDs in Flobi’s cheeks to let it blush… I say ‘it’ because Flobi’s hair (all of the facial elements, in fact) can be easily changed to let it appear to be male or female. For me, though,that process brings back quite a bit of the uncanny:

I find it pretty amazing how much of a difference subtle little things like blinking can make when it comes to how I (personally) relate to humanoid robots. And that’s part of the tricky thing about the Uncanny Valley: there’s a very fine line between seeming human, and seeming too human.

As IEEE Spectrum points out, Flobi looks a lot like iCat. Like, a lot. This makes iCat angry:

And you don’t want to make iCat angry…

[ CIT ] VIA [ IEEE Spectrum ]

Earlier this year we posted about how people are starting to specifically request robot-assisted surgeries as opposed to having ‘just’ a human operate on them. Now, researchers at Duke are working on an entirely autonomous robot arm that can take biopsies on humans based on ultrasound data. It works pretty well, too, at least on the dead turkeys that they tried it out on:

“In the latest series of experiments, the robot guided the plunger to eight different locations on the simulated prostate tissue in 93 percent of its attempts.”

I’m not entirely sure what happened in that other 7 percent… Most likely a slight miss with minimal consequences for the ex-turkey, as opposed to the robot going berserk and wildly stabbing everything within reach. More importantly, I’m curious as to what what the average “miss” rate is for a human taking a biopsy based on an ultrasound.

In any case, the idea here is that robots will eventually (soon, perhaps?) be able to at the very least take care of simple, routine medical procedures which will save patients both time and money.

“We’re now testing the robot on a human mannequin seated at the examining table whose breast is constrained in a stiff bra cup,” Smith said. “The breast is composed of turkey breast tissue with an embedded grape to simulate a lesion.”

This is making me hungry. Vid, after the jump. (Read more…)

Once again, it’s robots and pancakes. Not that I have a problem with that, except for the fact that it makes me want pancakes and I don’t have pancakes. This robot arm has been taught to flip a rather strange looking pancake (a pancake modified with vision tracking markers) through kinesthetic teaching, where a human demonstrates the basic movement sequence, and then the robot gradually learns how to move itself to duplicate the essentials of that sequence. For the flip, the robot figures out that the initial throwing motion requires a stiff arm, while the catching motion requires a more compliant arm.

This behavior has been programmed by Sylvain Calinon and Dr. Petar Kormushev. Watch a robot arm learning how to iron, after the jump. (Read more…)

We’ve seen a couple different kinds of perching UAVs lately, including Stanford’s wall sticking UAV and EPFL’s head-first perching UAV. This latest UAV, from the Robot Locomotion Group at MIT’s CSAIL, is a more traditional percher, able to land itself on a wire. This is a pretty neat trick (and quite useful, considering the prevalence of wires), and since birds manage to do it all the time, it can’t possibly be that hard, right?

See? All you have to do is increase your angle of attack to such an extent that the turbulence caused by air separation behind your wings combined with the drag caused by the front of the wings brings your aircraft to a gentle, pinpoint landing. Easy!

Next? Give these planes claws to let them siphon electricity from the wires that they land on.

[ Robot Locomotion Group: Perching ]

“I probably shouldn’t have given it a superclaw, or a laser eye, or the power to control dogs’ minds.”

This is a picture from a beautifully illustrated children’s book entitled Oh No! Or, How My Science Project Destroyed The World, starring a a 5th grade girl and her misbehaving (to put it mildly) giant robot. Written by Mac Barnett with illustrator Dan Santat, you can find the book on Amazon for an absurdly reasonable $12. One more image, after the jump. (Read more…)