This is it… PR2 has finally reached its full potential: beer delivery. After many long hours teaching the robot to not ever bring anyone a Bud Light under any circumstances, Willow Garage has successfully completed their beer delivery hackathon. PR2 can now take orders for different kinds of beer, locate the fridge, open the door, scan all the different bottles and locate the tasty ones, pick them up, and then bring them back to you using facial recognition software to tell when it’s found a thirsty person. Oh, and it even remembers to close the fridge door.

And it opens bottles.

If it would just pour the beer into my mouth, I’d never have to move again.

Of course, there are lots of ways to go about getting a beer, and not everybody is going to have the same sort of fridge setup, so some tweaking will be required to get this software working robustly in your house on the PR2 that you don’t have yet. Remember, though, that all of their code is modular and open source, so it’ll be easy for others to take on each module (fridge opening, beer IDs, etc) and adapt them for other fridges and other tastes in beer. I have it on good authority that the Willow Garage team plans to put in many long hours honing their beer delivery software, testing it rigorously to make sure that the PR2 can deliver, say, a bottle of Guinness to a person over and over (and over) without shaking the bottles or spilling a drop. Yep, that’s gonna take a lot of testing, but it’s for science, so it’s worth it.

I stopped by Willow Garage late last week to see this whole process in action, and while it may take a little while (note the time compression on the video), it’s still pretty wild that they put this together in such a short amount of time. And like, the robot brings you beer, how can you not just totally geek out about that?

Don’t forget that there are 11 other PR2s on the loose now, and if this hackathon is any indication, we’re entitled to expect some pretty great stuff in the near future.

[ Willow Garage ]

One facet of RoboCup 2010 was the RoboCup@Home competition, which aims to “foster the development of useful robotic applications that can assist humans in everyday life.” Obviously, such applications must being with fetching beer from a fridge.

The robot in the video above is Dynamaid, from team NimbRo at the University of Bonn. It took second overall in the RoboCup@Home competition, which also included events like shopping in an actual supermarket. For chips. To go with the beer. Obviously, robots are getting smarter.

[ Dynamaid @Home ]

This microbot, born out of a collaboration between the University of Washington and Stanford, weighs half a gram, is about the size of a dime, and is thinner than your fingernail. This robot actually started out as a prototype part for a paper-thin scanner or printer back in the 90s. Then, the same hardware was used to design a docking system for picosatellites (more on that here). It was only recently that researchers flipped the thing over on its back and discovered that it could not only walk, but carry up to seven times its own weight while moving in any direction at a blistering 3 feet per hour.

The microbot has 512 teeny tiny individual legs, grouped into 128 clusters of four, positioned orthogonally to one another to allow for movement in any direction. The legs consist of an electrical wire sandwiched between two different thermally reactive materials. When electricity runs through the wire, the materials heat and the outside one expands, forcing the foot to curl. When the current is turned off, the foot cools, returning to its original position. At such small scales, this process can happen very rapidly, and the feet are able to complete a movement cycle between 20 and 30 times every second.

Since the microbot didn’t start off life as a robot at all, it’s far from optimized… For example, minor modifications could likely reduce its weight by about 90%, which would boost its power to weight ratio (and potential payload) even higher. This means that it should be relatively straightforward to equip the robot with a battery, circuit board, and sensors, making it entirely autonomous.

[ UWNews ] VIA [ PFN ]

As communication gets easier and even more pervasive for those of us who spend indecent amounts of time on our computers, other generations who we really should be paying a lot more attention to are getting, to some extent, left out. It’s not their fault; it’s our fault for being lazy and just assuming that by updating our Twitter and Facebook pages everybody who cares will be able to keep up to date. Shame on us, to be sure, but it’s not like we’re going to change, right?

Kompott is a robot designed to mitigate this issue by collecting phone calls, email, and social network updates and presenting them in an intuitive and easy to understand format. I’m not sure about the whole wacking ‘upside the head thing, but I do really like how easy it is to respond to messages… You just talk, and the robot takes care of all the actual internet stuff.

Kompott is just a prototype, for now.

[ Kompott ]

Thanks Tamberg!

Yes, that’s Ahmadinejad, going toe to toe (almost) with Iran’s newest (and only) humanoid robot: Surena-2*. Details on Surena-2 are vague in the way that only an official state news agency can make them, but we know that it’s 1.45 meters (4.7 feet) tall and weighs 45 kilograms (99 pounds).

“Walking slowly like human beings with regular arm and leg movements are among its characteristics,” [the report] said. “Such robots are designed and developed to be used in sensitive and difficult jobs on behalf of a person or as help.”

The report did not elaborate on the robot’s capabilities.

Surena-2 can walk (slowly), and it doesn’t seem to have any vision or speech capabilities. And that really is the extent of what anyone seems to know, so I guess feel free to use your imagination as far as what, exactly, Surena-2 is intended to, you know, do.

VIA [ GulfNews ]

*You’re probably wondering why Iran’s first humanoid robot is called Surena 2, and the answer (according to Google) seems to be that the first version of the robot (from 2008), while humanoid in shape, couldn’t actually walk but instead skated around on wheeled feet. Video here.

This video shows Herb, Intel’s Home Exploring Robot Butler, doing some stuff with a bottle of Fuze, which strikes me as as easily one of the most appropriate beverages for a robot to be messing with, although a McMenamins Terminator Stout would be more ironic (and tastier), especially if the robot tried kill you with it or something. Yeah, I don’t know where I was going with all that, but back to Herb.

Herb is comprised of a Segway base, two Barret manipulator arms, a sweet rotating laser rangefinder, a camera, and a whole bunch of computers. For those of you who are familiar with the antics of PR2, Herb probably seems sort of similar, at least in essential capabilities and objectives (and even basic design). This should be no surprise:

A recent survey by Ray et al. (2001) reveals that when asked what they would like a robot to do for them, the top answers were cleaning, dish washing, laundry, ironing, and moving heavy things, all of which involve the robot manipulating objects in the world, and none of which achievable by robotic agents in the market now.

In order to get a robot to do these kinds of things effectively, it just makes sense to design a mobile platform with two arms, a mobile base, and elevated sensors. After all, that’s the basic design of a human (arms + mobile base + sensor package), and we’re looking for robots that function well in a world designed for humans, so a pseudo-human platform is the way to go.

To make these kinds of things happen from a software standpoint, both Intel and Willow Garage are breaking complex tasks (like laundry and dish washing) into a series of individual objectives that can be focused on (like folding towels and putting dirty dishes on a cart). Once each objective is completed, stringing them together to create a package that can do laundry or the dishes from start to finish is (if not totally easy) at least significantly more achievable than trying a less distributed approach.

Herb is interesting and all, but I’m sorry Intel, you just set the bar WAY too high with Jeffrey, and now you’re doomed to forever disappoint the robotics community until you swap your robotics research budget with your advertising budget and make him a reality. Because if you don’t, you’ll hurt his feelings.

Again.

[ Herb ]
[ 2009 Paper (*.PDF) ]
VIA [ Fast Company ]

References

Ray, C., Mondada, F., & Siegwart, R. (2001). What do people expect
from robots? In Intelligent robots and systems, 2008 proceedings
2008 IEEE/RSJ international conference (pp. 3816–3821).

This paper is super interesting, and you should absolutely go read it, unless you’d rather just wait until next week when I post about it, which I will, because like I said, this paper is super interesting.

Mad props to Erico Guizzo from IEEE Spectrum for coming up with this robot baby matrix, which is pretty self explanatory (right?). Robot baby matrix… That’s my official phrase of the day. Click to embiggen.

Robots include:

Nao
M3-Neony
Nexi
Simon
iCub
CB2
Diego-San
Zeno
Yotaro
Kojiro
Robotinho
Repliee R1
RealCare Baby

[ IEEE Spectrum ]

We’ve covered a couple different proposals for DARPA’s Squishbot Chembot program, including a blobbot powered by air and a robotic amoeba powered by chemicals. This latest Chembot prototype is a collaboration between iRobot, MIT, and Harvard, and like its Chembot compatriots, the system of movement it employs is quite simple: by selectively inflating compartments on its exterior, the robot can roll itself forward. Ultimately, this robot would be powered by chemical pressure (instead of compressed air), achieved through thermal expansion or phase transition or “smart fluid” (whatever that is).

It goes without saying that I find this whole program extremely cool and innovative, but also a little bit, I dunno, freaky. I think it’s because these Chembots strike some sort of Uncanny Valley chord with me… Not in terms of their resemblance to a human (obviously), but in a more general sense: they appear biological while being artificial. And this pseudo-biological construction and behavior comes across in a not great way, like space alien brain slug laying eggs in your eyeballs biological. I think it’s the way it pulses or something.

But maybe that’s just me.

I do think that robots like these have a lot of potential, specifically because they are so different. DARPA thinks so too, of course, but it’s fun to think about what kinds of non DARPA-y applications a Chembot might have… Like, I dunno, maybe blobbing around inside my couch looking for loose change, or landing a starring role in a horror movie or something.

[ MIT CSAIL DRL ] VIA [ Hizook ]

We covered NASA’s Project M back in May, and despite the fact that it still seems to be unapproved and unfunded, we’ve now got a prototype lander to take Robonaut wherever he wants to go. Hmm… Maybe this is the way to get cool stuff done at NASA: don’t approve it, and take away all the money. Anyway, pretty much the entirety of what I know about this lander is contained in the YouTube caption: it’s a prototype, it runs on methane and liquid oxygen, and will launch a version of Robonaut on future exploratory missions.

After the jump, more rocket porn, including gratuitous video video of a LOX/methane engine test firing. Turn up your bass for one of the coolest sounds ever. (Read more…)