When we wrote about Alpha the robot back in March, we mentioned that it wasn’t exactly the safest machine to be around:

“Once it fired its pistol without warning, blasting the skin off [its creator's] arm from wrist to elbow. Another time it lowered its arm unexpectedly, struck an assistant on the shoulder, bruised him so badly that he was hospitalized.”

Anyway, the article in the picture above (from 1932) is a contemporary account of the incident, and although it seems as though the author probably embraced his creative license a bit more than a newspaper reporter perhaps should have, it’s an interesting peek into how people reacted to some of the very first humanoid robots. You can read the whole article in PDF format here.

On a side note (which is inevitably going to become the focus of this post, so here we go), it’s sort of amazing how similar that headline is to the type of things we read and hear when robots (for whatever reason) cause injuries to humans in the present. Irrespective of what actually happened, the robot is always given some kind of malicious motive, which obviously it doesn’t possess… Because of how they’re constructed, robots are always (always) doing what you tell them to do. If they screw something up, it’s because you (or some other human) screwed it up first, either in terms of the hardware or the software.

Also, I would just like to point out that this story, rather than illustrating the potential dangers of armed robots, should actually serve as an example of why a robot with a gun isn’t necessarily any more or any less dangerous than a human with a gun. I mean, this is gun safety 101: if someone (or something) has a loaded weapon, you don’t stand in front of it. Yes, robots can occasionally be unpredictable. So can humans. The difference is, when a robot shoots you when you didn’t intend it to, you can rip it apart, figure out what happened, and fix it so that it (or that particular issue, anyway) doesn’t happen again.

[ Jess Nevins ] VIA [ io9 ]

Kevin Warwick was arguably* the world’s first cyborg in 1998 when he got an RFID chip implanted into his arm that allowed him to interact with computer systems using a part of his body. In this interview, he talks about the present and future of cybernetics.

The first part of the interview is pretty tame (except for the big about the brain cell controlled robots, which is very interesting), but then Kevin starts talking about how he had his nervous system hooked up to his wife’s nervous system and things get a little freaky. Good stuff.

[ Motherboard ] VIA [ BB ]

*If you choose to define a cyborg as a person who has some form of technology integrated into their bodies to enable them to interact with the world in a different way, as opposed to (and this may be more generalized) a human with electronic enhancements, in which case the first person with a pacemaker (a guy named Arne Larsson) might have been the first cyborg back in 1958.

I guess it’s cold enough up thar in Norway that even UAVs need their own little comfy modernist Scandinavian drone huts that look rather a lot like mailboxes. They’re part of Scandicraft’s ScanCam perimeter security system, and the idea is that the huts act as base stations for roving semi-autonomous quadrotors that are controlled remotely. The quadrotors can launch, recover, and recharge themselves at their huts (or “hangars” I guess), and when it snows (which I hear it doesn’t do once or twice a year), the bots can stay snug at home, enjoying their stylish furnishings which you can find at your friendly neighborhood IKEA as part of the new Röböüüüt collection.

[ Scandicraft ]

Somehow, although it’s been some 4500 years, there’s still a little bit of the Great Pyramid that’s entirely unexplored. From the two chambers inside the pyramid (the King’s Chamber and Queen’s Chamber), there are small shafts (about the size of a breadbox) leading away towards the exterior. These passages are blocked by stone doors with copper handles built into them, and a previous expedition found that behind was of the doors was… Another door. So this time, a team sponsored by Leeds University and supported by Dassault Systems has built a robot designed to find out what’s behind that next door. It’s totally tricked out, with:

· A micro “snake camera” that can fit through small spaces and see round corners like an endoscope
· A miniaturized ultrasonic device that can tap on walls and listen to the response to help determine the thickness and condition of the stone
· A miniature ‘beetle’ robot that can fit through a hole 20mm diameter for further exploration in confined spaces
· Precision compass and inclinometer to measure the orientation of the shafts
· A coring drill that can penetrate the second blocking stone (if necessary and feasible) while removing the minimum amount of material necessary

This is actually the third robot that’s been sent down this particular shaft; the second was an iRobot project in cooperation with National Geographic:

My guess as to what’s down there? A THIRD DOOR. Followed by a fourth door, and fifth door, and then some hieroglyphs saying “sucker.”

[ Djedi Robot ] VIA [ Independent ]

This, kids, is yet another reason why you should start teaching yourself robotics. Plus, you can tell your parents (or your significant other, if you’re a big kid) that you “need a new paintball gun for your science project” (or something). Instead of a Tippman, though, I’d have to suggest something way better; something like an AKALMP Excalibur (otherwise known as the greatest paintball gun ever made).

Anyway, wouldn’t it be cool if you could somehow buy this turret setup as a kit or something? Yeah it would.

[ Alter Robotics ]

If you were Google, what would you do with an autonomous, camera-equipped quadrotor? Google, who is Google, must have a pretty good idea (or ideas), since they’ve bought their own Microdrone, which (last time we checked) costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $60k. According to the German publication Wirtschaftswoche, Microdrones GmbH says that their UAVs “are superbly suited to deliver more up-to-date recordings for mapping service Google Earth,” although that may just be a potential use that they’re suggesting as opposed to what Google is actually planning. Still, it’s kinda fun to think about… Like, it might be possible for Google to deliver a live version of Google Earth, at least over a small area, using a Microdrone (or a network of microdrones!) and a georeferenced live video network link.

Or they could be doing something entirely different.

The point is, I guess, that the Microdrone offers a way to collect data that is pretty much limited only by the imagination of the user, and Google has proven to be pretty creative when it comes to collecting and deploying imagery. So now that they have one, the sky’s the limit. Or rather, it isn’t.

[ Microdrones GmbH ] VIA [ Blogoscoped ]

“Vacuum living room” is where “sex” would be on the human version Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It doesn’t strike me as quite the same, but who knows… Maybe, to a Roomba, it is.

Man, that’s deep.

[ Lunchbreath ]

Thanks TheophileEscargot!

As soon as they figure out how to get quadrotors to operate outside of a motion capture environment as well (or nearly as well) as they do inside, surveillance could very well be their first major application, the appeal being that in addition to being highly mobile, quadrotors can set themselves down and provide static surveillance without wasting energy staying aloft. This isn’t a capability that most currently fielded UAV systems possess, despite some extremely cool research into fixed-wing perching.

Although it may not be the greatest thing, from a moral standpoint, that militaryish applications are driving robot development, there’s a pronounced trickle-down effect as eventually all that military hardware (or components thereof) becomes available to normal people who just want to do cool stuff with robots.

[ GRASP @ UPenn ]

The original Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em robots game has a certain charm about it, but nothing that can’t be improved with a bunch of servos and some fancy movement detecting watches from Texas Instruments. Fancy yes, but remarkably cheap (especially considering the fact that a Ti-83 graphing calculator with 32kb of RAM and a 6 (six!) MHz CPU still costs a blasphemous $130) as you get a three axis accelerometer, pressure sensor, and RF wireless communications (plus a watch) for only 50 bucks. Anyway, with one of these watches on each wrist, the Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots game can be completely controlled by the users’ motion, albeit with a bit less ferocity than what tends to be traditional. Quick, somebody call Hugh Jackman…

[ TI Wiki ] VIA [ Hackaday ]

ROCR may not look like a monkey, but it climbs like one. It may not look like a clock, but it climbs like one of those, too. Or at least, it shares its principles of efficient movement with both monkeys and clocks. The secret (which isn’t so secret) is in the pendulum tail, which oscillates back and forth. As it does so, a gearing system transfers some of the momentum to the frame of the robot, driving alternating sides upwards and giving small claws a chance to find a new spot to grip. Since the pendulum keeps swinging, energy isn’t lost in the start-stop motion of traditional climbing, a method that monkeys have used since they were monkeys:

“Brachiation is most notably employed by gibbons when they swing from one handhold to the next in a dynamic pattern of gripping and swinging. Brachiative motion strings together a sequence of pendular paths with coordinated grip changes to achieve lateral motion. In this method of lateral swinging motion, very little input energy is required to maintain physical progress. ROCR turns standard gibbon brachiation vertical, combining it with human style mass shifting into a tail-swinging body-oscillating scansorial climbing strategy.”

ROCR is capable of climbing about a foot every two seconds with 20% efficiency, which is quite impressive for such a unique design and nearly on par with a car engine. The robot was designed by William Provancher, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Utah, who says that it could be used for “maintenance or inspection in environments such as the exteriors of buildings, bridges or dams, storage tanks, nuclear facilities or reconnaissance within buildings.”

[ ROCR ] VIA [ KurzweilAI ]