Another year, another update to Samsung’s pimpin’ robovac… I guess it wasn’t satisfied with the first (or second) girl it managed to get into bed with. There isn’t that much detail on this latest generation of the Tango, but the big new feature seems to be a remotely accessible camera. Here’s all the info I’ve been able to find, from the Samsungtomorrow Flickr page:

A robot vacuum cleaner goes state-of-the-art with the launch of Samsung’s innovative vacuum cleaner, the industry’s first cleaning machine equipped with video surveillance functions — typical of the ubiquitous CCTV system around your neighbors.

A video robot vacuum cleaner is a kind of hybrid product, a combination of Samsung’s high-end robot cleaning technology and S-One’s proprietary video surveillance system. This innovative technology is a follow-up version to ‘Tango,’ responsible for expanding a robot cleaner market in Korea since last November.

As violent crimes have been on the rise, a keen interest in preventing such crimes among consumers grew higher as well. Hence needs for a variety of ‘pre-emptive’ measures tapping the cutting-edge technology — CCTV, emergency bell, or digital door-lock system — is growing, providing another niche area in the home appliance market.

I’m not exactly sure how the camera and the robot work to prevent crime… Like, does it patrol your house (while keeping it clean!) and then somehow contact you if it notices something suspicious? Or maybe it takes care of any intruders all by itself. Brutal.

Look for the Samsung Tango for around $680 this November, but only in Korea.

VIA [ Akihabara News ]

In March of last year, we posted about a project to mount WiFi and cellular routers on quadrotor UAVs to enable rapid deployment of networks in disaster areas. EPFL has been working on the same sort of thing, except utilizing swarms of micro air vehicles (MAVs) relying on intelligence algorithms derived from the behavior of army ants. Basically, it’s like LANDroids, except airborne.

SMAVNET (Swarming Micro Air Vehicle Network) consists of a whole bunch of small, cheap (or relatively cheap, more on that in a follow-up post) micro air vehicles. Each one carries an off-the-shelf USB wireless dongle, and by following simple rules to optimize their positions and scout new territory, the drones can spread out, locate a target, establish a robust aerial data network, and then make their way back to base for an automated landing when they’re finished. Sweet concept, right? Well, here’s the system in action using real MAVs:

As far as I know, these 10 MAVs constitute the largest outdoor aerial robotic swarm ever deployed. SMAVNET is primarily designed to facilitate communications in disaster areas. However, it’s hard to ignore the potential military applications, especially considering how similar SMAVNET is to the LANDroid project, which is sponsored by DARPA. There are obviously substantial upsides and downsides to flying network nodes versus ground network nodes, but it strikes me that a combination of the two would be ideal: SMAVNET provides fast response time, while LANDroids offer longer term endurance. That’s just a fantasy, of course, but it’s pretty cool to watch how swarm robotics has been evolving over the last few years, especially now that we’re starting to see real life practical applications for the technology.

[ SMAVNET ]

Thanks Sabine!

We heard about this a couple weeks ago, but now it’s officially official: PR2 is for sale (go buy one right now!), with a list price of $400,000 (plus shipping). Your choice of color. Luckily, a substantial discount is available for people who’ve demonstrated leadership in the open source community… If you’ve got a track record of providing quality open source software, you can apply to Willow Garage for their Open Source Discount Award, which is worth a staggering $120,000 (!) towards the purchase of a PR2. If that’s not a ringing endorsement of ROS and open source culture, I don’t know what is.

If you’re wondering where that $400k goes, well, robots are expensive, especially robots as comprehensively capable as PR2. The PR2 has lots (and lots) of sensors, each of which can cost well into the tens of thousands of dollars. Mix in a pair of robust arms, all the computer hardware in the base, and assembly and testing by hand, and you end up with a robot that costs about as much as a reasonably sized house. The good news is that as the market grows (not just for the PR2, but for the components separately as well), Willow Garage expects the price to drop dramatically.

I hate to keep making this comparison, but it’s like the personal computer 40 years ago. Computers went from being very expensive, very specific tools (breaking codes) to very expensive, very general tools (doing math problems), at which point everybody with a math problem wanted one, creating a market and forcing computers to get cheaper. This is the point in robotics that (hopefully) has just been crossed with the PR2, which is arguably one of the first seriously capable generalist robots to be commercially available.

Remember, the general idea behind the PR2 is to remove the whole having to build a robot bit from robotics, allowing software developers to focus on, you know, developing software, instead of building robots over and over. Since this is the first really serious attempt at such a robot, the market is both wide open and somewhat undefined, so it’s going to be interesting (to say the least) to see how well PR2 does as a commercial product, as well as who ends up buying one.

Now, if you can’t afford a PR2, there are still some options… You can download a very solid PR2 simulator, right now, for free, and start developing code. Of course, no matter how well something works in simulation, you’ll still need to test out your code on an actual robot, but there are plans in the works (most notably from Bosch, one of the recipients of the original 11 PR2s) to develop a sort of remote testing lab where people without a PR2 of their own can borrow some time on a communal robot for a little bit to run their code on. And don’t forget that ROS runs on lots of stuff, so you can start playing around with it on robots besides the PR2.

And speaking of playing around with it, it’s worth mentioning that there is no provision to keep people from using a PR2 for evil. I asked. So remember, kids: black power outlets and round doorknobs will keep you safe.

For now.

[ PR2 ]

[ Direct Link to Video ]

Using lasers to power vehicles is a method that’s been worked on for quite a while. Besides novel techniques like pulsed plasma propulsion (that uses a laser to make air explode underneath a vehicle, propelling it upwards), lasers have also been used to transfer power directly to vehicles, most notably in NASA’s space elevator competition. In of itself, laser propulsion is not particularly efficient, but the big advantage is that the fuel (the laser) stays on the ground, meaning that not only does the vehicle never have to refuel, it doesn’t have to waste payload on fuel or the associated systems.

LaserMotive, winner of the power beaming challenge at the 2009 Space Elevator Games, has applied their expertise to develop a laser powered remote control helicopter, a precursor to what they hope will be a new generation of UAVs. The helicopter weighs 22 grams, and stayed aloft for 6 hours by using tuned photocells to convert a few watts of power from a near-infrared laser (with a tracking system) on the ground directly into electricity. The helicopter would have stayed aloft indefinitely if its motor hadn’t burned out. Although the vehicle was tethered in this demonstration, the next step for LaserMotive is to develop a free-flying UAV that takes advantage of the same technology, and eventually, they envision long-duration UAVs being stationed above military bases, with the capability to glide long distances between laser ground stations.

There are certainly some compromises when it comes to laser power… For example, if your UAV needs 1 kilowatt of power, the laser needs to be outputting 2 kilowatts, which means 4 kilowatts are being delivered to the laser diodes. There are also potential issues with atmospheric interference. But, if you combine this technology with solar power and lightweight batteries, it’s easy to imagine a UAV that never has to land, ever.

Incidentally, this same type of technology is attempting to make its way into your living room to wirelessly power your electronics.

After the jump, a video of laser propulsion from the 2009 Space Elevator Games, and a bit more on LaserMotive. (Read more…)

Part of the appeal of flapping wing micro air vehicles is that (unlike helicopters) they offer some resilience against crashing into obstacles. Crashing is still bad, though, and (with some exceptions) significant damage to things that fly generally keeps those things from continuing to be useful. To mitigate this, Harvard University has developed an itty bitty differential to keep a pair of wings (say, on a robot bee or robot fly) generating the same amount of torque, even if one of those wings is damaged. The beauty of the PARITy differential (Passive Aeromechanical Regulation of Imbalanced Torques) is that it’s completely mechanical, and simply due to its design it will (for example) increase the flapping speed of a damaged wing to match the torque output of a paired, undamaged wing. Basically, it’s the same kind of thing that you have controlling the power to the wheels in your car, except about a million times smaller.

VIA [ Gizmag ]

Japan seems to always be at the forefront of creative hobby biped robots, and the 18th Robo-One contest is certainly no exception. Biped Robot News has tons of coverage, but I’ve reposted some vids of my personal favorites, of which Tokotokomaru takes the cake with its incredibly awesome head-mounted ducted fans:

Apparently, this is legal in combat:

Garoo will open a beer for you:

Two more, after the jump. (Read more…)

Colony Scout is a modular robot platform designed to provide adaptable and affordable swarm robotics to anyone who wants it. “Modular” and “adaptable” means that each individual robot comes with an accessory plate to which you can bolt pretty much anything you want, including a little forklift that extends up to 6 inches, or a digger arm and bucket with a 2 pound capacity:

Besides the accessories, Colony Scout is designed to be cheap and simple. The batteries and processor are easy to access, and the basic robot includes long range sonar and short range IR sensors to allow for obstacle avoidance. Also, the two halves of the chassis are coupled with a rotating joint, allowing the robot to navigate some pretty serious bumps, even at its 2 mph top speed:

The target price for for the Colony Scout is a reasonably affordable $500… In bulk, that is, but with swarm robotics, there’s really no other way to go.

[ Colony Scout ] VIA [ I Heart Robotics ]

Those cute little Landroids (disposable robots that work together to form a mobile local area network for soldiers) that iRobot is developing for DARPA have been evolving, and now sport all kinds of new hardware, including:

-Cliff sensors
-Front obstacle sensors
-Yaw sensors
-Four video cameras
-Two way audio
-And an optional laser scanner

Check out the video here.

That seems like a heck of a lot of hardware to stand up to the hypothetical $100 per bot mass production price, and I really, really hope DARPA stands firm on that point. I mean, I have to wonder if all of this stuff is really necessary to fulfill the Landroid’s mission. I loved the original concept which was basically just a little disposable tracked robot that turned into an internet node. Yes, having four cameras and a laser sensor makes it better at finding its way around, but is that critical equipment when you could just use a little camera and vision software like this prototype from the previous generation? More capabilities and increased adaptability are certainly valuable, but at some point Landroid will turn into something bigger and more expensive and not a Landroid at all. Besides, the whole point of a cheap and disposable node in an adaptive network is that if one node gets lost/stuck/destroyed/stolen by me, another one can just take its place.

[ iRobot Landroids ] VIA [ Robot Stock News ]

The robotics journal Autonomous Robots has its own blog, which is intended to take the hardcore robot news from the journal and make it a bit more reader friendly. They also link back to the journal articles, should you need a little of that hardcore techy info. Yeah baby. Anyway, looking back through some of their posts, I found these vids of LittleDog exhibiting some new learning behaviors.

While it’s best to develop a robot that’s capable of adapting to new situations, after the robot explores the world for a bit, new situations (in the general sense) stop showing up as often. So ideally, you want a robot that’s able to recognize a situation that it’s already experienced, and apply those past experiences without having to start figuring out what to do from scratch. To this end, Martin Stolle and Christopher Atkeson are developing a system that allows a robot like LittleDog to first recognize features that it’s seen before (like walls or gaps), and then access a library containing a sequence of actions that it has successfully applied to solve similar situations in the past. LittleDog can then alter those actions to apply them to the current situation rather than attempting to compute an entirely new action sequence. It’s faster, more efficient, and I imagine more successful since LittleDog is building on past experiences that worked as opposed to trying something entirely new.

After the jump, another LittleDog video, just because. (Read more…)

Robot plants are not new to BotJunkie, but creepy ones are. Not that this robot plant is intended to be creepy, but like everything in the Uncanny Valley, it just sort of ends up that way. Or maybe it’s just me.

Each of the plant’s 169 artificial leaves is controlled by a piece of shape memory wire. When cameras mounted above the plant see your hand move over it, it signals the plant to shimmy its leaves in the same area in response to a ‘virtual wind.’

Plant (that’s what it’s called, “Plant”) was designed by Akira Nakayasu, and will be on display at Ars Electronica 2010. Pic of Plant sans leaves, after the jump. (Read more…)