UT Austin’s HCR Lab just got this robot head, and its primary goal is to “elicit a sense of trust and sociability to an otherwise pure mechatronic device.” This is a moderately refreshing (and on the whole, quite advisable) approach to creating a robot… It’s very easy to focus on functionality without worrying about whether or not people are going to actually want to interact with your robot. Obviously, a lot of thought was put into Dreamer, because it’s securely in that sweet spot of humanish without trying too hard.

One of the things that I think makes this robot appear so natural is that fact that it has fast eyes that lead its head around, just like an animal or human. There’s only a minimal amount of that sluggish, mechanical servo response, and the video even mentions that the eyes are capable of moving even faster, up to “human speed.” Plus, as we’ve mentioned before, having eyelids is a really big deal.

[ HCR Lab ] VIA [ Engadget ]

Hobby roboticists now have a serious problem: which awesome off the shelf sensor do they use for 3D mapping, Kinect’s stereo camera system, or Neato’s LIDAR system, which has just been hacked wide open. Posting on RobotBox (presumably because of the sweet bounty that they threw down), Hash79 has provided video showing the raw distance output from a Neato XV-11′s LIDAR sensor:

The next step is for smart people to plug this hack into a module that the rest of us (who aren’t quite so smart) can readily access, like ROS. The step after that is to figure out how to find a Neato sensor without having to buy the entire robot. And the step after that is to go crazy and maybe speed up the motor and mount the sensor on a servo that scans up and down to get a whole 3D scene and damn this is going to be awesome!

VIA [ RobotBox ]

You took Willow Garage’s favorite fictional robot survey, right? Right? Sure you did, and here are the results. Try to contain your dismay:

1. R2-D2, from Star Wars (81.5% ‘Like It’ votes)
2. Bender, from Futurama (76.4%)
3. WALL-E (73.9%)
4. Marvin, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (66.3%)
5. HAL 9000, from 2001: A Space Odyssey (65.4%)
6. Eve, from WALL-E (62.7%)
7. T-800 or T-1000 from The Terminator (60.8%)
8. Data, from Star Trek: Next Generation (60.1%)
9. C-3PO, from Star Wars (58.9%)
10. Johnny Five, from Short Circuit (53.3%)
11. Optimus Prime, from Transformers (52%)
12. Sonny, from I, Robot (49.8%)
13. KITT, from Knight Rider (40.1%)
14. Cylons, from Battlestar Galactica (39.9%)
15. Rosie the Maid, in The Jetsons (27.8%)

Yes, I’m feeling the nerd rage too, but here’s what WG has to say on who wasn’t included:

We also received nearly 200 write-in votes for our readers’ favorite fictional robots. Many of them were in our internal survey and didn’t get enough support to make the public survey, but there were some great examples that we just missed. All of these received multiple votes: the robot Andrew in Bicentennial Man; the robot servant GIR from the Invader Zim TV series; GLaDOS from the video game Portal; the robots V.I.N.CENT (“Vital Information Necessary CENTralized”), B.O.B. (BiO-sanitation Battalion), and Maximilian from the movie The Black Hole were all mentioned; R. Daneel Olivaw, who appears is Isaac Asimov’s Robot/Foundation Series.

R2-D2 is fine, and I love Wall-E, but GIR… GIR is something, you know, special.

Click through to see how the community choices differed from Willow Garage’s internal survey… Apparently, some of the people who work there are, like, old, or something.

[ Willow Garage ]

You might remember this Fanuc pick and place robot from a post last year:

Not bad, right? Well, since then someone’s gone and cranked it up to nutso:

Wow. Good thing sorting Skittles isn’t a real job, or I’d be looking at unemployment right now.

[ FANUC ]

This is Hoops, an automobile welding robot retrained by the Carnegie Science Center to shoot free throws. Visitors can program Hoops to themselves to see how well they can shoot with a robot, but on his own, Hoops nails his shots 98% of the time. This sounds pretty good, and it definitely is, but the record for humans is about 96% over an entire season, which is much higher than I would have though. Of course, Hoops here isn’t a pro (he plays for free), and I bet with a little extra training, he could probably hit that 99.99% accuracy that we’re used to hearing about when it comes to robots performing repeatable actions.

As far as I can tell, you can go see Hoops (and a bunch of other cool robots) at the RoboWorld exhibit in Pittsburgh, the next time you find yourself in Pennsylvania with nothing to do.

[ RoboWorld ]

We’ve seen robots balancing sticks before, and it’s pretty cool… Since humans can do the same thing, there’s a limit to how impressive it can get. But just try finding a human who can balance a stick with a hinge in the middle:

This thing gets even more awesome, because one commenter on the video asked (somewhat rhetorically) if the robot could do the same thing with a rope. Here’s what the author had to say:

For a chain the stabilization is theoretical possible (a rope doesn’t has the needed compressive strength). Swing up of a chain should be possible with a feedforward control but probably not with an energy based approach.

Just imagine how utterly crazy that would be… My mind is now preemptively blown.

[ Vimeo ] VIA [ Reddit ]

This is by no means an exhaustive list of robot deals (actually, it’s just a couple things that have shown up in my inbox), but if you’re looking to buy a robot for yourself or someone else (or yourself), here are a few places to get you started today:

-Pololu has discounts of up to 60% (!) on a variety of electronic bits, pieces, and even complete robot kits

-Trossen Robotics is offering a flat 10% off everything in stock, using coupon code “cyber10″

Also, Robots.net has a few extra deals, including black friday specials from HobbyPartz.com

Got any hot tips for your fellow robot enthusiasts? Post ‘em in the comments.

While you were stuffing your face on turkey (or forest loaf, whatever that is) and vegging out, the guys over at Utah Aerials (remember their robot ghost?)were busy constructing a flying turkey robot that drops pumpkin pie bombs. In other words, my fantasy animal.

Somehow, adding a turkey costume to a quadrotor doesn’t seem to effect its ability to achieve stable flight. Adding a pumpkin pie definitely does, but the bot manages to stay airborne long enough to achieve its mission. Kinda. Anyway, a pie make it from the sky to the ground, and that’s the important thing.

PIE!

[ Utah Aerials ]

When you think of a massage robot, you probably think of something that’s humanoid, using hands to give a human a traditional massage. Robots, however, are best at being robots and doing things in robot-y ways, and all you really need for a massage is movement and pressure. WheeMe is a cute little robot that provides both by driving around your body on knobbly rubber wheels.

At only 240 grams, WheeMe isn’t heavy enough to do a painful and fulfilling job, but I can imagine that it probably feels pretty good, at the very least like having someone run their fingers along your back. The especially clever bit about WheeMe is that it somehow knows how not to plunge to its death off of your shoulders… From the sound of things, it uses tilt sensors to keep its center of gravity in a safe place, but otherwise roams around more or less randomly.

WheeMe will be on display at CES in January, and we’ll be there to test it out (extensively) in person. There’s no word yet on price, but I can’t imagine it’ll be very expensive, although I’ve definitely been wrong about this kind of thing before.

[ Dreambots ] VIA [ IEEE ]

Joe wrote in to share the debut of this new robot arcade game (that he designed!) at the international arcade expo in Orlando. It looks pretty fun: two sumo robots with lifters compete to flip each other over and score points. From the look of things, the robots are cleverly constructed so that when they flip, they can reliably self-right without any trouble at all. I’m guessing that there’s a computer vision system watching everything from above, and that’s how the bots are able to dock themselves to recharge.

It might be kinda neat to see something like this outside of an arcade too… As sort of a really simple robot combat game, maybe with accessories to give your bot different capabilities or something. Robotics in general has such a steep learning curve (or that’s the perception, anyway) that anything designed to make the field easily accessible to beginners and kids would be great for the industry in general. And ideally, it would be fun at the same time, which is obviously the most important thing, since non-fun things just plain suck.

Look for Robo Restle sometime in 2011.

[ Robotic Amusements ] VIA [ Arcade Heroes ]