The Robo-One Humanoid Helper Robot Project challenges hobbyists to create robots capable of performing common household tasks. I’m not sure whose house these robots have been chillin’ at, but these common household tasks include getting drinks from a fridge, pouring said drinks, setting off a party popper, waiting until you’re hammered, and then giving you a shoulder massage.

And then the video cuts out, but you can fill in the blanks… Just make sure to ask it to deactivate its crotch cam before things get too crazy.

Happy new year!

VIA [ Robots Dreams ]

To film up close and personal with polar bears, the BBC (who knows a thing or two about making nature shows) decided that it would be kinda cool to deploy an entire fleet of little remote controlled, robotic cameras:

As you can see, the curious polar bears and the cameras didn’t always get along, and several of them were playfully destroyed. Follow the link below (or just go ahead and click here) to watch some of this destruction firsthand… It’s pretty damn funny to see a polar bear chasing a propeller-driven robot on skis across the ice and then trying to eat it.

Update- someone’s ripped the vid onto YouTube, enjoy it while it lasts!

[ BBC ] VIA [ Suicide Bots ]

Robots are potentially dangerous, but it’s usually hard to tell just how dangerous they are. You can make up as many ludicrous warnings as you want, but the only way to tell for sure is to let the robots just beat on people a whole bunch and see how bad it gets. At least that way, you get a worst-case scenario.

If you’re not quite that brave, you can be like Japan and use crash test dummies in a specially designed facility instead. Less entertaining and less accurate, but also less risk of death, and that’s probably good. Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Automobile Research Institute (JARI) have all banded together and decided that it would be kinda cool to form a Robot Safety Center to test out robots to make sure that, among other things, they won’t go bonkers and kill you every time you turn on your microwave.

Most joking aside, this is a serious first step towards the acceptance of an industry that will (hopefully) be producing large consumer robots sometime in the near future. You’re probably not worried about your Roomba breaking your ankles, but when you’ve got something the size of a PR2 grabbing beers for you, it’s good to know just exactly how hard and how accurately it’s capable of chucking a bottle, you know?

For better or worse, this type of testing also means that we’re going to have to have to make some serious (and legally binding) decisions about what happens if a safety certified robot has an accident and hurts someone. At the moment, issues like these are a significant roadblock to the development of consumer robots: why should companies spend a bunch of money developing an awesome robot if they’ll be sued into oblivion the first time one of their creations has a little accident? There needs to be some sort of legal framework in place to deal with this stuff before it happens, and knowing what can go wrong is a good way to help plan for what might go wrong.

VIA [ Plastic Pals ]

This robot (you might recognize it, it’s an HRP-2) has been programmed to NOT AVOID OBSTACLES. I know, crazy right? Instead, it’s smart enough to either move obstacles out of its way when it needs to, or actually use obstacles to help it get around, as you can see in the vid above.

The system breaks down tasks into two stages. In the first stage, software developed by Lengagne’s colleague Karim Bouyarmane identifies objects in the robot’s surroundings that it can use to help complete a task – for instance, leaning on a table with its forearms to sidle past it and into a nearby chair. The software then calculates a number of poses that the robot could strike to make best use of the table for stability while it shuffles towards the chair and sits on it. Lengagne’s software then converts these static poses into one smooth motion, taking into account the forces operating on the robot in each position to ensure it does not lose balance.

I really don’t know why New Scientist makes it sound like using obstacles to your advantage has to be an old person thing… I’m not old (okay, I’m not THAT old) and I use objects to support my weight and maintain my balance all the time. It might not be strictly necessary that I do so, but I’m super lazy and it saves me energy, so why not? For robots, being super lazy just means that they’re more energy efficient and they put less wear on their motors and joints, which is almost as important.

As I’ve pointed out before, creative compromises like this are a great way to make progress in robotics. I’m sure it’s possible (and perhaps even ideal) to make a humanoid robot that can sit at desks and kick soccer balls without any form of support, but why bother? Humans are so capable because we know how to efficiently adapt ourselves to our surroundings, and robots are getting better at doing the same.

VIA [ New Scientist ]

As if it wasn’t bad enough that robots are stealing our jobs, this particular one actually rubs it in with facial expressions. Fraunhofer’s pi4 workerbot is fully equipped to take over from a human (or two) on an assembly line, with two 7-DoF arms with force-feedback hands and a set of three high resolution cameras sophisticated enough to let it inspect parts for quality. It doesn’t just put you out of work, though: stealing your job makes pi4 happy:

With great care, a robot picks up a gear wheel in one hand, a housing in the other, and places the two together. When they don’t immediately engage, it breaks off its movement. Slowly, it twists the gear wheel round a little and tries again. This time the wheel slots easily into its mounting. The robot smiles, and places the correctly assembled part on the conveyor belt.

The facial expressions are designed to provide feedback to managers… Happy means that the robot is hard at work, and bored means that it’s capable of working faster: “Please, let me steal someone else’s job too!”

[ Press Release ] VIA [ PopSci ]

Our posting on BotJunkie has been a little bit lighter over the last week as we’ve all taken some well-deserved time off to suffer through holidays and family… It’s times like these that you really appreciate how great robots are, since most of the time they do exactly what you tell them to do and they generally come with prominent ‘off’ switches.

We’ll be catching up as the new year rolls around, and for the first week in January we’ll be on the ground at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to bring you all the latest new robot stuff for 2011, so stay tuned for that.

Meantime, enjoy these festive robot vids, as well as the picture up top, which we stole from Neato Robotics’ Facebook page.

This first one comes from EPFL, and features an AirBurr MAV and what looks to be some kind of EyeBot:

Nao’s doing his best, but it looks like it’s just not his Christmas this year:

ETH’s quadcopters have figured out how to play jingle bells on a real piano:

That balancing robotic cube sculpture thing has decked itself out for the holiday:

And lastly, for those of you who may not be surrounded by family this season, Wieden+Kennedy has a suggestion for you involving telepresence robots:

Spotted anything else related to holidays and robots? Post in the comments so we can all share in the heartless and steely holiday spirit.

This video of what claims to be the world’s first badminton robot suffers from a serious lack of robots playing badminton, but from the few peeks that it offers of what this robot actually does, it seems pretty cool.

Now, before you scoff at the fact that anyone would bother to create a robot that plays badminton, you should know that badminton is in fact the fifth most popular sport on the planet. It’s also the fastest sport, with birdies routinely traveling at speeds of 300 kph. If you’ve only ever played badminton in your back yard, you’ve been totally missing out, because here’s how it’s meant to be played:

The rest of the match is here, if you’re interested.

But anyway, robots! This system reminds me a lot of that crazy parts tossing robot, except with the addition of an extra motor or two to swing the racket around. If it was possible to add a Z axis to the whole contraption to let the robot cover the entire court, it could turn into a serious competitor, although the reaction times required in a badminton match would certainly challenge even the most sophisticated vision and drive systems.

Thanks @BatistLeman!

IEEE Automaton scored a sneak peak at Aldebaran Robotics’ newest version of their Nao robot at the Humanoids 2010 conference in Nashville recently. Nao’s body has been completely reworked to be more robust, and longer curved arms give the bot more space in which to pick stuff up and throw it at you. A new motion engine helps Nao move more fluidly, and as you can see in the demo above, it exhibits some fetchingly human moves.

Nao also got a new head, along with an upgraded brain that helps it to recognize speech and images. It can do some form of facial recognition and it sounds like it’s capable of reading text as well, which is pretty handy. There also seem to have been a few, um, attitude adjustments… This latest version of now is the spunkiest yet.

Incidentally, I never really noticed this before, but doesn’t Nao sound an awful like those freaky sentry guns from Portal? Oh well, it’s probably just a coincidence.

Probably.

VIA [ IEEE ]

Heartland Robotics is a company headed by legendary iRobot co-founder Rodney Brooks. It’s been in ‘stealth mode’ since its founding in 2008, meaning that they’re working on something cool enough to have raised some $32 million in funding, but they’re not ready to tell the world about it yet.

With the latest round of funding (which involves as bunch of investors being shown around and told what the plan is), some new information has leaked out from Heartland, and it’s tantalizing:

Visitors to Heartland describe a robot that looks like a human from the waist up, with a torso; either one or two arms with grippers; and a camera where you might expect the head to be. The robot is on a rolling base rather than legs; it can be moved around but doesn’t move autonomously. The arm and gripper can be quickly trained to do a repetitive task just by moving them, no software code required.

It’s possible that this robot is based in part on MIT’s Obrero platform, pictured above. There’s more:

“Brooks apparently likens Heartland’s robot, which is intended to perform assembly and packaging tasks that low-wage factory workers do today, to Apple’s iPhone. He’s interested in encouraging a community of software developers to create applications that would teach the robot to do tasks such as using its camera to recognize a defective widget and pulling it off the conveyor belt.”

Thinking about robots as hardware that runs apps is not unique to Heartland, but the deciding factor could be the target price point: a shockingly low $5000. At that level, it’s easy for businesses to justify purchasing a robot just to try it out, since the risk is so small. And if they can set the robot up on an assembly line (which seems to be its general target market), it could very rapidly start making things more efficient for even small businesses, especially if the robot is as easy to program as they’re trying to make it.

Even if it takes three of these robots to do the job of one human, you’re still talking about a very positive investment. Heck, even if you needed ten of them, a $5k a pop they’d probably pay for themselves in less than a year when you consider the overhead that humans require, and they’d work 24/7 to boot.

For a long (long long LONG) time, the robotics industry has been looking for its PC, the one killer platform or application that has the potential to make robots simple, cheap, reliable, and useful. It hasn’t turned out to be vacuums, but it might just be a cheap robot worker from Heartland.

Stay tuned.

[ Heartland Robotics ] VIA [ Boston.com ] and [ NBF ]

Legged robots offer a lot more flexibility than wheeled robots do when it comes to moving over uneven terrain, like the types of surfaces you might expect to find on the moon. As the Apollo astronauts discovered, however, walking on the moon is much easier said than done, and the most effective bipedal gait turned out to be a sort of robot-unfriendly bouncy trotting run.

While low gravity sounds like it would be great for walking robots (easier on the motors, more time to recover), it’s actually not ideal, since the robot would spend most of its time not in direct contact with the ground as it tried to move. And running like the human astronauts did wouldn’t be much better because of the difficulty of keeping the robot consistently stable. Researchers at Waseda University in Tokyo have developed a computer model that suggests a new way for lunar robots to get around: jumping. Based on the model, the most stable and efficient way for a bipedal robot like their WABIAN-2R to conquer the moon would be with a series of foot-together, one meter high jumps.

Japan, if you remember, is already planning to put humanoid robots on the moon by 2020 to do some rock gardening. This is totally cool, but when it comes down to it, a humanoid might not be the best platform for planetary exploration. Yes, humanoids are better than wheeled robots in certain situations, but there are plenty of designs that offer most of the adaptability of legs while preserving the efficiency and stability of a wheeled platform. Giant mutant PackBot, anyone?

[ WABIAN-2R ] VIA [ New Scientist ]