We wrote about robotic road trains last year, and somewhat remarkably, the research project that’s trying to make them happen is progressing nicely with help fro companies like Volvo. Cars drafting closely behind trucks in road trains save up to 40% in fuel consumption, thereby saving money and the environment at the same time. But the biggest advantage of being in a road train is that you can just stop paying attention to the road and do something else while your car drives itself.

It’s true that your life is in the hands of the system, and not in your hands, but while the current perception is that that makes things more dangerous, it really should be the exact opposite. With your car doing all the hard work for you, accidents are less likely.

Of course, the system is only as safe as the lead driver, so many different technologies are being employed to make sure that the person driving the truck is sober, qualified, and paying attention. This includes a breathalyzer and a fancy infrared camera system for vision tracking to make sure that the driver is paying attention to the road.

Other especially exciting bits from the video include mentions of ‘several years from now’ for road trains themselves, and the suggestion that technology to allow cars to drive themselves in stop and go traffic jams might be just around the corner. As we’ve discussed before, the technology (adaptive full stop cruise control and lane keeping) is already here and in some cars, we just have to catch up in terms of people (and lawyers) being comfortable with it.

VIA [ Wired ]

Wow. Unlike that blind robot juggler, this quadrotor is juggling one ball the hard way, with a tennis racket duct-taped to itself. Someone just needs to toss a couple more balls in there and see what happens…

[ ETH Zurich Flying Arena ]

Kinect’s 3D sensor is so cheap and effective that it’s getting bolted onto any robot that moves, and quadrotors are just the latest victims. UC Berkeley’s quadrotor is using the Kinect for autonomous flight and dynamic obstacle avoidance, and as long as you don’t come at it from behind, it works great. The nice thing about using Kinect like this is that it translates into a SLAM system, where the robot can fly around and make a 3D map of a space using the same data that it’s relying on to keep from crashing in to stuff.

[ UC Berkeley Hybrid Systems Lab ] VIA [ Trossen ]

This video may be NSFW if you don’t like watching raw meat get sliced up by a robot.

The reason that someone thought that giving this robot arm a razor sharp knife to stab meat with was that boning hams is repetitive task, i.e. something that a robot would be great at. They’re probably right, and it’s an impressive technical achievement, because the robot has to be able to compensate for lots of variability in, uh, “meat form and bone size.” Using these robots, it only takes 10 people to bone 500 hams an hour instead of 20.

On the other hand, I can’t help but thing two things. First of all, this is the sort of semi-skilled labor that until very recently was not at risk for automation because of the knowledge and adaptability required. And second, we’re giving robot arms knives now. PANIC!

I’m kidding, of course.

VIA [ DigInfo ]

I don’t understand this Papero dance video at all. But it has a bunch of dancing robots, some guys in matching outfits who yell a lot, and drums. Whether or not they’re trying to sell anything, I’ve already gone and bought it.

VIA [ Plastic Pals ]

Japan’s National Agriculture and Food Research Organization has developed this excessively complicated robot that’s able to visually recognize ripe strawberries and then delicately pluck them and drop them in a basket.

The robot operates at a speed of 9 seconds per strawberry, which is probably a minimum of 9 times slower than an experienced human would be able to do it, so I’m really not sure how the designers suggest that using robots would be 60% faster. The only way I can get that type of math to work is by using an impractical number of robots, and by impractical, I mean hugely expensive. Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s a future in agricultural robots like this… But they’re going to have to find some way of overcoming cheap and efficient human labor first. This has already happened with lots of crops, but with some exceptions, fruit is significantly more difficult, because it has a ripeness factor and bruises easily.

The strawberry harvesting robot is currently being tested in the field, with a more practical production version due next year.

VIA [ Crunchgear ]

This robot is called Kunstrasen. It as designed by Sebastian Neitsch to take a vector graphic and burn it into grass (someone else’s grass, probably) using a small flamethrower. I can’t find a video of the robot in action, but here’s the end result:

Um, brilliant.

[ Kunstrasen ] VIA [ Designboom ] and [ Neatorama ]

Norri from GetRobo had a chance to sit down with Sebastian Thrun, Christopher Urmson, and Anthony Levandowski, three of the guys who have been working with Google to develop their autonomous Priuses. Here’s a teaser:

What are the things that the Google car can do now that were not possible at the Urban Challenge?

There’s a lot. Drive at freeway speed. None of the vehicles we had at the Urban Challenge could do that. We can now perceive pedestrians and deal with them. We can merge with freeway traffic. None of the Urban Challenge vehicles you would want to see driving on a public road with traffic. They were very cautious, they were kinda jerky. With our vehicle, you can operate around other traffic. Even people who are videotaping as they go by think that there’s a human driving. And that’s a quality that we didn’t have before.

Head over to GetRobo (or pick up a copy of the Japan edition of the Wall Street Journal) to check out the rest of the interview, including some super interesting bits where they explain some of the specific points where the autonomous technology is not quite up to snuff. I’m just going to toss in one more quote from the interview, though, because it is so directly relevant to why all of this robot car stuff is important in the first place:

What is the ideal way that the public can benefit from your research?

The end goal is pretty clear. Today we have close to 40,000 people in the U.S. that are involved in traffic accidents each year. More than a million people worldwide. The American commuter spends 52 minutes in traffic so we would like to make this safer, more fun and productive. We can envision that our technology will assist people with disabilities, people who can’t be mobile and people who lose ability to drive due to aging. So that is the vision.

[ GetRobo ]

Man, you just can’t make this stuff up:

A robot met its end near Coors Field tonight when the Denver Police Department Bomb Squad detonated the “suspicious object,” bringing to an end the hours-long standoff between police and the approximately eight-inch tall figurine.

A bomb squad robot was sent it to examine the troublesome robot before a bomb squad officer, dressed in heavy protective gear, took a turn.

Robot vs. robot! That must have been pretty epic.

Everything ended badly (for the toy robot) when it was “rendered safe” as police decided to blow it into chunks, just in case it decided to attack them. After the remains of the robot were cleaned up, the citizens of Denver went about their lives, slightly more confused than they were the day before.

Congrats to the Denver PD, though, as they struck a preemptive blow against the inevitable robot takeover.

[ Denver Post ]

This demo was developed for “forskningsdagene,” which is apparently a word that somehow means Norwegian Science Week. By combining a Wii Balance Board with a little self-balancing LEGO NXT robot (aka LegWay), you can have all the fun of riding on a Segway without actually having to be someone who rides on a Segway.

VIA [ Reddit ]