For the 4th of July back in 2009, we saw some PoV video from a robot plane outfitted with remotely launched roman candles. It was pretty sweet, but it’s definitely been put to shame by the above vid, which shows a tricopter UAV doing fireworks battles with hydrogen filled balloons and air defense systems.

While I hate to turn such a cool project into a rant, this video showed up at the end of a TechCrunch article that’s essentially just another flavor of the obligatory “robots are going to kill us all” piece that media who know nothing about robots like to write because it scares people. Since I haven’t in a little while, I’m going to address a couple of these points right after the break. (Read more…)

Remember how RoboCup keeps saying that they’ll have a team of fully autonomous humanoids ready to take on Brazil Italy Spain (or whoever) by 2050? RoMeLa’s CHARLI could be the progenitor of those eventual champions, as it’ll be competing in the humanoid adult class at RoboCup 2011. Adult class means that CHARLI is more or less the size of a person; it’s 4 foot 7 which I think is slightly taller than Diego Maradona.

Also heading to RoboCup 2011 from RoMeLa is Team DARwIn and their (slightly smaller) autonomous humanoids:

Not bad, I’d say, and I especially liked those two what I’m going to assume were deliberate fake-outs at the end there. You had me fooled, you tricky little robot you!

[ RoboCup @ RoMeLa ]

The insane epicness of this movie cannot possibly be overstated. And somehow, the fact that it’s overdubbed in Russian makes it just that much more awesome. It’s called Robot, and if you get a copy, send it to me. Immediately.

Update: the full movie is here on YouTube (all 2+ hours of it), with English captions!

VIA [ Laughing Squid ]

This is InBirdie. InBirdie plays golf, and it’s apparently the world’s most sophisticated golf robot (besides Putter Bot, of course). It can accurately judge distances and slopes and is supposedly able to reliably nail hole-in-ones, at least on the putting green. When it comes to driving, it looks like InBirdie might need a bit of a motor upgrade. Or an air cannon of some sort… Those are legal in golf, right?

Oh, and if you’re wondering why I have a beef with golf as a sport, it’s simply because it seems ludicrous to have a tiny little ball that’s supposed to go in a tiny little hole when you have such a gigantic course. The proportions are all wrong, that’s all.

VIA [ Plastic Pals ]

Remember how incredibly simple and effective that jammin’ robot coffee-balloon gripper thing was? Turns out that you can make one yourself, as Norris Labs did, with a Handi-Vac. It looks like it works nearly as well as the original, and my guess is that it’s pretty damn cheap too.

Grippers, especially grippers capable of picking up a couple geltabs without breaking them, used to be complicated and expensive. These jamming grippers, though, were a serious stroke of genius, and they’re already starting to make fine manipulation accessible to DIY roboticists on a budget.

VIA [ Norris Labs ]

It looks like that desert testing we wrote about in May of last year has paid off, and UPenn’s KodLab has developed a new version of their RHex wheeled/legged robot called X-RHex. X-RHex is about the same size and weight as RHex, but it’s stronger, more durable, and has as longer run time of up to two hours. It’s also got a couple mil-spec rails mounted on top along with standardized electrical connections, which could be just for convenience or could be because X-RHex has a probable military future, or both.

X-RHex doesn’t seem as capable of the speeds exhibited by other leg/wheel hybrid robots such as Whegs, but its strength is in its adaptability and the way it can make it through basically any sort of terrain, even things that would challenge conventional wheeled or tracked robots.

[ X-RHex ]

Well, this isn’t a headline I get to write every day. Instead of using impoverished young children to jockey camel races, Dubai has been using impoverished young children-shaped robots with remote controlled whips. One thing the robots have going over the kids, though, is that they can be equipped with hidden stun guns to shock the camels into running faster, as if having a robot with a whip on your back wasn’t incentive enough:

Dubai police have confirmed they uncovered a gang of dealers who were selling electric stun gun kits, for up to £5,000, across the region.

These were then being fitted inside the robot jockeys, which cost between £130-£200, that in recent years have largely replaced child jockeys, traditionally used in camel racing, due to humanitarian concerns.

The electric shocks could be administered by remote control to encourage the camel to run faster.

Now, I know what you really want to see is a camel race with these robot jockeys in the saddle. I found a good one on YouTube; it’s a 6 kilometer track that the camels must make one single circuit of, and they can run at 50 kph. It’s ludicrous, and if you stick it out until the end there’s some closeups of the bots:

Man, what a crazy future we live in.

[ Telegraph ] VIA [ Gearfuse ]

Here’s one way to make an inherently safe robot arm: use balloons. Siddharth Sanan, a Ph.D student at Carnegie Mellon, has been working on ways to make robots less dangerous for humans to be around, and he’s come at the problem differently by not using rigid components. This technique makes precision control of the robot more difficult, but for assistive robots that spend a lot of time interacting closely with humans, it could still make for a good solution. Just don’t let any of these guys near it.

While we’re here, we should also have a look at another ‘soft’ manipulator arm by Sanan, the Tubot. It’s a ‘continuum type soft manipulator,’ but I’m just going to go ahead and call it a tentacle:

The tentacle version is a slightly different solution to the the same potential issue, which is ensuring that even if a robot arm really really REALLY wants to stave your head in, it won’t be physically able to.

Also, pudding. Mmm, pudding.

[ Siddharth Sanan ] VIA [ Robots.net ]

I’d say that the craziest way of landing a rover on Mars is still the giant airbag bouncing and rolling method, but the ‘Sky Crane’ system that’ll be setting Curiosity down on the red planet in 2012 is pretty nuts. The above video shows the first test of Curiosity (or rather, the test model of the rover) deploying from the Sky Crane system, which gives a good idea of how the final landing is going to work.

On Mars, the Sky Crane will be supporting itself using rockets, and when Curiosity hits the ground, the cabling will detach from the crane using a set of pyros. The Sky Crane then flies off and crashes somewhere (sad), while Curiosity gets busy exploring. Here’s a rendering of the process:

This first test bodes well, but it’s still going to be a pretty hairy thing, and I’m going to keep my fingers and toes preemptively crossed between now and the landing just in case.

This just in: trying to touch type with crossed fingers is bizarre and doesn’t work.

[ Curiosity ]

Robot ethics is always a pretty hairy subject to tackle, largely because human ethics is something that’s hard to reduce to logical rules, and robots really, really like logical rules. There are ways to try and make it work, though, and researchers at the University of Connecticut have been trying to combine machine learning with traditional ethical philosophy to teach robots to behave ethically.

The approach they’re taking is based on a technique pioneered by a philosopher named David Ross, who’s automatically awesome because he’s Scottish. Ross suggested that when people make ethical decisions, they’re actually balancing a bunch of different variables against each other, including things like ‘do good,’ ‘don’t do harm,’ ‘keep your promises,’ ‘don’t be annoying,’ and other things in that vein. Variables, you say? You know what are good with variables? Robots, that’s what.

In this demo, for example, Nao is trying to give medication to someone who doesn’t want it. The robot is considering several variables here, including the importance of taking the medication at all, the importance of taking the medication at a specific time, and the implications of the patient’s refusal. Essentially, Nao does some math to balance the values of these variables, and decides that the patient gets to refuse their meds once, but after that Nao appeals to a higher authority (the doctor, who we can probably assume is a human).

So where do the values for all of these variables come from in the first place? That’s the tricky bit, but for things like medications, you can see how it would be possible to come up with figures. Other values (like the importance of respecting the wishes of a human) are much harder to quantify, but part of the hope is that robots will be able to observe the results of their ethical decisions, and use that information to help them make better choices in the future.

[ UConn ]