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 ]

Aldebaran Robotics, best known for their rather expensive hobby and research humanoid Nao, has announced that they’ve been developing a much larger humanoid robot called Romeo, and that they’ll have the first prototype ready to go in March.

Romeo will have a 37 degrees of freedom, a backbone, a partially soft torso, and the ability communicate using natural language and gestures. It’ll be able to walk around and carry and fetch things, which is good, since Aldebaran envisions Romeo helping out the elderly and disabled in their homes.

Looks pretty sweet, as a rendering at least.

I have to say, though, at this stage the project seems a bit optimistic to me. Not that there’s anything wrong with optimistic, mind you… But a humanoid that’s so far just a rendering walking around and taking out the trash by next March? At this point, the only piece Aldebaran seems to have is the head, although all of the rest of the mechanics have had their designs finalized. Maybe they’re just talking about having the physical robot completed, but to some extent, that’s the easy part. It’s one thing to design a robotic leg, it’s another thing to get a 5 foot tall, 90 pound robot to walk around, not to mention doing it while carrying stuff.

The other reservation I have about Romeo is that Aldebaran doesn’t sound like they’re going to make the robot open source. I’m not blindly advocating ROS or anything (or at least, I’m trying not to), but there’s a lot to be said for open source, and I feel like taking a different direction is going to be a substantial setback for Aldebaran… Why would you buy a robot that you have to program from scratch when open source languages like ROS have all kinds of code out there, just begging for you to use it and improve upon it?

Again, optimism is great, and I love that Aldebaran is going in this direction. I’m definitely hoping that all of my reservations will prove to be unfounded, and that this little robot kid will be taking out my trash by April.

As long as he gets some eyelids, that is.

VIA [ IEEE ]

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 ]

You know, I kinda hate to say it, but that actually looks pretty good. Or at least, relatively good. Last year, AIST’s HRP-4C robot was somewhat woodenly singing J-Pop, but this performance is borderline believable if you squint really hard while trying your level best to willfully disbelieve that she’s a robot. Maybe she took some pointers from their newer HRP-4?

I guess what I’m saying is, this seems to me (from a purely artistic and non-technical perspective) to be a significant improvement. Much of the credit likely goes to AIST’s new dance choreography software, which prevents users without robotics experience from planning dance that might sending their robot sprawling. Dancing might be a bit of a novelty for robots, but it’s certainly a good way to try and teach fluid and non-robotic movement, which is a big step towards less-uncanny humanoids.

[ AIST Press Release (Translated) ] VIA [ Pink Tentacle ]

I’m sure you remember Diego-San, whom we spotted in an issue of Kokoro News back in January. Reactions to these pictures were… Well, let’s just say, reactions were decidedly mixed. And by decidedly mixed, I mean predominantly negative. Diego-San’s createor, Dr. Javier Movellan, has been exploring possible alterations to Diego-San’s face, and has made this concept public:

As Dr. Movellan pointed out in one of his comments on our post, a lot of what’s relevant about designing the appearance of a humanoid robot is simply about trial and error:

“Everybody has strong opinions about why the current version generates such negative reactions: face too large, robot babies are freaky, skin texture is wrong, mixing mechanical body with biological face is scary, giganto-babies are scary … For just about every theory examples can be given that contradict the theories. The truth is nobody really knows. It is a trial and error process.”

With that in mind, Dr. Movellan is looking for some feedback (constructive feedback, please) on what you do and don’t like about this new concept for Diego-San’s face. Personally, I’d say it’s a good start, with the helmet, antenna and exposed electronics all reinforcing the fact that the robot isn’t intending to fool you into thinking it’s real. However, I’d be curious as to what the effect would be if more of the human features were removed. Like, what is strictly necessary for the robot to accomplish its research goals, which may not necessarily involve a substantial amount of expression recognition? Does Diego-San need ears, for example? A nose?

While one route might be to make it less human, the other route would be to make it much more cartoony. So basically, keep all the human features, just make it look intentionally fake… Again, the idea being that you’re reinforcing the fact that the robot isn’t trying to fool you into thinking it’s human.

Anyway, please let Dr. Movellan know what you think by posting a comment. For more background, read through some of the comments on our original post, and Plastic Pals has a very interesting interview with Dr. Movellan here.

[ UCSD Machine Perception Lab ] VIA [ Plastic Pals ]
[ Original Kokoro News Article (*.PDF) ]

Kawada Industries and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (ASIT) have just unveiled the latest edition to their family of androids, the HRP-4. HRP-4 is designed “in the image of a lean but well-muscled track-and-field athlete,” and it certainly is pretty damn lean… At 5 feet tall it only weighs 86 pounds, and it boasts increased flexibility of its 34 joints over its predecessors. Despite its apparent lack of big fat heavy stuff like powerful motors, computers, and batteries, it has no trouble doing all of the important android basics:

HRP-4 is designed to aid in the development of robots that could replace humans in simple manual labor, specifically to address Japan’s impending labor shortage (due to an aging population and low birthrate). While I’m all for androids, when it comes to manual labor and repetitive tasks the human form (while adaptable) is not necessarily optimal, and I have to wonder whether it really makes sense to use humans as a research model in that respect.

HRP-4 will be available in 2011 for about $305,000.

VIA [ Physorg ] and [ Pink Tentacle ]

A week or so ago, we posted about a 2008 study suggesting that humanish robots are a bad, bad idea. However, it’s definitely true that human facial features are great at communicating emotional information to humans, so there’s certainly something to be said for incorporating things like eyes and eyebrows into a robot. Flobi, a robot from Bielefeld University, is a good example of a conscious decision to make a humanoid robot head that is capable of recognizable human expressions while avoiding the Uncanny Valley.

Flobi relies on expressive elements that are almost cartoonish in their simplicity: 18 actuators move the eyes, eyelids, eyebrows, and mouth, and there are LEDs in Flobi’s cheeks to let it blush… I say ‘it’ because Flobi’s hair (all of the facial elements, in fact) can be easily changed to let it appear to be male or female. For me, though,that process brings back quite a bit of the uncanny:

I find it pretty amazing how much of a difference subtle little things like blinking can make when it comes to how I (personally) relate to humanoid robots. And that’s part of the tricky thing about the Uncanny Valley: there’s a very fine line between seeming human, and seeming too human.

As IEEE Spectrum points out, Flobi looks a lot like iCat. Like, a lot. This makes iCat angry:

And you don’t want to make iCat angry…

[ CIT ] VIA [ IEEE Spectrum ]

iCub is a robot designed to study cognition and learning, and his latest talent is dynamic ball catching. Rather than being programmed to do this, iCub gets ‘taught’ by a human, who makes catching motions while being hooked up to some motion encoding hardware. This approach allows iCub to dynamically adapt to variable ball trajectories, which is the kind of thing that happens all of the time outside of the lab, as it were.

Obviously, iCub needs to speed up a bit if he wants to be useful in a baseball game, and he certainly doesn’t have anything on the speed or precision of robot hands like this or this. But, iCub also doesn’t depend on an array of high speed cameras, and he also doesn’t depend on a constant trajectory for the ball, making him far more adaptable. At this point, I’m not entirely sure if iCub needs faster hardware or software or both, but the potential is here for something pretty cool in the near future.

[ RobotCub iCub ]

There are lots of reasons why heavy robots tend to use wheels instead of legs, but there may be just as many reasons why legs are more versatile and adaptable than wheels. We’ve seen a couple effective implementations of wheels made up of lots of little legs, but Hitachi’s EMIEW2 humanoid robot just uses wheels on its legs instead of feet. This approach gives the robot efficiency and stability while moving, along with the potential for it to make its way over obstacles (sort of):

I’m not entirely sure who the heck has carpet like that, and to be honest, EMIEW2′s adaptive suspension doesn’t look like it’s getting that much of a workout. Also, it’s unclear as to whether the robot can actually balance itself on one wheel, which would be necessary for it to “step” over an obstacle larger than its wheels are capable of negotiating, which is what I found to be potentially cool about this design in the first place. Still, it is pretty darn cute, and it can do precision speech recognition and sound localization, which is handy.

As with most Asian humanoid robots with fancy plastic shells, Hitachi suggests many ways in which EMIEW2 might be commercially useful (the obligatory guide/guard duties), but doesn’t offer any sort of cohesive commercial details.

VIA [ WWWery ] and [ Physorg ]

Not that it’s strictly necessary, but Justin, DLR’s android, appears to be good at more than just dancing like John Travolta. The plan is to shoot Justin into space, mounted on his own satellite to ride around on, which sounds pretty badass to me. He’ll be able to wander around up there, repairing and upgrading satellites. The eventual goal is to have Justin operate autonomously, but in the short term, he’ll be teleoperated from the ground… With binocular vision and force feedback arms, operating Justin will be just like being up there in space, except warmer and with less explosive decompression.

So, what’s the most exciting thing about this new plan for Justin? Simple: there is now potential for android combat in space. Robonaut is gonna be up there fixing stuff. Justin is gonna be up there fixing stuff. Maybe they’ll both find each other fixing the same satellite, and maybe Justin is hogging all the space wrenches and then Robonaut makes some crack about Justin’s noodle arms, and then BAM, they’re goin’ at it… ROBOT SPACE COMBAT. It’s the future, people!

[ DLR Space Robotics ] VIA [ IEEE ]