Obey gravity. It’s the law. Unless you’re this cube, in which case you’re perfectly happy balancing on a single point, which is a vaguely startling feat for something so large and made of metal. This balancing cube was created by Raffaello D’Andrea, Sebastian Trimpe, and Matt Donovan from ETH Zurich… You might remember D’Andrea; he helped create the robotic zombie chair.

The concept for the cube is relatively simple: like most balancing robots, it has some form of gyro (in this case, an inertial measurement unit) that can tell how much falling-overness is taking place and in which direction. This information is relayed to servos inside the cube to swing weights around, changing the center of gravity of the entire robot and keeping it steady and upright even to the extent that it can resist a gentle push.

The whole “that really should not be allowed to ignore gravity” concept really reminds me of this insane thing… Except with the balancing cube, the worst that happens is that it topples over, as opposed to, I dunno, killing us all or something.

VIA [ IEEE ]

Geoff pointed out Peter Oravetz’ website, where he’s got an entire gallery of robot drawings. I’ve posted a few more after the jump, but be sure to take the time to read what the artist has to say about his work:

It’s always been entertaining for me to watch someone verbally and physically abuse a copy machine, a T.V., or any other electronic device. Obviously they don’t have feelings so there is no way they’ll ever yield to threats or sympathize with frustration. Moreover, they are made by us and can only do what we program them to do. Since humans aren’t perfect, robots will never be perfect either. We can program them to perform tasks perfectly but once a hurdle is presented unexpectedly, like a wall placed in their path, everything comes to a halt. This problem of how they can be so smart and yet so stupid is what interests me, as well as our efforts to empower them with Artificial Intelligence (or AI) so that they may figure out how to leap over these hurdles by themselves.

AI must be a frustrating program to bestow upon a robot. Every aspect of free motion has to be programmed, every form of potential danger must be introduced… At least humans instinctively know they have hands but robots have to be taught that they have hands (or clamps). They may be capable of great feats of strength or be able to compute calculus in microseconds but they still have the mind of a new born baby. I suppose that robots with AI will eventually show glorious moments of humanity, especially when they make mistakes. These moments, depicted in the the ‘Robots!’ series, are truly the purist display of the mimicry of humanity, revealing the curiosity, love and humor that we as humans hold so dear. The images reflect the robots’ utter stupidity and their wonderfully endearing attributes as they attempt to become human in their own way.

More art, after the jump. (Read more…)

Wood isn’t really what comes to mind when you think of robots, which is a shame, as these beautiful toys from Takeji (Take-G) Nakagawa illustrate. At least, he calls them toys, I probably wouldn’t. Each one is hand made, and they’re really little works of art, combining the essences of natural materials and future technology. The artist, understandably proud of his work, refuses to let you buy one unless you’ve seen it in person, so you’ll have to go to Japan if you want one. Once you get there, the small figures start at $50, the medium sized ones are mid three figures, and the large figures add another zero onto that.

[ Take-G ] VIA [ DVICE ]

Back in January we posted about a couple robot movies showing at Sundance. One of them, Spike Jonze’s I’m Here, is now viewable (in its entirely) online. The movie shows every two hours, and there’s limited seating, so (just like real life) you may have to go find a coffee shop and wait for the next showing. It’s worth it, though, and you don’t have to go broke for popcorn.

[ I'm Here ] VIA [ Laughing Squid ]

Update 2- It’s all back, yay!

Update- Apparently Flyfire is a secret still, since it looks like MIT has pulled the video, plus the website, just an hour or so after we posted this. Weird…

The problem with true three dimensional displays (displays that you can walk around) is that they require pixels to be floating in space. This has been done with lasers and plasma, but such technologies are super expensive and limited in many ways. MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory in collaboration with ARES Lab (Aerospace Robotics and Embedded Systems Laboratory) has hit upon the idea of creating huge free form three dimensional displays out of individual “smart pixels” made up of micro helicopters carrying LEDs:

Gigantic 3D displays made up of swarms of micro helicopters that can be released into any open space… How awesome is that?

We’ve talked about the benefits of swarm robotics before: it’s relatively cheap because the individual robots are simple, if any one robot breaks it’s easy to replace, and it’s easily scalable since you can just toss more bots into the mix. You can even use swarms to compensate for things like batteries: if you initially launch your robots in waves, you can have a whole other group of standby robots that dynamically replace the performing robots as their batteries run out, flying up with their LEDs off to switch places without anybody noticing.

The tricky part, of course, is getting everything to work together. MIT has big plans for the system, though…

The Flyfire canvas can transform itself from one shape to another or morph a two-dimensional photographic image into an articulated shape. The pixels are physically engaged in transitioning images from one state to another, which allows the Flyfire canvas to demonstrate a spatially animated viewing experience. Flyfire serves as an initial step to explore and imagine the possibilities of this free-form display: a swarm of pixels in a space.

You could even play an HD movie on system… Let me see, to play a movie in 1080p (trying to get it to do 1080i with half the number of bots would be pretty interesting but probably impossible, unless you could get them to do barrel rolls at 60 Hz or something to form the interlacing) you’d need over 2 million micro copters to form the base screen, plus however many more are required to swap out for recharging. Fun to think about, but maybe it would be better to just stick with standard def, since you’d only need about 350,000 bots.

While the video is a rendering, the robots are real enough, and hopefully we can expect to see some live demos of the entire system sometime soon.

[ Flyfire ]

This is Crowbot (not this). Crowbot was designed by Hiromi Ozaki (with help from a couple of experts in crow intelligence), and can reproduce a variety of crow calls. By choosing the right calls, Crowbot can attract crows, repel crows, and from the looks of it, seriously confuse crows:

Oh, and there’s more… (Read more…)

Oh, if only ’twere this easy…

$15, available for a severely limited time.

[ shirt.woot ]

I saw some of Sarah Dungan’s awesome robot prints at the Edwardian Ball over the weekend, and had to share.

The robot prints aren’t up on her Etsy store at the moment, but if you want one, you might try sending her an email through her website at the link below.

[ Industrial Fairytale ]

Just in case you’re not familiar:

1. Robots aren’t supposed to squish humans.
2. Robots have to sweep up when humans tell them to.
3. Robots are allowed to shoot humans if they’re unhappy.

Today only, shirt.woot. $10 shipped.

[ shirt.woot ]

We wrote about Nils V├╢lker’s rolling orbital Bluetooth operated thing back in July, and since then, he’s been busy developing this light drawing robot (among, I assume, other things). The principle behind this bot is simple: moving lights + long camera exposure = cool. Very cool. It’s tricky to do, though, especially if you’re trying to draw anything with precision. But robots are great at precision, and if you want a light drawing made up solely of straight lines, Nils’ robot does a bang-up job:

[ Nils V├╢lker ] VIA [ Designboom ]