Alright, well, I’ve been incredibly busy here at CES, and while my official iRobot demo is scheduled for 1pm on Friday, I did stop by their booth to snap this pic. That right there is an in-house prototype of an iRobot telepresence robot that uses a tablet PC for a head and a PrimeSense camera (the same thing that’s in the Microsoft Kinect) to see.

Consider this a teaser; we’ll be getting a complete video overview of this robot and the rest of what iRobot has on display in just a few hours (although it’ll take a bit to edit it all and stuff).

Also, we’ve got video of a Murata Boy and Murata Girl demo, and we haven’t even actually had a chance to make it over to the robot zone yet! There’s a lot here, but we’ll get it to you as fast as we possibly can.

Concepts are some of my favorite things ever, but even better than concepts are concepts that have a little bit of grounding in the form of a prototype, to provide some assurance that yes, they may actually become reality at some point. These renderings from fuRo (the Future Robotics Technology Center at the Chiba Institute of Technology in Japan) show a bunch of concepts that look like they build off of the prototype legs that you can see towards the middle of the video. That robot is called Core, which somehow stands for Human Boardable Bipedal Robot Project. It’s specifically designed to carry humans weighing up to 100kg on legs that are 2 meters long, and you can see a GIANT PICTURE of it, after the jump. (Read more…)

I love Microsoft Surface. I’ve been in love with it ever since the hands-on demo I got back at CES 2008. Since then, Surface has trickled into a few retail settings (and become the most epic D&D tabletop evar), but it shines when it comes to practical applications, too. Mark Micire at UMass Lowell has taken a Surface table and set it up to control a small swarm of (as yet hypothetical) robots through one of the most simple and effective interfaces I’ve ever seen, a hallmark of Surface. Not only can you just tap, touch, and drag to command as many robots as you like, but if you need to take personal control, the interface for that is extremely slick, Minority Report style. Furthermore, the control interface is also the display, making it fast and intuitive to change commands based on new data. Although it’s not implemented here, a logical next step might be to update the Surface display based on real-time mapping data from the robot swarm.

Another advantage of this kind of system is that you can combine multiple types of robots returning all kinds of data into one seamless command and control display. Like, imagine that some of the swarm consisted of UAVs, and you could add a Z coordinate and send them off to scout ahead. And maybe they have radar or LIDAR, and then that data gets overlaid on the display as well. Sort of like this, except real. Am I gushing? I think I’m gushing. But this is totally cool, and there’s tons of potential. It’s not even that there’s anything that innovative going on here, strictly… It’s just that Surface is able to merge existing hardware and existing controls into a new interface, which makes all the difference.

While I wouldn’t say that interface is necessarily overlooked when it comes to the current generation of robot designs, I do think it’s under-emphasized. People tend to focus on making a totally awesome robot, but unless it’s entirely autonomous, the effectiveness with which the robot operates is dependent on (and in some cases constrained by) the ability of the human user to communicate what they want to the robot quickly and precisely. And even if it IS entirely autonomous, some directions are generally required. I won’t belabor the many examples of this, but I would suggest that a mediocre robot with a good control system is substantially more effective than a good robot with a mediocre control system.

[ UMass Lowell Robotics Lab ] VIA [ Microsoft Robotics Blog ]

In a sure sign that the military industrial complex is running out of quality acronyms, Lockheed Martin has posted a concept video of their VARIOUS UAVs. I’m not yelling, I promise… The name of the UAV is VARIOUS, which Lockheed claims stands for VTOL Advanced Reconnaissance Insertion Organic Unmanned System. Now, I get the Unmanned System part, and Reconnaissance sort of makes sense, but Insertion is a stretch and I’m not at all sure where they get Organic from, not to mention the fact that putting an acronym inside an acronym is totally cheating. Still, the UAV is pretty neat, with an enclosed lift system and stealth capability… But with a name like “VARIOUS,” I just don’t see this ever becoming a reality.

[ VARIOUS Fact Sheet (*.PDF) ]

Edit- I just realized that this concept isn’t exactly new (like, 2006-2007ish), but since I already wrote that whole rant about the acronym, I’m just gonna post it anyway. It’s new to BotJunkie, at least. Enjoy!

While humanoid robots are kinda neat, my favorite soccer bots are definitely the SmallSize (aka Mirosot), which are unapologetically designed to do nothing but zip around super fast and kick little soccer balls. This video is part 1 of 4 from the final RoboCup 2010 match, which saw team Skuba take on the CMDragons with their physics-based motion planning robots. The trick to telling the teams apart, by the way, is the dot in the center: Skuba is sporting a blue dot, while CMDragons are wearing yellow.

I won’t spoil the result for you, but the other three parts are after the jump. (Read more…)

I don’t read German, but it looks like this concept from Festo for a robotic tentacle arm is fairly straightforward and well in line with the sorts of things that they’ve got experience with. The tentacle arm is actuated using air power instead of servos; by using air pressure to expand chambers in the arm it can be made to move in any direction. It looks like the hand is a little more complicated, relying on the addition of a few piston driven actuators for finer control. There’s not much more information on this design yet, but I’m crossing my tentacles that we’ll see a real prototype sometime soon.

[ Festo ]

I’ll bet you thought that EATR, the robot that uses biomass (but not people, they swear) to refuel itself, was just another weird DARPA concept, especially based on the excessively MS Paint-y sketch. But according to a press release, Cyclone Power has completed the Cyclone Mark V, which is the biomass steam engine that will actually be running the thing:

Just a friendly reminder that EATR doesn’t have to eat people to function… It simply finds us to be tastiest. Most of the time, it’ll be digesting (burning) vegetable matter that it finds, a pound and a half of which will allow it to travel a mile. Now that the engine is complete, they just have to mount it on a vehicle, give it a vision system and arm with a chainsaw, and tell it who what to chase down and, um, harvest. In other words, this thing is alarmingly close to being fully armed and operational. Remember: you don’t have to run the fastest, you just have to run slightly faster than someone else.

[ Press Release ]

We posted last week about MIT’s FlyFire project, which takes swarms of little flying robots and uses them to create dynamic 3D images. Last September, Julia Tsao put together a conceptual project for her graduate thesis that embodies a similar set of ideas… Using swarms of small robots working together to form displays. She took the concept to a few different places, though, by enabling the robots to interact with other objects both directly and indirectly. ‘Course, it’s easy to get robots to do whatever you want in a concept video, but there are some interesting ideas here. My third favorite part of the project is the conceptual remote control:

My second favorite part is the conceptual kill switch:

And my favorite part of all are the warning labels:

I can’t quite make out that last one… Something about diving into a swimming pool if the bots are trying to murder you? Sounds like it might actually work, good plan!

[ Curious Displays ] VIA [ Boing Boing ] VIA [ Robot Living ]

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 ]

GetRobo has the scoop on a presentation made by Toyota executives entitled “Realization of Moon Exploration Using Advanced Robots by 2020.” Sending robots to the moon is certainly not a new idea, but slick looking humanoid robots? Building rock gardens and doing calligraphy? I guess the robots can do whatever they want once they get there, and Toyota has some fairly specific ideas on hardware and capabilities:

-joints are protected from regolith

-small capacity solar battery onboard

-internal status shows on screen on chest

-arms exchangeable for different tasks

-able to jump with springs in legs

-keeps warm during night covered in metal cloak

There isn’t a lot of detail beyond the info here, but I’d say it’s certainly possible to have bots like this in 2020 based on the current capabilities of Toyota’s partner robots. The first robots back to the moon might look more like this, but Toyota has a real shot at the solar system record for lunar calligraphy.

VIA [ GetRobo ]