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 ]

Nobody seems to know what exactly this is or if anything ever came of it, although the consensus is that it’s probably a dead concept. The two noses are kinda neat, though. I’m not sure what the aerodynamic implications are, but they certainly add a bunch of payload space. I also like the idea of an optionally-manned UCAV… For that matter, why do we need dedicated UAVs at all? Why not just retrofit existing combat aircraft with optional unmanned systems for added flexibility and, for that matter, safety? The answer, of course, is that you can’t make an optionally manned UCAV that looks anywhere near as badass as this.

VIA [ Flight Global ]

As if you don’t have enough distractions while driving, the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab and MIT’s SENSEable City Lab have teamed up to create AIDA, a robot that lives in your dashboard, is way smarter than you, and has no compunctions about letting you know it:

AIDA is actually watching you while you drive, paying attention to your expressions and even measuring your galvanic skin response through the steering wheel. Based on your driving habits, AIDA will suggest how you can be safer or more efficient. The robot is designed to use expressions to intuitively convey information, something that MIT has a lot of experience with. You know who AIDA reminds me of, though?

AIDA may have her dad’s skinny neck and blocky head, but her face is all mom.

I’ll bet you can’t guess who’s helping sponsor this project… Here’s a hint: it’s not Pixar. Yep, it’s Audi. AKA Volkswagen. AKA the robot car company. AIDA was, in fact, developed in partnership with the Volkswagen Electronics Research Lab out in Palo Alto. It’s really, I dunno, inspiring or something to see a major car company investing so much in future technology. Next time I buy a new car, which is probably going to be never (94 Volvo wagon FTW!), it might very well be a Volkswagen, especially if it can park itself.

[ AIDA ] VIA [ MIT ]

I’m all for emotional support robots, especially soft and fluffy ones that look like baby seals. This robot pillow, though, goes a little too far. It’s called Funktionide, and was designed by Stefan Ulrich after a two month research project by our favorite German bio-inspired robotics company, Festo.

The “Funktionide” is an autarkic amorph object whose intention is to provide the user with a atmosphere of presence thus counteracting the feeling of loneliness.

Firstly, if this thing crawled into bed with me, it would cure my loneliness but probably not with a sense of what you’d call relief. Maybe, terror. And secondly, inventing words isn’t fair.

[ Funktionide ] VIA [ Eggshell Robotics ]

You may have seen this Pet Care robot concept around the internetz in the last few days. It’s sort of interesting, and certainly weird looking, but what I really like is the innovative battery charging syste. Like many other robots, the Pet Care robot uses a dock that it can find by itself. The dock, however, is not for recharging the robot… It’s for recharging the robot’s battery packs, independently. So, instead of sitting at the dock and being useless when it runs out of batteries, the robot just goes over to the dock, swaps out a spent battery for fresh one, and keeps on going:

Good idea? Obviously. Will it ever happen? Well, it’s a concept, so it’s probably one of those things that turns out to be much more complicated than it looks.

Aside from that, the Pet Care robot is a general telepresence robot that is designed (conceptualized, rather) specifically to play with your dog. The robot features stereo vision and a little ball that is actually a robot itself, that can be controlled separately. The Pet Care robot can also guard your home for you, but unfortunately, it can’t do much more than alert you to an intruder. The designer says: “I would love to equip the robot with more weapon-like modules, such as tranquilizer gun and tazer gun, but unintentional trauma may occur.” Personally, I’d be willing to accept whatever risk would be involved if my snail robot would taze anyone who manages to break into my house.

[ Mintpass 1, 2 ] VIA [ Geeky Gadgets ] and [ DVICE ]

This (fake) advertisement for Able Mable the robot housemaid comes from a BBC program programme called Tomorrow’s World, which presented developments in science and consumer technology, often years (or decades) ahead of the game. They introduced the CD in 1979, for example, but I think they’re still ahead of the game when it comes to Mable here.

The show was canceled in 2003, but apparently it’ll be coming back on the Discovery Science channel in 2010.

[ BBC Archive (UK only) ] VIA [ TechRadar UK ]

In the tradition of uncertainty, confusion, and general “huh?”-ness incarnated in the Sony Rolly comes the AU iida Polaris, which, if anything, manages to be just a little bit stranger than the Rolly. It appears to be a cell phone that comes with a little round robotic cradle. Place the phone in the cradle, and it… Uh… Can move around. And maybe play music or something. And it can go over to your TV and get it to display the weather. The coolest bit, as far as I can tell, is that the robot can close itself up into a little ball, but seeing as it’s most likely not robust enough to kick, I’m not sure what the point is.

The AU iida Polaris is currently just a concept prototype, and I’m 99% sure that it’s going to stay that way. Akihabara News has a little video, and there seems to be something else about it on the Flower Robotics website.

[ Flower Robotics ] VIA [ Akihabara News ]

“Le Petit Prince” is a little robotic greenhouse that’s one of the finalists in Electrolux’s 2009 Design Lab competition. The concept is cool (if not entirely practical): each plant gets its own little robot, which seeks out whatever nutrients and other resources the plant needs… But it really should win just because of the artwork:

[ Electrolux Design Lab ] VIA [ Tuvie ]