We introduced you to Monty last year at RoboDevelopment, and it looks like he’s made some progress… Instead of doing your cleaning for you, Monty has figured out how to delegate his responsibilities to other, less complicated forms of robotic life. Namely, a Roomba. It’s an interesting move; as soon as robots figure out how great robots are at mindless manual labor, robots will start getting themselves robots to do all the robot work for them. And where does that leave us? Yeah, probably cowering in a corner somewhere.

[ Anybots ]

This is Cyberdyne’s HAL (hybrid assistive limb) exoskeleton, a powered robotic suit designed to significantly increase the strength of the wearer. Using sensors attached to the skin, HAL senses which muscles you intend to move, and powers its joints at the same rate as you move yours, allowing you to walk around effortlessly while wearing the fifty pound suit. If you pick something up, the suit is able to compensate for a portion of the weight, effectively increasing your strength from 2 to 10 (!) times. The suit can be used indoors or outdoors and will provide power for between about three to five hours before it needs a recharge.

Prototypes of the HAL exoskeleton have been around for a few years, and Cyberdyne just begun to construct a new facility that should be able to produce 400 - 500 suits per year by the end of 2008, ramping up to tens of thousands of suits (!!) over the next few years. The best news is that the suits will be available for individual users overseas to rent (that’s us), for an estimated $1,000 per month which includes $300 for maintenance and upgrades. Is that a sweet deal or what? Sign me up, I’ll take one for Christmas.

[ Cyberdyne ] VIA [ Loving The Machine ]

You know why I don’t have a pool? It’s certainly not because I don’t have a large enough backyard. Or money. Or the desire to be cold and wet. No, it’s because keeping it clean would be really, really annoying. The Solar Breeze helps you out by automatically skimming the inevitable and unending gunk off the water all by itself. This, apparently, is trickier than it seems, and the Solar Breeze has special paddles to gently lift debris into interior bins without causing it to sink. The paddles also push it around the pool, focusing on the downwind edges where stuff is likely to accumulate. The Solar Breeze is powered completely by the sun, and also includes a chemical dispenser to help keep the water clean (although it only cleans the surface). It’s not going to give your pool as comprehensive of a cleaning as an iRobot Verro, but it is only $500 and you don’t have to plug it in to anything.

[ Solar Breeze ] VIA [ Crave ]

I have no idea whether or not this is true, but it’s just plausible enough to be believable. And it’s funny. From a post on How To Get Rid Of Stuff:

A local exterminator came over to my house a few weeks ago after finding an investigation. He gave me a small robotic vaccum cleaner called the roomba for a week. It had a scheduler and a base charge unit that it automatically went to when the battery got low. The roomba dispatched to the room like 20 times a day. Mostly while I was at work. As worker ants came out behind the wall, the roomba rolled over them and swept them up. So every once in a while it would go off its charger, run for half an hour, and nuke 100+ ants coming out of the wall per session. After about 3 days, running unattended thoughout the day and night, it killed off all the foragers, leaving the queen to starve to death. It was a merciless killing machine. It also cleaned my floors.

Just imagine yourself in the six three pairs of shoes of these poor little ants, with a gigantic robot chasing you down, trying to exterminate you and your entire family. Yeah, sometimes I have dreams like that… It is, after all, only a matter of time.

VIA [ RSN ]

This little round robot is named ApriPoko. He’s an 11 inch tall, 5 pound prototype under development by Toshiba to be used as a voice-activated universal remote system. Place him somewhere within eyesight of your entertainment system, and whenever you use one of your remotes, ApriPoko will notice the IR signal, perk up, and ask you what you just did. When you tell him “I just kicked my massage chair up to Shiatsu” he’ll remember your voice and the IR code from the remote. Next time, you can speak the command, and ApriPoko will rebroadcast the IR signal back to the device. I imagine that you’ll be able to assign specific voice commands to different combinations of devices, like a preset for “let’s watch a movie” or “hey baby, how ’bout a drink?”

Ultimately, it may just be easier to pick up the remote and push the button, but Toshiba is hoping to have a viable product sometime soon… And I’d like to see a remote that’s as cute as this. Heck, I might even pay for it.

VIA [ Pink Tentacle ]

The Samsung Hauzen VC-RE70V vacuum robot is one of the few foreign models I’ve seen that isn’t a poorly disguised and partially dysfunctional knockoff of an iRobot Roomba. In fact, it’s got a mapping feature that is a noticeable departure from the way Roombas operate. A small camera in the Hauzen takes pictures of its surroundings and creates some kind of map, which it uses not only to clean more efficiently, but also to return to it’s charging dock and (if necessary) resume cleaning where it left off. This means that the Hauzen will clean much more faster and more efficiently than Roombas do, with their random, insecty logic. The advantage of the Roomba’s approach, however, is that it cleans each spot 3 or 4 times during one cleaning cycle. It remains to be seen which approach is best, or even if there is a best approach. The Hauzen is supposed to be released later this month in Korea, so hopefully more details will be forthcoming.

VIA [ I4U News ]

Robot cooks are shaping up to be one of the next big things when it comes to automation. If you think about it, robots should be ideally suited to cooking, since it’s basically a construction project involving a set of components being assembled according to an instruction manual. This robot makes octopus balls entirely from scratch, hand-turning them to make sure they cook evenly, and adding sauce and seasonings after moving the finished ones over to a serving tray. I’ll confess to not being exactly sure what an octopus ball is, but what the heck, if a robot cooked it for me, I’d totally eat it.

VIA [ Technovelgy ]

Next time you’re at Kita Kyushu airport in Japan and are too lazy to carry your own luggage, you might be lucky enough to get to use one of these robotic skycaps, the RoboPorter. It’s 4 feet tall and responds to audio commands, so all you have to do is put your bags on it and tell it where you’re headed, and then meekly follow along. It has a touchscreen interface if you’re not in a chatty mood, and can carry up to 110 pounds. The only thing is, this little guy doesn’t look quite large enough to cope with the volume of baggage that you now see at most international airports. Personally, I’m either traveling with a very small amount of luggage (i.e. carry-on) or a very large amount of luggage (i.e. the entirety of my worldly possessions). In either case, this robot would not be particular useful to me, but I appreciate the step towards mitigation of all physical activity.

VIA [ Digital World Tokyo ]

The fact that Yasukawa Electric Corporation’s SmartPal V knows how to sort laundry by color and type, and then hangs it up, makes me instantly distrust it, simply because it’s smarter than I am. When it comes to laundry, anyway… But is sorting laundry really so different from enslaving humanity? Hm? Is it? IS IT? Yes, yes it is.

SmartPal V was designed from the ground up to be a service robot, helping people in their homes with daily tasks. It stands nearly four and a half feet tall and weighs an intimidating 280 pounds. At least you can outrun its top speed of 2.2 mph. Using 4 CCD cameras and voice recognition, it can recognize and respond to individuals, or just wander around and keep things tidy on its own. 21 joints including a bendable waist allow it to pick things up off the floor, and it can continue to do so until its battery runs out after about 2.5 hours, or until you get tired of listening to it use its voice synthesizer to complain about how it’s got a brain the size of a planet, but you’re making it pick up trash and sort laundry.

Definitely too early for availability, but I’m fairly confident that production is in the cards, since Japan seems to be looking towards robots for elder care in the near future.

[ News Release (Google Translated) ] VIA [ Technovelgy ]

Is it just me, or does this robot look really freakin’ creepy? Called Robovie, he was deployed in the Universal Citywalk Osaka shopping center to assist shoppers. Robovie has 16 cameras and 6 laser range finders, and is able to watch up to 20 people at a time and diagnose their mood based on their actions into one of 10 categories, including waiting, wandering, walking fast, running, hopelessly lost, totally freaking out, etc. (those last two, I made up). When it encountered disoriented patrons, Robovie pointed them where they wanted to go. Otherwise, he recommended local shops and restaurants. No word on what his recommendations were based on, but I assume it’s not personal experience.

The good news is that Robovie will be available for hire starting in June, in Japan.