Why is it that so many animals get to have tails, but not humans? It’s just not fair, because so so often I find myself in a tail wagging mood. Wei-Chieh Tseng has constructed a strap-on robotic tail which looks, and acts, enough like the real thing to satisfy any expressive needs you may have. Built with an Arduino board and a servo or two, the tail is directly controllable with a Wiimote, or using RFID tags that represent different emotions:

Hmm, I wonder if there’s a yiff mode on this thing…

VIA [ Engadget ]

We’ve seen plenty of powered exoskeletons over the last few years, including working prototypes from Tokyo University, Berkeley Bionics, Sarcos, Kanagawa Institute of Technology, and of course Cyberdyne. Where Panasonic’s Power Loader differs, though, is that it endows you with some extra goodies like extended utility arms with giant gripper claws so that you can kick alien ass lift stuff that much more effectively:

The suit itself weighs an appropriately colossal 230 kg (500 lbs), and enables you to easily lift about 100 kg (220 lbs) thanks to eighteen electromagnetic motors. Force feedback helps control the lifting power intuitively, but there’s no power source specified… And as is often the case, sheer awesomeness is often tempered by power requirements. Fuel cells, anyone?

The suit should be ready for consumers in about 5 years for an as yet unspecified, but no doubt rather high, price.

[ Mainichi (Translated) ] VIA [ Pink Tentacle ]

CBS has an interesting (and comprehensive) video and accompanying article on DEKA’s robotic prosthetic arm, commonly known as the “Luke” arm. We’ve written about it several times, and while this video doesn’t get into the coolest stuff (the brain control), it’s still worth a watch… If for no other reason than it’s great to see that innovative and effective cybernetics are finally getting to the people who need them the most.

[ CBS News ]

Thanks Andrew!

Those DARPA funded cyborg insects we wrote about last year have made significant progress, and are now flying completely untethered and under contro. By using direct optical lobe stimulation, the bugs can be steered left and right and up and down, and they also respond to stop and start commands. Basically, everything you could want in a remote control bug.

The awesome part is that this implant only steers the insect, and only when necessary. Once the bug is pointing in the right direction, the steering signal cuts out, and the bug self-stabilizes and gets back to the tricky business of flying, which it was just fine at before some roboticist stuck a bunch of wires into its optic lobe, thank you very much. As you can see from the video, the insect has no trouble landing itself on a vertical surface, a maneuver which would be, uh, a little bit difficult to code.

The next step, obviously, is getting the insect to do something useful, like carrying a camera. The bug can carry up to 30% of its own weight as payload (that works out to about 2.5 grams), but the controller and an antenna capable of operating at any significant distance is going to eat up a lot of that. It’s only a matter of time, though, and based on the rate of progression on this project so far, that time is probably a lot sooner than you think.

[ Science Blogs ] VIA [ Danger Room ]

You might be wondering just why, exactly, one would want to wear an arm-mounted robotic eyeball named Miruko. That looks to be wearing a sweater. Well, it’s obvious: to spot all the invisible monsters that are around you right now. You can’t see the monsters, by the robot eyeball can, and by following its gaze, you can figure out which of your friends are, in fact, monsters. And then you take a picture of them with a special iPhone app that’s connected to the robot. After that, the video doesn’t specify how the game works, but I assume since they’re monsters, you need to do something violent to them in order to score any points.

The game is mostly a proof of concept (but don’t let that fool you, most of your friends really are monsters), showing how robots can help humans interact with a virtual environment or augmented reality. Physically, Miruko is loosely based on another eyeball robot that’s, if possible, even more creepy… Called the Opto-Isolator, we wrote about it on OhGizmo last year.

VIA [ Pink Tentacle ]

What makes this robotic hand, from the neurobotics lab at the University of Washington, special is that it’s designed to be an exact replica of a human hand. The shape of the bones, the attachment points of the tendons, even the musculotendon passive viscoelasticity (whatever the heck that is) are functionally identical. The hand is a testbed for investigating the potential for complex neural control; if your brain sends a signal to a robot hand, the hand better be able to interpret the signal and move just the way you’re expecting it too.

Now, I still don’t think that modeling robots on human anatomy is a very efficient way to make robots more effective, but it is a good way to figure out how humans (most humans) are inherently able to be as dexterous as we are. And that, in turn, could help us to design better robots. Not necessarily more human robots, but robots that make use of (or potentially improve upon) specific attributes of human anatomy.

[ UW Neurobotics ]
Thanks Alan!

Dean Kamen’s brain controlled cyborg arm, which we first saw over a year ago, has received an additional three years of research funding. This time, it’s not from DARPA, but from the VA’s Prosthetics and Sensory Aids Service. This is a big step; even without knowing all the details, when funding shifts from the crazy world of DARPA to the Veteran’s Administration, actual availability seems and lot closer. And this appears to be the case: “veterans fitted with the arm will provide feedback to guide engineers in refining the prototype, before it is commercialized and also made available through the VA health care system.” So, it’s very possible that in just a few years, and 18 DoF thought controlled cyborg arm will be available to people who need one.

[ Press Release ] VIA [ Robots.net ]

This huge robotic hand, constructed by Christian Ristow of RoboChrist Industries, is what’s called a Waldo. No, it has nothing to do with this guy. The term ‘Waldo’ actually comes from a Robert Heinlein sci-fi short story about a disabled guy named Waldo who builds himself gloves that can remotely control other gloves, be they tiny or huge. In the story, the device is called “Waldo F. Jones’ Synchronous Reduplicating Pantograph,” but everyone just called it a Waldo, and the term has managed to make the transition into the real world.

As you can see, the beauty of Waldoes are that with zero training, anyone can use them to control giant metal hands capable of crushing steel barrels and stoves:

[ Christian Ristow ]

In an attempt to make manual control of robot vision a thing of the past, researchers from the University of Munich Hospital have developed the EyeSeeCam system, which is able to track eye movements and relay commands to a robot (or anywhere else). Using infrared LEDs, transparent mirrors, and video cameras all mounted on a pair of glasses, EyeSeeCam can monitor what your eyes are doing 600 times per second with a pointing accuracy of half a degree. That data are then used to dynamically control a robotic vision system, which causes the robot to look exactly where you do. The EyeSeeCam system also includes a 6 DoF inertial measurement unit that can be used for head tracking, meaning that you can set up a robot head and eyes to exactly mimic your own head and eyes without any active input.

All that’s required to run EyeSeeCam is a laptop with a Firewire port. The hardware itself is wireless, only weighs 170 grams, runs on batteries, and is “low cost” (whatever that means). Primarily designed to study cognitive behavior, the system should end up being commercially available at some point.

[ EyeSeeCam (PDF) ] VIA [ DVICE ]

Back in April of last year, we reported that Cyberdyne had begun constructing a facility to mass produce their strength-enhancing exoskeletons. The HAL exoskeleton uses sensors attached to your skin to sense when you move your limbs, and then it assists those movements, effectively increasing your strength by anywhere from 2 to 10 times, with a battery life of up to 2.5 hours.

Cyberdyne initially said that the HAL exoskeletons would be available for rent (in Japan) for about $2200 a month by the end of 2008, but it now appears that they’re ready to start selling the exoskeletons straight up for $4200 each. The only disappointing bit is that the annual production is only supposed to be 400 units, which means you and I are pretty much guaranteed not to get one. However, Cyberdyne originally planned to ramp their production up to “tens of thousands” of suits, so maybe in the next couple years… They’ll be available first in Japan, and then probably in the EU, and most likely to people with disabilities first. So yeah, it’s gonna be a while for most of the rest of us, but better maybe sometime than probably never.

[ Cyberdyne ] VIA [ Slashdot ]