To film up close and personal with polar bears, the BBC (who knows a thing or two about making nature shows) decided that it would be kinda cool to deploy an entire fleet of little remote controlled, robotic cameras:

As you can see, the curious polar bears and the cameras didn’t always get along, and several of them were playfully destroyed. Follow the link below (or just go ahead and click here) to watch some of this destruction firsthand… It’s pretty damn funny to see a polar bear chasing a propeller-driven robot on skis across the ice and then trying to eat it.

Update- someone’s ripped the vid onto YouTube, enjoy it while it lasts!

[ BBC ] VIA [ Suicide Bots ]

On Monday, Barack Obama opened the (first ever) White House Science Fair with the following:

“One of the great joys of being President is getting to meet young people like all of you — and some of the folks in the other room who I just had a chance to see some of their exhibits and the work that they were doing. It’s inspiring — and I never miss a chance to see cool robots when I get a chance.”

Wow, me neither! Also introduced at the event was a new DARPA initiative to give resources to students to help them build those aforementioned robots. BTW, I’m still waiting to hear back on that anti-robot takeover czar position…

[ The White House Blog ] VIA [ Robot Living ]

Each Cubelet has a tiny computer inside of it and is a robot in its own right. So when you put blocks together, you’re actually making a robot out of several smaller robots. Each block communicates with its neighbors, so you know that if two blocks are next to each other, they’re talking. If you make a simple robot by connecting a Light Sensor block to a Speaker block, they’ll start to talk, and when the light in the room gets brighter, the Speaker will get louder. Actually, you’d need a third block to make this work: every robot needs a Battery block to run. Next, you could swap the Speaker for a Drive block, and when the light gets brighter, the robot will drive faster. A third category of blocks is the Think Blocks: maybe you’d want to put an Inverse block in between the Light Sensor and Drive blocks. Then, the robot would drive slower as the light gets brighter. This simple communication between adjacent blocks is what gives the kit a little bit of magic.

The basic kit (which you can pre-order now for $300) includes 20 Cubelets:

Action Blocks: 2 Drive, 1 Rotate, 1 Speaker, 1 Flashlight, 1 Bar Graph
Sense Blocks: 1 Knob, 1 Brightness, 2 Distance, 1 Temperature
Think/Utility Blocks: 2 Inverse, 1 Minimum, 1 Maximum, 1 Battery, 2 Passive, 2 Blocker

More info on each Cubelet is available on the website. And to clarify, there are no wires involved, and no programming, so Cubelets are suitable for children as young as 5. Technically Cubelets are in beta testing, so it’ll be exciting to see some of the combinations that people come up with.

Speaking of, I will award one extra tasty virtual cookie to whomever can convincingly figure out just how many different permutations of robot you can make with one set of 20 Cubelets, keeping in mind the following:

-Each Cubelet has either 5 or 6 attachment points (depending on what it does)
-The same set of Cubelets functions differently when arranged differently
-Cubelet permutations must be able to exist in physical space (tricky!)

We’ll ignore the fact that using (say) two inverse blocks in a row is functionally identical to not using any inverse blocks, and just assume that a Cubelet robot that has a different size or layout counts as a different robot.

Good luck! :)

[ Modular Robotics ]

In a startling bit of news, Microsoft has just announced that their Robotics Developer Studio (RDS) software will be available to anyone… for free.

In the past, Microsoft RDS has been distributed in several versions, only the most limited of which was free. Now Microsoft intends to open the doors and bring RDS to the masses- a move which could prove hugely successful, or potentially fatal.

Microsoft believes that by opening up their software to the public, they’ll help to spark a revolution in consumer robotics, and begin a new era in technology.

Microsoft RDS is a set of development tools including a visual programming interface and a 3D simulator which, especially when combined with the myriad of tutorials, make for a very easy-to-use piece of development software that is geared towards as broad a user base as possible.

This is a big bit of news from Microsoft, but it’s important to keep things in perspective- there are a growing number of robotic development tools available, many of which are already open-source. One such competing development platform is Willow Garage’s Robot Operating System (ROS). The folks at the Garage have had some impressive results with their software, and given that the market is still developing, it should be interesting to see how it all pans out.

Download RDS here.

Should Microsoft have kept the full version of RDS for purchase, rather than giving it out to the masses? Let us know in comments!

[ Microsoft Robotics ]

Thanks Rich!

It’s times like these that I’m reminded just how miserable the world was before we had robots. Before robotic dental practice patients, what poor unfortunate souls had to sit through the inept and bumbling ministrations of wet behind the ears dental students? I weep for them. Hanako here weeps too, if you screw up. Touch sensors inside her mouth allow her to give authentic wincing and gagging feedback on your dental technique. She can obey orders like “ooooooopen… wider please… wider…” and she also sneezes, coughs, drools, turns her head, and fails to understand why dentists try to ask her about her life while they’re elbow deep inside her skull.

Hanako is brought to you by a group of universities in Japan in partnership with Tmsuk, makers of your favorite net-tossing security bot.

[ NODE (Translated) ] VIA [ CrunchGear ]

SPARK stands for Starter Programs for Advanced Robotics Knowledge, and it’s iRobot’s new program to help improve robotics education for students in elementary school through college. While not too much seems to be happening at the moment, SPARK does have a lot of promising partners, including FIRST, CMU, BeatBots, Topobo, and even Paro… There’s a lot of potential here, and of course we here at BotJunkie are wildly in favor of anything that makes robotics more accessible to students, especially younger students who may not even realize that robotics is something they can learn how to do.

All too often, programs like this don’t get past the concept+slick website phase, which as far as I can tell, is where SPARK currently is. But hopefully with the backing of iRobot and its partners, something substantial will become of this program. We’ll keep you posted.

[ SPARK ] VIA [ RSN ]

Several times a year, friend o’ the blog Trossen Robotics hosts a contest for roboticists. This time, the contest was to write a tutorial or tutorials on some aspect of robotics that would make sense to someone with little or no experience on the topic. The winners of the contest, announced last week, include tutorials on everything from So You Want To Build A Robot to Obstacle Avoidance in the Real World to Prototyping a PCB with Desoldering Braid. There are plenty more tutorials available, and the Trossen Robotics community as a whole is a fantastic (and friendly) resource for anyone with any level of interest in, or experience with, robotics.

[ Trossen Robotics Tutorial Contest Winners ]

Thanks Andrew!

Building robots isn’t easy, and everybody has to start somewhere. Me? My first robot was a cute little photovore, but I had to teach myself to solder in order to build it. If that’s a big first step for you (it’s okay to admit it), iBotz kits are small, cheap, fun, and a good way to get yourself (or your kids) introduced to the amazing and spectacular world of DIY and hobby robotics, no soldering (or other experience) necessary.

The kits come in several different designs with different interactive capabilities. The cheapest (a little car that runs away from sounds) is only $30, while the most advanced (responds to sounds, avoids obstacles, and follows lines) is $65. This is easy cheap enough that after you’ve built it and played with it for a while, you should have no problem taking it apart again to hack it up into something different and/or better.

[ iBotz ] VIA [ Trossen ]

Last time the Charles Milby High School robotics team from Huston tried to get LARA, their LEGO Autonomous Robotic Android, to Michigan for the Robofest competition, they used FedEx. Big mistake. LARA arrived two weeks late with a fractured spine. So this year, thinking that it would be easier, they just bought her her own ticket.

“(We) almost did not get her on the plane: sent to two different scanning sites, TSA inspected with x-ray, physical, photos, chemicals, bomb squad, extensive interviews with TSA and FBI and bomb squad…finally we were allowed on since one of the inspectors saw the robot on the news through a story on RoboFest and I was wearing a ST Lawrence RoboFest t-shirt.”

And with that, LARA ended up in seat 5A on Continental Airlines. No, you still can’t bring a bottle of water, but an android? No problem!

LARA is anatomically correct in that she has a skeleton, muscles, and even a nervous system. Although she may not look like it from the pics, she can stand up on her own. She responds to verbal and gestural commands and is made entirely out of LEGOs, and her creators are hoping to make her into a kit that other schools can build and use as an educational tool.

There’s some video of LARA on the Team RoboBuffs YouTube channel, but it’s pretty random and doesn’t seem to involve the robot actually, you know, doing anything.

[ Press Release ] VIA [ GetRobo ]

As part of health and sexuality education, 13-15 year old students are being given robot babies to help illustrate why they might want to wait just a little bit longer before having kids of their own. The animatronic babies require constant attention including feeding, burping, rocking, and diaper changes, and just like a real baby, the robot babies will cry incessantly until you figure out the correct action key (there are keys for food, changing diapers, etc.) to insert into a slot in their back.

The babies help to teach cooperative parenting skills:

“[People on the street] look at you like you’re an easy prostitute,” said classmate Sarah. “One guy said, ‘Can I be your baby daddy?’”

As well as fostering family development:

It was hard on other family members, too, one student said. “I had to have two babies. My dad ripped the battery pack out of the first one.”

Software inside the babies monitor how well their parents are doing. Teachers are able to set the difficulty level of the babies, from easy to medium to hard to crack baby:

The “crack baby” shows the devastating effects of substance use by a pregnant woman. It bears a painful facial expression and cries frequently and heartbreakingly. “I had the crack baby,” said one student. “It was crying and screaming. Its head did a 360.”

At this particular school in Brooklyn, girls are required to take care of their robot babies for three days and two nights, while boys can either take a baby for 24 hours or write a paper. Educators are trying to stress that “it’s important that women take control of their sexual and reproductive health. If a young woman gives birth, most of the time she will be the person responsible for the child.” It seems to be quite effective for boys as well, however:

“Babies cost a lot of money,” said Kevin, who started out thinking he would have a child at 18 but gradually upped it to 40 during the interview.

Sounds like a good plan to me, Kevin.

[ Brooklyn Eagle ]

(Image from a different article)