So, as you may or may not know or care, I also write posts for OhGizmo.com. Obviously, BotJunkie is way more awesome, but sometimes I just have to suck it up and write about consumer electronics and gadgets and stuff. It’s one of those days, since the Game Developer’s Conference is going on here in San Francisco. If you’re interested in Sony’s new PlayStation Move motion controller or a music game that uses a real playable guitar instead of a plastic thing with buttons, please feel free to swing by over there. Meantime, enjoy a couple more vids from Cybernetic Zoo and I’ll be back here with our usual robotyness in a day or two.

Odex-1. The creepy music is not helping.

This is the Adaptive Suspension Vehicle, a product of Ohio State University and DARPA in 1984. It weighs 2600 kg, has 1.4m ground clearance, and can cross a 1.8m ditch. When you turn it off, it lies down on its belly, which for some reason I find to be incredibly cute.

[ Cybernetic Zoo ]

On a side note, just another shout-out to commenter Cynox. All these awesome retro robot posts were derived from his Pop Sci tip. If you find something cool, let me know… We’ve got an occasionally flaky contact form, or feel free to email me directly: e v a n @ b o t j u n k i e . c o m , without all the spaces of course.

Another gem from Cybernetic Zoo is Alpha, a robot created in 1934. Here are some excerpts from a contemporary article from Time magazine:

Last week Alpha, the robot, made its first public appearance in the U. S. One of the most ingenious automatons ever contrived by man, a grim and gleaming monster 6 ft. 4 in. tall, the robot was brought to Manhattan by its owner-inventor-impresario, Professor Harry May of London, and installed on the fifth floor of R. H. Macy & Co.’s department store. The creature had a great sullen slit of a mouth, vast protuberant eyes, shaggy curls of rolled metal. In one mailed fist Alpha clutched a revolver.

Professor May, a dapper, blond, beak-nosed man in his middle thirties, signaled his assistant who drew a curtain behind the stage, revealing the massive control cabinets to which the robot was wired.

Said the crisp British voice of Professor May: “Wake up!”

The eyes of the automaton glowed red.

“Stand up!”

The robot clicked and whirred. Pivoting at knees and waist, it slowly stood up.

“Raise your right arm.” Alpha gave a tremendous Nazi salute.

When commanded, the robot lowered its arm, raised the other, lowered it, turned its head from side to side, opened and closed its prognathous jaw, sat down.

More, after the jump. (Read more…)

On yesterday’s retro robot article, David Buckley provided a link to Cybernetic Zoo, a website with a whole bunch of incredible pictures and information on early robots from all over the world. You can easily spend a few hours (or days?) paging through all of the bots, but here are some of my favorites:

Arok, an American robot designed by Ben Skora in 1975. Arok can lift 125 pounds and move at 3 mph. It’s radio controlled, and that freakish head is a Frankenstein mask.

More, after the jump. (Read more…)

Commenter Cynox was browsing through the 137 years of Popular Science magazine which are now available online, and he noticed this robot in the September 1984 issue. Called Odex I, it was developed by a (now apparently defunct) company called Odetics. Odex was six and a half feet tall, had six legs, and was fully capable of walking. Although it only weighed 370 pounds, each of its legs could lift 400 pounds. It could dead lift some 2100 pounds, and carry 900 pounds while walking at normal speed (which was about 18 inches per second). Odex used a tripod gait, and the fishbowl thing on top contained sensors that helped it avoid obstacles. It was one of the first robots with an onboard computer that helped coordinate all of its limbs. Since the limbs could articulate themselves in several directions independently, Odex was able to rapidly change its limb configuration to squeeze through tight spaces, move quickly, or lift stuff. It was able to climb into the back of a truck through a combination of automated step behaviors and teleoperation, which was pretty damn good for 1984.

Odex was called a “functionoid,” which implied that it was good for multiple tasks, as opposed to the single function robots that were in use in factories. There were a lot of potential applications for Odex, from coal mining to seafloor exploration to nuclear inspections to military operations, but despite some potential partnerships with NASA and the military and a huge amount of spending on robotics research in the late 80s, Odetics stopped working on robots by the early 90s and pretty much vanished a few years later. In light of how things went, it’s interesting to read some of the quotes from the time when Odex represented a huge technological advance:

“We believe that when historians recount the evolution of walking machines, Odetics’ research will be considered an important part of the development of this technology.”

This may actually be true, for all I know, even if the advances made by Odex I and Odetics aren’t directly associated with them anymore.

If anyone else sees any cool robots from the Pop Sci archives, please post ‘em in the comments.

[ Popular Science ]
[ Odex @ TheOldRobots ]

Thanks Cynox!

Paxshikai may have hit 100 i-SOBOT YouTube videos last year, but apparently he’s not out of good ideas, as this latest firefighting i-SOBOT shows. That little guy has a surprising amount of strength in his arm servos, don’t you think?

[ Paxshikai @ YouTube ]

The future of robotics is here. It’s **drum roll** cockroaches? Texas A&M University’s Nuclear Security Science and Policy Institute (say that 10 times fast!) is developing technology that allows cockroaches to be controlled via a tiny chip on a cockroach’s back that sends electrical signals to make the roach move. “It’s like a cattle prod for cockroaches,” says William Charlton, an associate professor at Texas A&M.

But why cockroaches? Well, the same chip that communicates remotely with a computer to prod the roach has several types of radiation sensor, meaning that it can detect whether conditions in a given area are safe for humans.

“Cockroaches really are the perfect medium for this,” says William Charlton, an associate professor of nuclear engineering at the university and a principal investigator on the project. “They can go for extraordinarily long periods of time without food. They exist on every continent except Antarctica. They’re very radiation resistant, and they can carry extremely large amounts of weight compared to their body mass.”

If Charlton gets his way, we’ll have mini-armies of 20 or so roaches surveying areas as large as one square kilometer, all controlled by remote operators, all reporting data about chemical conditions in the area.

I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords

It may look almost cartoonish in proportion, but the picture above is the real deal. How long till we see “Control Your Own Cockroach” kits for the kids?

[ NDIA ] VIA [ Wired ]

From the folks at RSLSteeper in the UK comes BeBionic, “The next generation of fully articulated myo-electric hands.” Being myoelectric means that these hands can be controlled by electrical signals from the human brain. Not only can these bionic digits produce still art straight out of a zombie flick, they’re actually quite… dare I say… handy? “Complete with a range of naturally compliant grip patterns that provide repeatable accuracy, our powerful new hands combine innovative technology with life-like appearance.” In other words these things are AALLIIIVVVEEEEE… or at least pretty darn close to it. RSLSteeper has also released a nifty teaser video showing off just how accurate these things are:

Tell me those things don’t look awesome!

Now, maybe I shouldn’t be talking, seeing as I’ve made some pretty destructive robots, but as cool as these bionic hands look, I always find robots that are capable of actually hurting someone (read: Kung-Fu grip) the slightest bit creepy, and this is no exception. I mean, if we’ve learned anything from The Addams Family, it’s that hands with a mind of their own can only mean bad news.

At the same time, I do have to applaud RSLSteeper- if the BeBionic hands are as nimble as the video demonstrates, then they could have some very important applications, both in helping amputees, and in making more life-like androids.

What’s your take? Handy, or creepy?

[ BeBionic ] VIA [ Engadget ]

The robot build designs that come in the stock LEGO NXT 2.0 kit are pretty neat, but I bet you never thought you could build a self balancing LEGO Segway… After all, you need a gyro for that, right?

Right?

Or, apparently, all you need is the light sensor:

The way it works is that when the robot tilts forward, the light sensor gets closer to the ground and the sensor signal increases. Tilting backwards moves the sensor the other way and the signal decreases. All the robot has to do is to try to keep the sensor signal constant by compensating for the changes with its motors, and it’ll stay upright. The only trick is that the robot has to start off perfectly balanced… Unlike a real Segway, it has no idea what balanced actually is, it’s just looking at the relative feedback from the sensor.

Also, if you have a 2nd NXT brick, you can control the system (making it go forwards and backwards, anyway) via Bluetooth. Now if there was just some way to get it to turn, it could potentially be to the LEGO car what the LEGO car was to the LEGO horse and LEGO buddy.

The build instructions and code can be found here.

[ NXTPrograms ] VIA [ Make ]

Last time we heard about robot evolution, the bots were figuring out how to deceive each other. Now, researchers at EPFL in Switzerland have been using the same sort of genetic programming techniques to enable robots to teach themselves how to solve mazes, cooperate on tasks, and hunt each other (we’ll save that one for last).

The way genetic programming works is that the robots are only programmed on a very basic level, with simple information on their sensors and objectives. At first, the robots are clueless as to how to take the information from their sensors and apply it to completing their objectives, but after each test, random variations (mutations) are introduced into the code. Robots that demonstrate the most improvement have their code passed on to the next generation, and the process was repeated a bunch of times. In this experiment, after 100 generations, the robots taught themselves how to navigate a maze without running into a wall, and figured out that having their sensors pointed in the direction that they were going was the best way to be. It gets cooler:

“In another experiment they programmed groups of robots to push tokens along a wall to a marked area to win points. They selected the robots that gained the most points to pass their code on to the next generation. Over time altruistic behaviors were observed, in which robots sacrificed points if the entire group would benefit, and the robots cooperated to push larger tokens together to earn more points. As in nature, the robots followed the biological principle of kin selection, in which they only helped robots having the same code lineage.”

Code-based kin selection. Crazy, huh? It makes sense, though, if you think about it… Robots work together best if they’re using the same code, and robots who aren’t using that code won’t know how to cooperate with the robots that are. So, they’ll end up being less efficient, and won’t be as likely to make it into the next generation.

The predator-prey dynamic is perhaps the most interesting. One group of robots with several sensors were programmed to chase after another group of robots, who had fewer sensors but were faster. At first, the predator robots simply chased after the prey robots, who ran away. After 125 generations of evolution, the predator robots had figured out how to stalk the prey robots, hiding out and then sneaking up on the prey’s blind spots. The prey robots, on the other hand, learned where the predators liked to hide and made sure to keep their sensors facing them.

All this, in just a hundred or so generations in a lab. Kinda makes you wonder why we don’t just set a couple hundred Roombas loose in a dust covered wearhouse, let them fight it out and breed with each other, and after a couple years we’d get the world’s smartest, most efficient, and deadliest robot vacuum.

[ Evolution of Adaptive Behaviour in Robots by Means of Darwinian Selection ] VIA [ Physorg ]

The paper also refers to another robot evolution project called Golem@Home, which used distributed computing to design a moving robot from scratch. Different simulations were raced against each other, and the winners were actually created. We posted about it back in 2007, it’s pretty cool.