For Discover Magazine’s 30th anniversary, they’re posting a series of predictions from eminent scientists about what’s going to happen over the next 30 years. One of these scientists is Rodney Brooks, a professor of robotics at MIT and CTO of iRobot, and he’s got some interesting things to say (besides the all too familiar “robots right now are like computers in the 80s”):

One of the great things about the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, which my company iRobot designed, is that it’s too cheap not to be autonomous. Military robots right now are too expensive to be autonomous—you can’t afford to have them screw up. If the Roomba misses a spot, no big deal, it can find it later. So there will be a lot more robot autonomy, but surprisingly it will start out at the low end. It will trickle up to the high end over time.

Too cheap not to be autonomous… The ‘trickle up’ idea for robotics isn’t something I’ve heard people talk about much. The conventional way of thinking is that expensive and complex robots with expensive and complex sensors will provide the origins of autonomy, and then as the hardware gets cheaper and more accessible, robots offering the same autonomous capabilities will also get cheaper and more accessible. After all, this is what happens with computers. Brooks is right, though, in that to some extent, the more expensive a robot is, the less likely we are to trust it entirely to itself. In order for true autonomy to trickle up from the bottom, however, we’re going to have to overcome the hardware limitations and start getting access to more technology like the $25 SLAM system in the Neato XV-11.

Cars will certainly be more robotic. There will be many more robots in our houses, in our hospitals, in our factories, and in the military. We don’t have armed robot soldiers yet, but if we did, a robot could afford to shoot second, where a person could not. A robot doesn’t care whether its life is at risk. One can imagine robots getting a lot better at detecting what’s dangerous and what’s not dangerous: where there’s a gun and where there isn’t one. They might actually become more moral than we are.

I know that this is a somewhat contentious subject, but I tend to agree with Brooks here, although I’m not sure about the morality bit… Plenty of people definitely don’t agree, but I think the idea of being able to shoot second with no risk is an important advantage that robots have and humans don’t.

[ Discover ]

Well, it’s nothing BotJunkie readers haven’t seen before… A Motoman robot, serving ice cream. Only this time, he’s got a big head. Yay? Um, sure, yay! And if you liked that, here’s a Motoman robot with a smaller head (but sunglasses) wielding a golden shovel (and using those new Robotiq grippers that we tweeted about last week:

For the record, that’s Dexter helping out with the groundbreaking with the new headquarters of Motoman North America in Ohio. Anyway, more yay! Or something.

VIA [ CrunchGear ] AND [ Dayton Daily News ]

When we wrote about Alpha the robot back in March, we mentioned that it wasn’t exactly the safest machine to be around:

“Once it fired its pistol without warning, blasting the skin off [its creator's] arm from wrist to elbow. Another time it lowered its arm unexpectedly, struck an assistant on the shoulder, bruised him so badly that he was hospitalized.”

Anyway, the article in the picture above (from 1932) is a contemporary account of the incident, and although it seems as though the author probably embraced his creative license a bit more than a newspaper reporter perhaps should have, it’s an interesting peek into how people reacted to some of the very first humanoid robots. You can read the whole article in PDF format here.

On a side note (which is inevitably going to become the focus of this post, so here we go), it’s sort of amazing how similar that headline is to the type of things we read and hear when robots (for whatever reason) cause injuries to humans in the present. Irrespective of what actually happened, the robot is always given some kind of malicious motive, which obviously it doesn’t possess… Because of how they’re constructed, robots are always (always) doing what you tell them to do. If they screw something up, it’s because you (or some other human) screwed it up first, either in terms of the hardware or the software.

Also, I would just like to point out that this story, rather than illustrating the potential dangers of armed robots, should actually serve as an example of why a robot with a gun isn’t necessarily any more or any less dangerous than a human with a gun. I mean, this is gun safety 101: if someone (or something) has a loaded weapon, you don’t stand in front of it. Yes, robots can occasionally be unpredictable. So can humans. The difference is, when a robot shoots you when you didn’t intend it to, you can rip it apart, figure out what happened, and fix it so that it (or that particular issue, anyway) doesn’t happen again.

[ Jess Nevins ] VIA [ io9 ]

A bunch of you have been wondering what the deal is with the Neato XV-11 robot vacuum, since it was a month ago that Neato said they’d started shipping their pre-orders. We got in touch with Neato, and they’ve confirmed that the robots are shipping to people who placed a pre-order. If they seem to be moving kinda slowly getting the bots in the mail, it’s for a good reason: they’ve had an “overwhelming response” to the pre-orders that “exceeded expectations” and they’ve run into a bit of a backlog. Neato says that they should be caught up before the end of August. If you want one, it’s worth noting that they won’t bill your credit card until the robot actually ships.

Anybody get theirs yet? Please post if/when you do!

[ Neato Robotics XV-11 ]

This is what happens when you mix robots and beer.

Thanks Alex!

Mad props to Erico Guizzo from IEEE Spectrum for coming up with this robot baby matrix, which is pretty self explanatory (right?). Robot baby matrix… That’s my official phrase of the day. Click to embiggen.

Robots include:

Nao
M3-Neony
Nexi
Simon
iCub
CB2
Diego-San
Zeno
Yotaro
Kojiro
Robotinho
Repliee R1
RealCare Baby

[ IEEE Spectrum ]

Remember how Willow Garage decided that it would be kinda cool to give away 10 11 PR2 robots to deserving research institutions worldwide to mess around with? Last night was the official PR2 graduation, where the winning teams got to meet (and dance with) the PR2s that they’ll be taking home with them to do incredibly awesome things. We’ll be keeping you up to date on all of that, of course, but meanwhile, enjoy some pics and video straight from the party at Willow Garage, after the jump. (Read more…)

This infographic is a nice National Robot Week-y overview of the industry. It doesn’t have any info that will shock dedicated BotJunkie readers (not even the bit about the cow milking robots), but it’s fun to glance through and has cute robot graphics.

The only thing I take issue with is where the artist says that ASIMO “doesn’t really have much of a purpose.” To that I would just say, of what purpose, sir, is a newborn baby? Hrmph.

It’s absurdly long, and you can view the whole thing after the jump. (Read more…)

Dino Segovis of DinoFab.com gives us the breakdown of a Roomba 4000 in a 20-minute, 2-part video packed with tons of digestible, relevant information!

Top 5 Things We Learned:

1. The Roomba 4000 is very hacker-friendly, in that is has innumerable sensors and motors, most of which are easily disconnected and repurposed.
2. If you’re taking apart your used Roomba, be ready for dust! These things work in dust, carpet, and generally dirty places all day- so get your mask ready.
3. The drive wheels use planetary gears, which is mostly just badass – planetary gears offer a nifty solution to creating a gear train that ends in the same axis as the input. HowStuffWorks has a great article with more info on planetary gears here.
4. For the front bumper, the Roomba 4000 uses IR sensors, instead of a simple button sensor to detect whether it’s touching a wall. Presumably this is for durability reasons- though that doesn’t explain why they opted for normal pushbutton sensors elsewhere.
5. Every sensor has a unique plug, making disassembly/reassembly infinitely less terrifying, since it’s easy to determine what goes where. No more plugging the kneebone into the jawbone.

All in all, the 2-part video is an impressive show of Roomba knowledge- the ease with which Segovis moves through the different parts of the dissection show that he’s had his hands in a fair few robots. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did- now I’m off to Craigslist to look for my own!

[ I Heart Robotics ]

Life magazine has a online slideshow of “Curious Robotic Animals,” most of which we’ve posted about before. We didn’t post about this bunnybot, though, probably because it’s from back in 2000, before BotJunkie (or most of the rest of the exciting bits of the internet) existed. Life doesn’t provide much in the way of specific information about the robot besides the date on the picture and the name (“Patata”), and something about making faces and voice recognition. A Google search turns up just a bunch of pictures of potatoes, so until we find out more, just enjoy the least happy robot bunny ever.

VIA [ Life ]