Despite the fact that plastics are used everywhere, especially in products which are intended to be disposable, the recycling rate for plastics compared to metal, paper, and glass is utterly abysmal. It’s at like 6%, which means that 94% of potentially recyclable plastics end up in landfills or the tummies of sea turtles. The problem, as you have probably noticed, is that it’s a gigantic pain in the butt to do the obligatory pre-recycle sort with plastics. Yeah, there are recycle numbers stamped on most plastic containers, but I’ll bet you didn’t know that plastics with the same number often can’t actually be recycled together. Basically, it’s a mess.

Mitsubishi Electric Engineering Corp and Osaka University are tackling this problem with a robot, as well they should, since we humans have proven ourselves to be absolutely no good at plastic recycling. As you might expect, the the robot has some capabilities that we don’t, namely five lasers of different wavelengths that can be used to determine the reflectivity index, and therefore composition, of most plastics. The robot will automatically sort plastics into six different types, which takes the hard work of manual identification out the whole plastic recycling process.

There aren’t any details on how much plastic one of these robots can sort through every day, but there is a commercial version in the works, which should be available (at some point) for around $55k. At that price, it’s not going to be resource neutral anytime soon, but at least it will make you feel better about your recycling habits. And the sea turtles will thank you.

[ Osaka University ] VIA [ Telegraph ]

Nobody wants mess around inside sewer pipes, which is why robots have been doing it since one tried to kill James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever back in the seventies. This pipe inspection robot, developed by Osaka Gas and Koichi Osuka, a professor at Osaka University’s Graduate School of Engineering, has an innovative spiral springy shape that gives it all kinds of useful characteristics. The body of the robot can adapt to different sized pipes by expanding outwards, and wheels mounted parallel to the body drive it forward in a spiraling motion. The bot has no trouble making turns and getting past joints, and can carry a camera or other sensor packages.

This isn’t exactly a shape shifting robot, but it is a robot with a non-rigid body that can adapt its shape as required by its environment without relying on sensors or motors: you stick it in a pipe, and it fits the pipe. It’s that simple.

[ Mainichi ] VIA [ Gizmowatch ]

We got a terrifying peak at Castrol’s free kick robot in September of last year, but it looks like now it’s almost finished. Weighing in at around two tons (!), the actual kicking part of the machine is powered by an automobile engine (!!) that stores up energy in a flywheel, which releases it to the steel and carbon fiber leg all at once. The resulting kick tops 200 kph, and as you can see, it’s not something any goalie would want to sacrifice themselves for:

Blink? Here’s the slow-mo:

That tarp could have been your face. Yay robots!

VIA [ GetRobo ]

Here’s one upside of the near total collapse of the American auto industry: cheap industrial robot arms when the plants get liquidated. An old Chrysler plant is being sold lock, stock, and barrel by the University of Delaware, and up for auction are about 200 six axis robot arms. 181 of them are Nachis, with a couple ABB and Fanuc arms thrown in for good measure.

If you’re asking yourself why you’d want to go bid on a six axis robot arm, you obviously haven’t been reading BotJunkie for very long… Here is one idea (or two or three).

[ Great American Auctions ] VIA [ BBG ]

I’ve been hoping for a video of Motoman playing with LEGOs ever since I saw this picture from IREX 2009, and I’m definitely not disappointed. Motoman’s high resolution color cameras and object recognition make picking out and connecting LEGO pieces easy, and I especially like how he’s able to get the pieces with one hand while assembling the building (or whatever it is) with the other. Next time, though, they should give Motoman one of these and see how he does… That would impress me. And the rest of the world.

VIA [ Robots Dreams ]

This FANUC robot has an immensely satisfying job: it sorts candy (they say pills, but it looks like candy to me) into little jars by color, and then pours them all out again and starts over. It will happily keep doing this until you shut it off, kinda like me with M&Ms at Halloween… Because if I don’t sort them by color and then eat the colors I have more of to make sure that everything is even, the world ends.

[ FANUC ]

I have no problem with industrial robots. They may be inhuman, but at least they look inhuman enough that they don’t scare me. The scary robots are robots that have enough human features that you can imagine them having some kind of evil intent, kinda like these Nextage industrial robots from Japan’s Kawada Industries. Although you can’t really see it in the video, the robots are mounted on mobile bases, so they aren’t restricted to working in just one place. Unlike most industrial robots, the Nextage robots have their sensors and intelligence integrated into one package (complete with stereo cameras in their heads and additional cameras in their hands for examining objects), which makes them more versatile but also much more expensive. From what I can tell, these robots are designed to work in concert with humans as part of a cooperative assembly line, but personally, I would not like one of these things as a co-worker… I think it’s those creepy praying mantis arms:

VIA [ Robot Watch (Translated) ]

I love the inhuman speed of pick and place robots. We’ve seen a lot of incredible examples from ABB, but Adept Technology has just broken the “300 cycle per minute barrier” with their Quattro robot. The secret, they say, is that using four arms instead of three enables higher speeds and faster accelerations. If you want to see what 300 cycles per second looks like, pay attention at about 1:30 in the video and remind yourself that you’re not watching it on super fast forward.

[ Press Release ] VIA [ RobotBuzz (Translated) ]

I’m not sure that this is the greatest demo for a Motoman robot… I mean, they know how to sell soda, make chairs, mix drinks, and even cook pancakes. At the very least, I’d expect some kind of fancy shuffling or something, but visitors to PackExpo 2009 in Las Vegas had to content themselves with watching the robot make fun of them for losing with a giant sign. Sorry Motoman, if you really want to impress me at blackjack, you’ll have to put on a funny hat and show me some skills.

[ Motoman ]

Last February we posted some video of a couple ABB industrial robots showing off some Fanta Can avoidance maneuvers. Level two of the challenge adds a third robot and drops the tolerance down to 1mm. That’s, like, really small. And the robots are moving, like, really fast. What ABB is demonstrating here isn’t the repeatability, or even the tolerance (which is, in fact, tighter than 1mm). Rather, it’s the fact that you can program a complex path into the robot and then bump up the speed to something inhuman without any part of the system flinching. Neat stuff.

Also, what the hell is “Exotic Thrill” flavored Fanta?

[ ABB Robotics ]