Back in July, we wrote about how UPenn’s GRASP Lab had taught their quadrotors to work together to grasp and move things. The next step, it seems, is teaching the quadrotors to work together to grasp and move things and actually build buildings. The video above shows a team of quadrotors cooperating to construct the framework of a (rather small) building. The building’s structure is held together with magnets, and the quadrotors are able to verify that the alignment is correct by attempting to wiggle the structural components around, which is pretty cool.

It’s fun to speculate about how this technology might grow out of the lab into the real world… To build actual buldings, you’d either need much bigger quadrotors (which is possible), lots of small quadrotors cooperating in big pieces (also possible), or buildings built out of much smaller components (which might be the way to go). The quadrotors probably wouldn’t be able to do all the work, but they have the potential to make construction projects significantly more efficient.

[ GRASP ]

As if it wasn’t bad enough that robots are stealing our jobs, this particular one actually rubs it in with facial expressions. Fraunhofer’s pi4 workerbot is fully equipped to take over from a human (or two) on an assembly line, with two 7-DoF arms with force-feedback hands and a set of three high resolution cameras sophisticated enough to let it inspect parts for quality. It doesn’t just put you out of work, though: stealing your job makes pi4 happy:

With great care, a robot picks up a gear wheel in one hand, a housing in the other, and places the two together. When they don’t immediately engage, it breaks off its movement. Slowly, it twists the gear wheel round a little and tries again. This time the wheel slots easily into its mounting. The robot smiles, and places the correctly assembled part on the conveyor belt.

The facial expressions are designed to provide feedback to managers… Happy means that the robot is hard at work, and bored means that it’s capable of working faster: “Please, let me steal someone else’s job too!”

[ Press Release ] VIA [ PopSci ]

This video of what claims to be the world’s first badminton robot suffers from a serious lack of robots playing badminton, but from the few peeks that it offers of what this robot actually does, it seems pretty cool.

Now, before you scoff at the fact that anyone would bother to create a robot that plays badminton, you should know that badminton is in fact the fifth most popular sport on the planet. It’s also the fastest sport, with birdies routinely traveling at speeds of 300 kph. If you’ve only ever played badminton in your back yard, you’ve been totally missing out, because here’s how it’s meant to be played:

The rest of the match is here, if you’re interested.

But anyway, robots! This system reminds me a lot of that crazy parts tossing robot, except with the addition of an extra motor or two to swing the racket around. If it was possible to add a Z axis to the whole contraption to let the robot cover the entire court, it could turn into a serious competitor, although the reaction times required in a badminton match would certainly challenge even the most sophisticated vision and drive systems.

Thanks @BatistLeman!

Heartland Robotics is a company headed by legendary iRobot co-founder Rodney Brooks. It’s been in ‘stealth mode’ since its founding in 2008, meaning that they’re working on something cool enough to have raised some $32 million in funding, but they’re not ready to tell the world about it yet.

With the latest round of funding (which involves as bunch of investors being shown around and told what the plan is), some new information has leaked out from Heartland, and it’s tantalizing:

Visitors to Heartland describe a robot that looks like a human from the waist up, with a torso; either one or two arms with grippers; and a camera where you might expect the head to be. The robot is on a rolling base rather than legs; it can be moved around but doesn’t move autonomously. The arm and gripper can be quickly trained to do a repetitive task just by moving them, no software code required.

It’s possible that this robot is based in part on MIT’s Obrero platform, pictured above. There’s more:

“Brooks apparently likens Heartland’s robot, which is intended to perform assembly and packaging tasks that low-wage factory workers do today, to Apple’s iPhone. He’s interested in encouraging a community of software developers to create applications that would teach the robot to do tasks such as using its camera to recognize a defective widget and pulling it off the conveyor belt.”

Thinking about robots as hardware that runs apps is not unique to Heartland, but the deciding factor could be the target price point: a shockingly low $5000. At that level, it’s easy for businesses to justify purchasing a robot just to try it out, since the risk is so small. And if they can set the robot up on an assembly line (which seems to be its general target market), it could very rapidly start making things more efficient for even small businesses, especially if the robot is as easy to program as they’re trying to make it.

Even if it takes three of these robots to do the job of one human, you’re still talking about a very positive investment. Heck, even if you needed ten of them, a $5k a pop they’d probably pay for themselves in less than a year when you consider the overhead that humans require, and they’d work 24/7 to boot.

For a long (long long LONG) time, the robotics industry has been looking for its PC, the one killer platform or application that has the potential to make robots simple, cheap, reliable, and useful. It hasn’t turned out to be vacuums, but it might just be a cheap robot worker from Heartland.

Stay tuned.

[ Heartland Robotics ] VIA [ Boston.com ] and [ NBF ]

The reason that someone thought that giving this robot arm a razor sharp knife to stab meat with was that boning hams is repetitive task, i.e. something that a robot would be great at. They’re probably right, and it’s an impressive technical achievement, because the robot has to be able to compensate for lots of variability in, uh, “meat form and bone size.” Using these robots, it only takes 10 people to bone 500 hams an hour instead of 20.

On the other hand, I can’t help but thing two things. First of all, this is the sort of semi-skilled labor that until very recently was not at risk for automation because of the knowledge and adaptability required. And second, we’re giving robot arms knives now. PANIC!

I’m kidding, of course.

VIA [ DigInfo ]

Japan’s National Agriculture and Food Research Organization has developed this excessively complicated robot that’s able to visually recognize ripe strawberries and then delicately pluck them and drop them in a basket.

The robot operates at a speed of 9 seconds per strawberry, which is probably a minimum of 9 times slower than an experienced human would be able to do it, so I’m really not sure how the designers suggest that using robots would be 60% faster. The only way I can get that type of math to work is by using an impractical number of robots, and by impractical, I mean hugely expensive. Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s a future in agricultural robots like this… But they’re going to have to find some way of overcoming cheap and efficient human labor first. This has already happened with lots of crops, but with some exceptions, fruit is significantly more difficult, because it has a ripeness factor and bruises easily.

The strawberry harvesting robot is currently being tested in the field, with a more practical production version due next year.

VIA [ Crunchgear ]

Not bad, right? Well, since then someone’s gone and cranked it up to nutso:

Wow. Good thing sorting Skittles isn’t a real job, or I’d be looking at unemployment right now.

[ FANUC ]

I have to say, this is simultaneously one of the most and least conventional climbing robots I’ve ever seen. We’re used to all kinds of weird stuff like claws and geckos and electroadhesion, but these robots just climb up with boring arms and legs and hands and feet. Which is actually kinda interesting.

Apparently these guys (called Yume Robo) aren’t exactly new… They’ve been climbing up and down a 15 meter high wall, every 20 minutes, for the last 184 days, until just last week. They’re dressed in silver work suits, but I don’t claim to know what they heck those antennae are for.

One more vid, after the jump.

VIA [ CrunchGear ]

The KUKA Titan is the strongest six axis industrial robot arm on the planet, capable of working with loads of up to 1000 kilograms. And now, it’s got its own mobile base, courtesy of an OmniMove base powered by a bunch of multidirectional Mecanum wheels. I’m not sure if the arm is actually operational while the base is moving (power issues, I’d imagine), but it sure is fearsome looking, especially with whatever is mounted on the end… It could be just another holonomic wheel, or it could be a death ray. I’m thinking death ray. That little guy in the front? That’s a youBot, which is basically the same robot, just smallified.

So, how much is 1000 kilos? As it turns out, it’s a lot:

That’s about 2,200 pounds for you imperialists, or not nearly enough to lift my Volvo. Phew, I’m safe.

[ KUKA Titan ] VIA [ Hizook ]

Motoman has many heads, but he saves this special one for Halloween. He’s out there, right now, creepily making things out of LEGOs and assembling chairs.

Be very, very afraid.