UT Austin’s HCR Lab just got this robot head, and its primary goal is to “elicit a sense of trust and sociability to an otherwise pure mechatronic device.” This is a moderately refreshing (and on the whole, quite advisable) approach to creating a robot… It’s very easy to focus on functionality without worrying about whether or not people are going to actually want to interact with your robot. Obviously, a lot of thought was put into Dreamer, because it’s securely in that sweet spot of humanish without trying too hard.

One of the things that I think makes this robot appear so natural is that fact that it has fast eyes that lead its head around, just like an animal or human. There’s only a minimal amount of that sluggish, mechanical servo response, and the video even mentions that the eyes are capable of moving even faster, up to “human speed.” Plus, as we’ve mentioned before, having eyelids is a really big deal.

[ HCR Lab ] VIA [ Engadget ]

We’ve seen robots balancing sticks before, and it’s pretty cool… Since humans can do the same thing, there’s a limit to how impressive it can get. But just try finding a human who can balance a stick with a hinge in the middle:

This thing gets even more awesome, because one commenter on the video asked (somewhat rhetorically) if the robot could do the same thing with a rope. Here’s what the author had to say:

For a chain the stabilization is theoretical possible (a rope doesn’t has the needed compressive strength). Swing up of a chain should be possible with a feedforward control but probably not with an energy based approach.

Just imagine how utterly crazy that would be… My mind is now preemptively blown.

[ Vimeo ] VIA [ Reddit ]

Shelley, the fully autonomous Audi TTS developed by Volkswagen and Stanford, has completed her Pikes Peak hill climb in a fairly respectable 27 minutes. An aggressive and skilled human driving the same car could have made it to the top 10 minutes sooner, but for a robot, this is certainly a notable performance. The course is a bit over 14 miles long, and climbs nearly 5,000 feet along the way. It’s a mix of asphalt, gravel, and dirt, and Shelley had to adapt to these different surfaces on the fly while driving as fast as possible.

Yeah, that doesn’t look as fast as possible… But you have to start somewhere, and seeing as Shelley is a robot, it’s fairly straightforward to just turn things up a few notches as you learn more about the potential (and limits) of the system.

Remember, Shelley is Volkswagen’s testbed to develop autonomous driving technologies that’ll be able to take over in the event of an emergency and pull some crazy stunt to keep you safe. The Stanford team is trying to figure out how close to the edge of performance Shelley can go without losing control, and the hill climb is only the first demonstration of that. Next, Shelley will robotically tackle some traditional paved tracks at high speeds.

[ Press Release ]

If you can’t wait for a hacked Neato LIDAR system and you need some cheap localization and mapping hardware, you might want to take a good look at Microsoft’s Kinect system, which has already been hacked open and made available to anyone using ROS.

MIT’s Personal Robotics Group has put together the demo in the vid above, which shows an iRobot Create plus a Kinect sensor performing 3D SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) and also reacting to gesture inputs from a human, which is pretty cool. Most of the heavy lifting is done by an offboard computer, but there’s no reason that the whole system couldn’t be easily integrated into the robot itself, since I think I remember hearing that Kinect is minimally intensive when it comes to processing requirements.

This kind of thing is really, really fantastic because we’re starting to see high quality sensing systems that provide awesome data being available for what’s basically dirt cheap. Remember those DARPA Grand Challenge cars and their hundreds of thousands of dollars of ranging sensors? It was only a few years ago that 3D sensing hardware was totally, completely out of range for hobby robotics, and now, in the space of like 6 months, we’ve actually got options. Yeah, it’s piggybacking off of other tech, but there’s nothing wrong with that, and it’s only going to get better as the gaming and automotive industry invest more resources in making their machines smarter, not just faster.

Thanks Philipp!

This video neatly demonstrates the utility of a jumping robot. EPFL’s jumper is simple, small, and cheap, but it’s able to rapidly negotiate an obstacle course that would be otherwise impassible by anything except a flying robot.

The robot plus its self-righting roll cage weighs 14 grams and measures 18 centimeters in diameter. It can jump over 60 centimeters high, which at over four times its own height, is definitely respectable. To steer, the jumping part of the robot is actually able to rotate around inside its roll cage to launch in any direction. Simple but effective.

I remember back in early 2008 when we first posted about this robot, and I wrote:

“Yes, it’s not exactly controllable. And yes, it doesn’t exactly land right-side up. But these are minor quibbles, and they’re being worked on.”

Quibbles solved. Nice job, EPFL. Now just make it fly…

[ EPFL ]

Marvin Minsky helped found what is now known as the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory back in 1959. Only 9 years later, he constructed this tentacle arm, which shows an impressive level of sophistication. There isn’t too much info about it, but here’s the caption from the video, which was posted by MIT CSAIL:

“This film from 1968 shows Marvin Minsky’s tentacle arm, developed at the MIT AI Lab (one of CSAIL’s forerunner labs). The arm had twelve joints and could be controlled by a PDP-6 computer or via a joystick. This video demonstrates that the arm was strong enough to lift a person, yet gentle enough to embrace a child.”

[ MIT CSAIL ]

Happy birthday ROS! Our first post about ROS (the completely open source Robot Operating System) was sort of as a footnote to another post about Willow Garage, where I mentioned that “if [ROS] catches on, this could be great.” Well, it looks like it’s catching on, as over the last three years ROS has grown exponentially:

These data suggest that by the time ROS celebrates its 10th birthday, there will be over 150,000 ROS repositories! Wow! In the meantime, ROS is running on many, if not most, of the coolest robots in the world, plus a lot of robots that are cheap and easy enough for you to buy and mess with yourself:

Looking towards the future, Willow Garage is proposing a ROS Foundation, which would be sort of like the Mozilla Foundation that’s brought you such quality products as Firefox and Thunderbird. The idea is that ROS stops becoming a Willow Garage project, and transitions into a community owned and community run endeavor.

Meantime, ROS is going strong, and we’ll continue to bring you all the latest and most incredibly awesome robots that use ROS to do what they do.

[ ROS ] VIA [ Willow Garage ]

Cody here comes from Georgia Tech’s Healthcare Robotics Lab; we first met him back in March. Since then, Cody’s been busy, learning how to give sponge baths. All an operator has to do is to select an area of a patient, and Cody will autonomously go to work. In the video above, there are little blue squares of debris that Cody has been assigned to clean up, and clearly, he’s pretty good at it. Very good. He goes nice and sloooowww. Yeah… Just like that.

Cody’s more than just a pleasurebot, though. He’s learning how to help out in hospitals and care facilities, to reduce the workload on nurses and direct care workers. This means better healthcare for everyone in the long run, and we can all look forward to getting sponged down by robots. I know I am.

[ Georgia Tech Healthcare Robotics ]

Electroadhesion is pretty sweet. It’s sort of the fantasy method of gripping something, since you turn it on and it’ll stick to just about anything until you turn it off, and then it doesn’t. The surface that it’s sticking to doesn’t matter… It can be conductive, non-conductive, smooth, rough, and even covered in dirt. Unlike passive gripping systems (like claws or artificial gecko toes), electroadhesion does continuously consume power as long as it’s active, but 20 microwatts per newton of weight is pretty damn efficient. SRI International have applied this technology to robots that can climb walls, but they’re also turning it into a robotic gripper.

Like the “jamming” gripper we saw last week, an electroadhesive gripper can be thought of as universal, in that it doesn’t need complex sensors or programming to do its job: you just put the gripper in contact with an object, turn on the electroadhesion, and pick it up. The electroadhesive surface itself is thin and flexible, so as Travis suggests over on Hizook, it might be feasible to incorporate it directly into existing gripping systems to improve their current capabilities, and enable some new ones.

[ SRI Electroadhesion ] VIA [ Hizook ]

Yesterday, ASIMO turned ten years old. It was also Halloween. Coincidence!?!!?!

Yes.

But, it’s still something to celebrate:

Honda has posted an inside look at the development of ASIMO, from waaaay back when Masato Hirose (now Executive Chief Engineer at Honda R&D) was initially told to make Astro Boy. Seriously. You can read about it here.

ASIMO has been around for so long now that we run the risk of taking him for granted, especially since he’s not generally considered to be practical (unless you count serving coffee or conducting an orchestra)… Honda deserves a lot of praise for spending who knows how much money over this period of time to continue to develop ASIMO. They must be pretty confident that the technologies inherent in ASIMO are going to pay off in a big way eventually, and I for one hope they’re right.

Anyway, it looks like ASIMO had a good time at his party:

And there’s more where that came from.

[ ASIMO ]