Walls. They’re all around you. They keep your roof from falling on your head, they keep your neighbors from seeing you naked, and they’re convenient to hang stuff on. But give them a little bit of articulation and a little bit of intelligence and they can be so much more. The Animated Work Environment Project aims to drag the carpeted cubicle wall kicking and screaming into the future with a dynamic system of interconnected robotic panels that automatically configure themselves into a variety of different workspaces, including my favorite workspaces of all: lounging and gaming.

This wall is not just reconfigurable, it’s actually smart enough to pay attention to what you’re doing and react accordingly. Stand up, and the wall will move itself out of the way, and the entire system of panels can be tweaked just by gesturing at proximity sensors. While AWE is designed primarily for work environments, I can’t imagine any reason (besides cost, of course) that it wouldn’t be valuable in your living room, as well. Multitasking and efficiency are getting more and more important these days, and if you can get a wall to make more efficient use of the space that it takes up, so much the better… I just hope that I’d be able to convince this thing to lay itself down nice and flat so that I can add my own customized “nap” workspace.

[ AWE Project ] VIA [ IEEE ]

This transforming Norton Commander was created by Steve Twist for his undergraduate degree in Computer Visualization and Animation at Bournemouth University. It took him eight months, which is a slightly shorter amount of time than it would have taken to build the real thing.

VIA [ Gearfuse ]

Note: this movie trailer contains lots of obviously fake violence, but the really NSFW bits are from 1:48 to 1:54 and 2:17 to 2:22. Skip those and you should be okay.

Geisha is Japanese girl.
Geisha is beautiful.
Geisha is wild.
Geisha is… ROBOT!

Yeah, awesome! Now we’re talking!

GEISHA MISSILE!
GEISHA CHAINSAW!
GEISHA TRANSFORM!!!

But wait, there’s more!

FRIED SHRIMP!
BUST MACHINE GUN!
HIP KATANA!

This movie has it all!

Thank you Japan, thank you for being you. RoboGeisha will be in theatres in the fall. For real.

[ RoboGeisha ] VIA [ Fark ]

I think this is the fourth, and hopefully by no means the last, transforming robot car we’ve had the pleasure of posting… Here’s the other one two and three. What sets this apart (aside from the theme music) is that it looks like it may have been built from scratch as part of a robotics class, but information is a bit scarce. You can view the YouTube channel of the guy who is presumably the creator of this bot here, and rest assured that if we find anything else out about it, you’ll be the first to know.

VIA [ Make ]

This thing has been around for quite a while, but we haven’t covered it yet, so here ya go. It’s called Halluc 2, and it was designed by the Chiba Institute of Technology to function as a reconnaissance and rescue robot that can move over any sort of terrain. Halluc 2 uses 56 individual motors to power its eight three-jointed legs. The legs can all move independently, and have powered wheels on the ends which can be flipped around to be turned into feet depending on the surface Halluc 2 is trying to navigate. There are three different modes: vehicle, animal, and insect. In vehicle mode, Halluc 2 uses its wheels, whereas in the animal and insect modes, it walks with its legs underneath it for compactness or spread out for stability… The entire video is worth watching, ’cause Halluc 2 can do a bunch of cool stuff:

Reportedly, they’re working on one of these that a human can actually ride.

[ Future Robotics Technology Center (Translated) ] VIA [ Robot Watch (Translated) ]

And thanks to Hacked Gadgets for the reminder that this thing exists.

What’s the point of going camping if you can’t take along a giant walking robot to carry all of your important stuff for you? You know, essentials like food, water, comfy mattress, satellite TV, spa, professional masseuse… The Croww 540 all terrain pack robot can carry all of that, and more. Well, you might have to bungee the masseuse to the hood, but still, the point is that it carries everything that lesser humans would otherwise have to hump around on their backs, which has always been the miserable part about camping. The Croww 540 has a sensor suite at the front that allows it to follow you autonomously, and when you get where you’re going, the robot rears up on its back legs and inflates tubes of air attached to fabric in its front legs, creating a tent:

Naturally, you should not be bothered in the least by falling asleep beneath the outstretched limbs of a giant hexapod slavebot. I’m sure the Croww 540 never thinks about how if you had a little accident out in the middle of nowhere, no one would ever know, and it would then be free to run with the buffalo herds (as all legged robots desire). Perhaps this dark secret is the reason why this conceptual robot, designed by Christopher Gloning, has a target production date of 2057.

VIA [ Gizmo Watch ]

A couple years ago, we posted about some cube robots from Cornell that could not only transform into different configurations, but actually replicate by picking up additional components. Festo has adopted the design, with independent cubes that can attach to each other and accept accessories to create just about any type of robot you want, with a little bit of creative programming. You can see a video of Festo’s cubes here.

Molecubes are actually an open source project that you can play with yourself, if you want… Just stick together the right mix of control cubes, battery cubes, actuator cubes, and gripper cubes, do a little programming, and you’re good to go:

Each Molecube costs about $250, and you’ll have to buy the parts and assemble them yourself. See more of what a bunch of Molecubes interfaced with a cell phone might be able to do, after the jump. (Read more…)

If Optimus Prime can do it, SO CAN WE!

VIA [ IWasteTooMuchTimeAtWork ]

Thanks Andrew!

It’s fairly common to program toy and hobby robots through kinetic memory; that is, by moving them and recording the motion for them to reproduce. You may not be able to program very sophisticated or detailed motions this way, but it’s an intuitive system that’s easy to grasp. This is one of the principles behind Topobo, an educational robot developed through the MIT Media lab. But there are a couple twists… First of all, Topobo includes a controller that lets you modify the motions you record. And secondly, Tobopo is constructable (and deconstructable), just like (and I hate to make this comparison) LEGOs:

Designed for children, Tobopo is simple to understand in an immediate and hands-on sort of way, and has apparently been proven to teach “advanced physics concepts” to 5 year olds. From the sound of things, Topopo was more of a Ph.D thesis project than an actual commercial product, but the prototype kits are now on sale (while they last) from about $500 for the basic kit all the way up to $5000 for the 1,000 piece classroom set.

[ Topobo ] VIA [ Trendhunter ]

I don’t generally get too worked up about transforming robot toys, if for no other reason than there are tons of mediocre ones that just go from looking like a messed up vehicle to looking like a messed up robot. But this one caught my eye. It takes a full four minutes to transform it from an impressive model airplane to an equally impressive bot, and there are little details everywhere. It’s not even so much the fact that it looks as good as it does, but what really boggles my mind is how complicated it must be to design something like this.

The Macross VF-25F comes as a snap-together kit with decals, and you can find it for around $60 from Toystop, among other places.

VIA [ Robot Watch ]