Swedish neuroscientists have figured out experimentally that a simple stereo camera setup and some careful touching can get about 70 or 80 percent of people to feel like they exist in a different body. It’s a straightforward experiment: two cameras are positioned to give a subject a view of a mannequin’s torso, from the mannequin’s perspective. The images are sent to VR goggles worn by the subject. If the subject and the mannequin are both touched on the torso, the subject begins to associate the touch they are feeling on their body with the image they are seeing on the mannequin’s body, and eventually, most subjects are able to associate themselves completely with the artificial body. When researchers suddenly brought out a knife and pretended to stab the mannequin, subjects instinctively reacted like they were about to get stabbed themselves. The instinctive part is key: people weren’t just pretending, their brains were to some extent fooled into believing that the other body was theirs.

“The principle finding was that under certain conditions, a person can perceive another body as his or her own, even if it is an opposite gender, or an artificial body. This effect is so robust that, while experiencing being in another person’s body, a participant can face his or her biological body and shake hands with it without breaking the illusion.”

Artificial body? Opposite gender? Okay, just two questions: where do I sign up, and can I choose my own artificial body? National Geographic has a video, if you want to see how the setup works.

[ AP ] VIA [ NG ]

I don’t know anything about these robots besides that they exist, they have no clothes on, they pole dance, and they’re on display at the MuTate exhibition in London. The BBC has a video that I haven’t been able to rip and repost, so you’ll have to head on over there for all of the robotic hip gyration you can handle.

[ BBC ]

Matt Denton’s impressive hexapod robot is now available in kit form over at Trossen Robotics. We’ve seen it doing cool stuff for about a year now, and it’s finally up for purchase. The hexapod comes with a brain that dynamically generates the leg movements based on where you’re telling the robot to move, ensuring a smooth and naturally coordinated (shall we say, lifelike?) gait.

The kit comes with all necessary servos (twenty of them), a pan/tilt head, and a battery (but no wireless remote), and will set you back a cool $1000. Dress it up, teach it to dance, and you’ll consider it money well spent.

[ Trossen ]

See? That is EXACTLY what my job was. They do everything I can do, only better and (in the long run) cheaper. I’m not sure how serious of an issue this actually is, but if robots become cheap and ubiquitous enough, entry level labor positions may become harder and harder for starving undergrads to find.

[ ABB Robotics ]

Last week we posted about a micromouse that used vacuum power to stick to the floor as it races about at high speed. Students at Michigan State University used the same principle to create Winboni, a window cleaning robot, that uses suction to stick itself to windows and automatically drive around and clean them with felt pads.

The students won a prize for their design at the International Student Design Competition of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, which I guess means it must be good, but I don’t quite think that this is likely to be the Roomba of windows (Woomba?). Currently, the bot has to be placed on each window by hand, and I know my mom wouldn’t let me get away with cleaning windows without Windex or something. Not a bad little robot for 900 hours of work, though.

[ News Release ] VIA [ TRF ]

Long before the Nintendo Wii, there was Dance Dance Revolution. Back in the day, it was the game for parties, and now it seems that the same type of dance dance technology has been applied to control robots. The robot projects a set of controls onto the ground, and you can step on the controls or poke at them with something and the robot will respond. The idea behind this interface is that the disabled can use their feet or a cane to control the bot, instead of having to use a mouse or keyboard or something less accessible or more complex.

This seems like a fairly effective concept, although I’m not sure what benefits it has over something like voice commands… Cheaper and more straightforward and more visual, I suppose. Also, you can see what the robot is planning to do as it does it, which could be nice. If it projects a picture of a human getting run over, for example, you’ll know to move out of the way.

[ Human Mechatronics Lab ] VIA [ GetRobo ]

I’m 99% certain that this is a glitch in Google Translator, but that 1% of just maybe is sheer awesomeness. If there’s one thing that the Roomba seriously lacks, it’s anti-aircraft fire performance. The QQ-3 might look like nothing more than a knockoff of a 400 series Roomba (and the resemblance is uncanny, to put it mildly), but it includes features that the Roomba doesn’t, and I’m not just talking about Stinger missiles hidden away somewhere. The QQ-3 can be scheduled, comes with a remote control, UV sterilizes as it cleans, and has some kind of “air flavoring” function. It’s also got an interesting triangle of sweeper brushes underneath, unlike the Roomba’s parallel double brushes.

Otherwise, the QQ-3 is fairly unremarkable, and just one in a whole family of Asian non-Roombas that we’re not likely to see anywhere near copyright laws. Unless, of course, the military decides that an anti-aircraft Roomba is just what they’re looking for.

[ QQ-3 (Translated) ] VIA [ RSN ]

This, people, is why you should invest $100 in an i-SOBOT. NOT-SO-DEADLY WEAPONS! Crossbow, sniper rifle, machine gun, rocket launcher, and light saber (!), after the jump. (more…)

We generally don’t do much in the way of theme posts around here, but I figured I’d spend 30 seconds and see what I could come up with via a Google search for “robot turkey.” Skipping over a robotic decoy designed to catch poachers and a song named “Let’s Talk Turkey” by band Ima Robot (see a video here), I found a robotic walking turkey developed by MIT waaaaay back in 1994.

Named “Spring Turkey,” the robot was MIT’s first bipedal walker. The 2 foot tall bot was connected to a boom arm to control roll and yaw and reduce the problem of walking to fundamentals, specifically pitch and coordinated joint movement. Spring Turkey was used to test walking algorithms until 1996, when it was replaced with Spring Flamingo. Spring Flamingo added feet and active ankles to the mix, and it was able to handle ascending and descending ramps at higher speeds than Spring Turkey.

Now, remember how dinosaurs are descended from birds? MIT went a little bit backwards and used their experience with Spring Turkey and Spring Chicken and evolved those bird legs into some dino legs, in the form of Troody. Troody is a 18 inch tall, 4 foot long, 10 pound robodino (most of a robodino) that can walk by itself. This was a pretty big deal back in 2001, and it’s no small feat today, especially for a top heavy robot with such spindly little legs.

After the jump, check out a video of Spring Turkey and Spring Flamingo doing their walking thing back in the day, and accompany Troody on its first field trip. (more…)

We wrote about micromouse competitions back in May, and this week, the annual All Japan Micromouse Robot Competition 2008 was taking place. The mice are capable of driving really, really fast, but the mazes they have to negotiate are full of sharp turns which limits their speed. One entry, Momoco8, attempted to overcome this by adding a vacuum system to their robot. Sort of like a reverse hovercraft, it keeps the mouse stuck to the floor and prevents it from careening out of control around turns:

Momoco8 finished the course in 7.1 seconds during its fastest run, which put it into sixth (!) place. The winner negotiated the entire maze in a mere 6.4 seconds.

VIA [ Robots-Dreams ]