YouTube user Paxshikai is the proud owner of what is potentially the most dangerous i-SOBOT ever, thanks to its arsenal of custom made weapons that includes crossbows, sniper rifles, machine guns, rocket launchers, and even a light saber. In celebration of his 100th (!) YouTube video of an i-SOBOT blowing things up with a variety of weaponry (or doing other weird stuff), Paxshikai put together this compilation video. I don’t know how he keeps coming up with inspiration for these vids, but I have no doubt that we’re going to see another hundred (or so). I mean, i-SOBOT has to work his way up to firing a little miniature custom made tactical nuclear warhead, and for obvious reasons, that video will most likely be the last.

[ Paxshikai ] VIA [ Robots-Dreams ]

You might have known that Colin Angle, the co-founder and CEO of iRobot, was an engineer. I’ll bet you didn’t know that he likes to snowboard and hates folding laundry (need a robot that can help with that?). Last week Colin was profiled on NOVA ScienceNow’s The Secret Life Of Scientists, and you can watch three more videos from the interview over on their website.

One of the weirdest things (amidst a bunch of weird things) that Colin mentions is to what he credits continued Roomba sales after its initial success at launch back in September of 2002:

“It was the week after Thanksgiving and sales were very disappointing, and we were still a pretty fragile company financially. It was a stressful time. We would get together every morning and [one day] the guy who ran direct sales raised his hand and said, ‘Hey guys, why did sales triple yesterday?’ Well, we didn’t know why. We hadn’t done any ads, there was no newspaper article about us, and we hadn’t been on ‘Oprah’, but sales had somehow tripled. And one of our engineers raised his hand and said, ‘Well, you know, I saw this Pepsi commercial yesterday, maybe that was it.’”

So, uh, thanks Dave Chapelle, I guess we Roomba owners all owe you one.

Or something.

[ Secret Life Of Scientists ]

That flutist robot from Waseda University with the lungs, lips, and funny hat is back, this time to accompany a much less anthropomorphic saxophone robot in a duet. The grand vision for these guys is to create and entire robot orchestra, but they’re gonna need a little bit more practice before anybody’s going to sit through much more than a few minutes, by which time I imagine the novelty factor will have worn off.

VIA [ Physorg ]

You’re probably familiar with the Trolley Problem ethical thought experiment, but if you’re not, here’s the question:

A trolley is running out of control down a track. In its path are 5 people who have been tied to the track by the mad philosopher. Fortunately, you can flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch?

There are a whole bunch of different variations on this scenario, involving fat people and organ donors, but according to morality and ethics researchers, “factors such as gender, age, education level, and cultural background have little influence on the judgments people make, in part because those judgments are generated by an unconscious “moral grammar” that is analogous in some respects to the unconscious linguistic grammars that support ordinary language use.” So basically, there are ‘built in’ rules of ethics that humans have.

Lu├¡s Moniz Pereira of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Portugal and Ari Saptawijaya of the Universitas Indonesia have published a paper entitled “Modeling Morality with Prospective Logic” in which they discuss using the answers to ethical questions like the Trolley Problem to create a piece of software that answers such questions the same way a human would. This is not yet a broad spectrum ethical governor like Ronald Arkin is working on, and it’s not designed for military situations, but it does suggest that it’s possible to endow robots with software that gives them the capability to make ethical decisions that are at least consistent with the decisions that a human would make. Whether those decisions are best, of course, is an entirely different matter… But that’s the great thing about robots: when you find something that works better, you just reprogram them.

VIA [ Technovelgy ]

Take a deep breath and repeat after me: this isn’t as bad as it sounds. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that militants in Iraq and Afghanistan have been able to intercept and record live video feeds from Predator surveillance drones using a $26 piece of software called SkyGrabber. Several confiscated laptops have been found with “hours and hours” of intercepted drone video, which presumably let insurgents track and avoid the drones. The military has been aware of this potential vulnerability (namely, that the video downlink between the drone and its ground control station is for some silly reason entirely unencrypted) since the 90s in Bosnia, but (and this is the actually scary part) “the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn’t know how to exploit it, the officials said.”

Now, an important point to make is that this just the video feed. Drone command and control communications are encrypted, and there has been no interference with the drones themselves. Also, this vulnerability is currently in the process of being fixed. But as I said, the scary part is that the Pentagon underestimated the insurgents by assuming that they aren’t sophisticated enough to break into an unencrypted satellite downlink.

[ WSJ ] VIA [ DIY Drones ]

We’re continually bemoaning the fact that the selection of practical robotic vacuums is extremely limited here in the US (although not so much elsewhere). Besides iRobot’s Roomba, you’ve got… Well, you don’t have much. Today, Neato Robotics (yep, their real name) unveiled the first new model of consumer robot vacuum we’ve seen in the US in quite a while: the XV-11.

Now, I hate to describe the XV-11 in terms of the Roomba, but for better or worse, that’s just kind of the way it is. The Roomba has a virtual monopoly on home robot vacuums, so any challenger is going to have to prove itself as good as, or better than, the status quo (as it were). And I think the XV-11 may do just that. Here’s the rundown:

Vacuum: Uses a “centrifugal compression impeller” which creates sustained, high powered suction on any surface. Gets pet hair out of carpet.

Interface: the XV-11 has a LCD on top that lets you schedule it and notifies you of any issues. Comes with a self-charging home base that’s drive-up, rather than drive-on. Operation is as simple as pressing the start button and letting it do its thing. Also, a nice little feature is that the XV-11 will automatically “snug up” to its charging base if it gets accidentally knocked askew.

Navigation: This is what sets one robot vacuum apart from another, and the XV-11 is pretty impressive with its navigation technology. It uses lasers. LASERS! Laser distance sensors, to be exact. When you first tell it to clean, it will scan the entire room to detect walls, furniture, and doorways up to 4 meters away. It then calculates the optimum cleaning path and cleans the room, vacuuming in generally straight lines and covering the entire floor once while continuously updating its map in case you try to trick it by moving stuff around. Once it’s done with the room it starts in, it proceeds to one of the doorways it located and repeats the process in a new room. If it runs out of battery before it’s finished cleaning a room, it will remember where it was, return to its charging base, charge itself, and then go back to finish the job where it left off.

Looks good, right? As I see it, here’s the deal on robot vacuums: if you want a good and inexpensive model, you should probably still go with the iRobot Roomba 535 or one if its derivatives for a couple hundred bucks. But if you want something better, the more expensive Roombas don’t really offer any new technology beyond a bigger battery and larger capacity dustbin. The Roomba 560, 570, and 610 cost $350, $450, and $550, but don’t fundamentally clean any better than the 535, which you can find for $200 – $250.

If you’re willing to spend a little bit more money on a fancier vacuum, then, the Neato robot appears to offer a bunch of innovative features that the Roombas don’t. At $399, It’s a substantial premium over the Roomba 535, but unlike the professional Roombas, you actually get a robot that (potentially) actually vacuums better, and includes a lot more options as well.

The Neato XV-11 should be available in February online and also at some unspecified retail partners.

[ Neato Robotics ]
[ Press Release ]

Edit: It’s somewhat interesting that the XV-11 shares its basic form factor (square front, round back) with this iRobot patent from 2008. Not sure what, if anything, to make of that.

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 ]

Once again, thank you Asia for understanding that every product is more appealing if it has a hot chick next to it. LG’s RoboKing autonomous vacuum isn’t exactly like a Roomba in the following ways: it’s short (at only 90mm tall), quiet (at 50dB), and contains two cameras that it uses to analyze and recognize its environment and determine the most efficient cleaning pattern. It’s also got an extra side brush, and some other minor differences, but nothing material enough to allow LG to sell this thing in the US. If you’re in Asia, though, the sexy machine in the picture above (the robotic one on the left) can be yours to do with as you will. No pricing and availability info as of yet.

VIA [ Akihabara News ]

First, just let me say that this group of cooking robots (collectively named “Cooky”) is totally coo. As you can kinda see from the video, their development environment is completely open and simple to use, allowing you to coordinate multiple robots performing different tasks with different ingredients. And that’s great.

Thing is, this is such a good example of why robots don’t really work in the home yet. Yes, it’s true that while the robots are making your soup, you can go do other things… But you still have to do all of the prep work and spend a bunch of time setting up the system. And then you have to clean up. And of course, there’s all the programming (although hypothetically you can just download the soup you want). Most household robots are sort of at this stage, with the possible exception of the Roomba, although even the Roomba (in my experience) is just barely above the break even threshold when it comes to time spent futzing with the robot and prepping the floor versus time that would be spent doing the vacuuming yourself.

[ Cooky ] VIA [ GetRobo ]

Remember this cute little “need power” animation of Willow Garage’s PR2? It’s part of a series of simulations that Willow Garage has put together to try and figure out which behaviors work best (i.e. are most intuitively understandable) when it comes to interacting with humans, and they need you to help them do the figuring. There are a series of eight different concept animations of PR2 interacting with people that they’d like you to watch and describe, and the data will be used to help make PR2 more human-readable… It’s online, it only takes 10 or 20 minutes, and it’s kinda fun. Click here to participate in the study.

[ Willow Garage ]