“What better use for automatic home appliances than to have them chase each other in classic video game style? “

Pacmba may have been a Roomba that looked like Pac-Man, but for all intents and purposes, these iRobot Create robots are the game of Pac-Man. There’s Inky, and Blinky and Pinky and Clyde, and a bunch of little white dots to suck up… The ghosts behave just like they do in the real game, and Pac-Man can send them packing after eating a power pellet.

The hardware and software behind this game is actually pretty impressive. The designers of the system are from the Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles (or RECUV), and Pac-Man was just something they whipped up to showcase their Unmanned Aerial System software suite. This begs the obvious question of when we’re going to see a real life version of Pac-Man in three dimensions, with flying Roombas chasing each other through a matrix of interconnected horizontal and vertical passages. And for that matter, when are we going to see flying Roombas at all? The tops of my bookshelves are dusty.

But I digress.

The research coming out of RECUV looks pretty interesting, with projects investigating how to do things like efficiently control a swarm of different UAVs, each with different objectives. Personally, I always like to see people who work on robots taking their free time and working on robots even more, just because robots are incredibly awesome. Especially when they’re Pac-Man. Waka waka waka.

[ Roomba Pac-Man ] VIA [ Engadget ]

I wouldn’t put it past Data to do a little bit of experimenting, but C-3PO? That’s shocking. I am officially scandalized. And so is R2-D2, who’s probably going to come after Data with that silly little tazer of his. This shirt was designed by Joanna Mulder, and you can pick it up for $20 on her Etsy page, if you hurry.

VIA [ io9 ]

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 ]

Just because a real Keepon is too expensive for anyone to afford doesn’t mean that it’s not possible to make one for yourself, and it doesn’t even have to be (technically) edible. Limitless Boredom created their very own astonishingly similar DIY Keepon out of a bunch of R/C helicopter parts, CrabFu style. Seriously, it’s such a good reproduction that it makes me wonder where that $30k really goes…

By way of comparison, after the jump you can watch a video of a pair of Keepons dancing with HOAP-3 at the ICRA ‘08 Human-Robot Interaction Challenge. (Read more…)

This robot (its name is CARL) may not look especially biological (aside from the adorable little ears), but inside, it’s thinking with a computerized model of a rodent brain and interacting with the world through a “biologically plausible nervous system.” The programming for the rodent brain comes from brain recordings of real rats, and when CARL’s brain learns to replicate the behaviors of those rats, researchers hope that they can analyze what CARL’s brain is doing to make inferences about how biological brains work. Specially, CARL (and the real rats) are put in situations where the locations of stimuli that predict food rewards change abruptly, so CARL and the rats have to quickly learn how to adapt. It’s this capacity adaptation that we don’t really understand on the neuronal level, and in addition to offering insights into human behavior, it’s hoped that the research will lead to robots that are better able to decide what to do complicated and changing environments.

[ UC Irvine ] VIA [ RobotBuzz (Translated) ]

Dear Paro,

My name is Evan, and I am a very influential and handsome robot blogger. I met you at CES last January and was very impressed with your warmness and softness and squishyness and general omgIwantone-ness. I especially like how you modify your behavior based on tactile feedback and can recognize greetings and learn your name. In order to educate the rest of the world on just how theraputic you can be, I would like to offer you the opportunity to come live with me. Also, you can spend time with my girlfriend, who could use a snuggly therapy robot… Plus, she is sort of a robot herself, so I’m sure you two would have a lot in common. I know you cost $6,000, but when you consider how very influential and handsome I am, I’m sure you will agree that visiting me would be awesome.

Yours truly,

-Evan
BotJunkie Editor, Influential, Handsome

[ Paro Therapeutic Robot ] VIA [ Robot Watch (Translated) ]

Gravity suck. Gravity especially sucks when you’re trying to get into orbit. It sucks because vehicles like the space shuttle expend most of their energy just hauling along the fuel they need to make it into orbit, instead of something useful like more payload or myself. Like, I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that the space shuttle could lift off with no trouble using just its main engines; the boosters are needed primarily to lift the external fuel tank. This is why Virgin Galactic launched SpaceShipOne from an airplane, why NASA is investigating launching satellites directly from high altitude balloons, and why an elevator to space that’s powered from the ground would be the best thing for spaceflight since Ham.

Freely admitting that they’re not up to the task of designing such an elevator (either the car or the tether, which has to be about 62,000 miles long), NASA has opened it up to everybody as part of their Centennial Challenges. This week, a bunch of different robots competed to climb a kilometer into the sky using only power transmitted from the ground by lasers so powerful that they have to turn them off when satellites fly overhead. The winner zipped up the tether at nearly 4 meters per second netting a prize of almost $1 million, which is pretty good, even though at that speed, it would take just under a year to make it into geosynchronous orbit. The point is, these robots don’t have to lift any fuel: with the engine on the ground, it’s all payload.

This isn’t the only way to power a craft remotely with a laser. Check out a vehicle that uses pulsed plasma propulsion, including a laser that makes air spontaneously explode, after the jump. (Read more…)

If you can’t justify buying yourself a humanoid robot to play with, ask yourself this question: what would you do if a little wooden doll was stuck at the end of an obstacle course? Huh? Yeah, that’s right, you’d just stare helplessly as it continued to be little and wooden. If you had a humanoid robot like a Robovie-PC, though, you could send it in to rescue the little wooden doll, earning its undying little wooden gratitude:

This is not at all the motivation for participants to build humanoid robots and send them in after little wooden dolls as part of a rescue robot contest in Japan. The remote controlled bots had to contend with barriers and blocks and a time limit, but after rescuing the doll, it was theirs to do with as they wished.

Don’t ask.

[ Rescue Robot Contest (Translated) ] VIA [ Plastic Pals ] VIA [ Engadget ]

There aren’t a lot of details on this updated version of Samsung’s robot vacuum, but like the version from last year, it’s already convinced one charming lady to get in bed with it, and who am I to refrain posting pictures of this sordid affair:

She looks happy, doesn’t she? I’m sure the robot performed quite admirably and did an excellent job cleaning her- no, no, I’m just going to stop right there before this gets entirely out of hand. Not because I’m thinking dirty thoughts, but you might be, and this robot is all about making dirty things clean and- GAH! NO MORE!

As for details, all that Akihabara News has to say is that this robot contains some updated hardware and few extra sensors, which probably makes it better at mapping out rooms while it’s cleaning them, a substantially more intelligent approach than the Roomba uses. And speaking of the Roomba, iRobot and its patents are the reason why you’re not likely to see this robot in the states anytime soon, but if you live in Korea, feel free to mail me one.

VIA [ Akihabara News ]

If I don’t write about robot movies as much as I could here on BotJunkie, it’s because we tend to focus on robots that either are real, or have at least some realistic potential. This is why we covered Wall-E (there are real ones!) but not Astro Boy, and why I’m especially interested in a new movie script that DreamWorks just picked up by robotics expert and our second favorite Keepon snuggler, Daniel Wilson. Called ‘Robopocalypse,’ the movie (based on a book that’s coming out in 2011) “explores the fate of the human race following a robot uprising.”

“Daniel H. Wilson’s cautionary tale of man vs. machine grabbed us from the very beginning,” said DreamWorks co-president of production Mark Sourian. “Wilson’s background in robotics and artificial intelligence grounds his story with a frightening level of realism.”

And that last bit, of course, is what makes this movie so appealing: hopefully, it’s going to be well reasoned and realistic with a solid foundation in robotics, and it’ll remind us all why we should be terrified of our Roombas.

[ Daniel H. Wilson ] VIA [ Variety ] and [ io9 ]