We’ve been waiting for this moment for literally three years now. Keepon, everyone’s favorite yellow squishbot and arguably the world’s best robot dancer, is going to be available.

For you.

To buy.

For $40.

$40!

BeatBots, maker of the Keepon Pro (the $30,000 research Keepon) has partnered with the UK’s Wow! Stuff (who also made this) to create ‘My Keepon,’ a toy version of the Keepon that we know and love. From the press release:

Wow!’s design experts and robotics engineers, based in their recently-opened Los Angeles office, worked closely with BeatBots to design a toy that captured the essence of the Keepon character while replicating the robot’s most engaging interactive traits. These features include reactivity to touch and an amazing ability to listen to music, detect the beat, and dance in perfect rhythm!

But most importantly, Wow! Stuff and BeatBots are working to ensure that the success of My Keepon will directly support the social welfare goals at the heart of the Keepon story. “A percentage of the profit from each My Keepon will go towards subsidizing and donating BeatBots’ research-grade robots to therapists and researchers,” said Taylor. “We are so proud to make Keepon available to a broader audience, and we will choose retail partners who also feel proud to sell him.”

Michalowski commented, “Our dream is to make Keepon Pro units widely available to researchers and practitioners. Our work with Keepon suggests that the character’s simplicity, combined with a caregiver’s ability to conduct mediated interactions through the robot, can facilitate social engagement in a novel and exciting way. We hope that the toy version of our robot can channel public excitement towards general autism awareness while supporting our distribution of tools and resources to people and organizations around the world working to understand and treat it.”

Sadly, these are all the details that I’ve got for you at the moment. I did talk with Dr. Michalowski a little bit about the toy, and I can say that they’re trying very hard to make sure that the core functionality (and look) that makes Keepon Pro so endearing will be there in the toy version. It’s easy to look at that $40 price point with concern, but I’m optimistic, and it’s also important to remember that commercializing My Keepon is going to help make Keepon Pro cheaper and more available to people who need it, so it’s good news for everyone.

My Keepon is still in the prototype stage, but we’ve been promised one of the first review units when they’re available, which means you’ll get the first look at them too. SWEET!

[ BeatBots ]

For the 4th of July back in 2009, we saw some PoV video from a robot plane outfitted with remotely launched roman candles. It was pretty sweet, but it’s definitely been put to shame by the above vid, which shows a tricopter UAV doing fireworks battles with hydrogen filled balloons and air defense systems.

While I hate to turn such a cool project into a rant, this video showed up at the end of a TechCrunch article that’s essentially just another flavor of the obligatory “robots are going to kill us all” piece that media who know nothing about robots like to write because it scares people. Since I haven’t in a little while, I’m going to address a couple of these points right after the break. (Read more…)

Remember how RoboCup keeps saying that they’ll have a team of fully autonomous humanoids ready to take on Brazil Italy Spain (or whoever) by 2050? RoMeLa’s CHARLI could be the progenitor of those eventual champions, as it’ll be competing in the humanoid adult class at RoboCup 2011. Adult class means that CHARLI is more or less the size of a person; it’s 4 foot 7 which I think is slightly taller than Diego Maradona.

Also heading to RoboCup 2011 from RoMeLa is Team DARwIn and their (slightly smaller) autonomous humanoids:

Not bad, I’d say, and I especially liked those two what I’m going to assume were deliberate fake-outs at the end there. You had me fooled, you tricky little robot you!

[ RoboCup @ RoMeLa ]

The insane epicness of this movie cannot possibly be overstated. And somehow, the fact that it’s overdubbed in Russian makes it just that much more awesome. It’s called Robot, and if you get a copy, send it to me. Immediately.

Update: the full movie is here on YouTube (all 2+ hours of it), with English captions!

VIA [ Laughing Squid ]

This is InBirdie. InBirdie plays golf, and it’s apparently the world’s most sophisticated golf robot (besides Putter Bot, of course). It can accurately judge distances and slopes and is supposedly able to reliably nail hole-in-ones, at least on the putting green. When it comes to driving, it looks like InBirdie might need a bit of a motor upgrade. Or an air cannon of some sort… Those are legal in golf, right?

Oh, and if you’re wondering why I have a beef with golf as a sport, it’s simply because it seems ludicrous to have a tiny little ball that’s supposed to go in a tiny little hole when you have such a gigantic course. The proportions are all wrong, that’s all.

VIA [ Plastic Pals ]

Remember how incredibly simple and effective that jammin’ robot coffee-balloon gripper thing was? Turns out that you can make one yourself, as Norris Labs did, with a Handi-Vac. It looks like it works nearly as well as the original, and my guess is that it’s pretty damn cheap too.

Grippers, especially grippers capable of picking up a couple geltabs without breaking them, used to be complicated and expensive. These jamming grippers, though, were a serious stroke of genius, and they’re already starting to make fine manipulation accessible to DIY roboticists on a budget.

VIA [ Norris Labs ]

It looks like that desert testing we wrote about in May of last year has paid off, and UPenn’s KodLab has developed a new version of their RHex wheeled/legged robot called X-RHex. X-RHex is about the same size and weight as RHex, but it’s stronger, more durable, and has as longer run time of up to two hours. It’s also got a couple mil-spec rails mounted on top along with standardized electrical connections, which could be just for convenience or could be because X-RHex has a probable military future, or both.

X-RHex doesn’t seem as capable of the speeds exhibited by other leg/wheel hybrid robots such as Whegs, but its strength is in its adaptability and the way it can make it through basically any sort of terrain, even things that would challenge conventional wheeled or tracked robots.

[ X-RHex ]

Well, this isn’t a headline I get to write every day. Instead of using impoverished young children to jockey camel races, Dubai has been using impoverished young children-shaped robots with remote controlled whips. One thing the robots have going over the kids, though, is that they can be equipped with hidden stun guns to shock the camels into running faster, as if having a robot with a whip on your back wasn’t incentive enough:

Dubai police have confirmed they uncovered a gang of dealers who were selling electric stun gun kits, for up to £5,000, across the region.

These were then being fitted inside the robot jockeys, which cost between £130-£200, that in recent years have largely replaced child jockeys, traditionally used in camel racing, due to humanitarian concerns.

The electric shocks could be administered by remote control to encourage the camel to run faster.

Now, I know what you really want to see is a camel race with these robot jockeys in the saddle. I found a good one on YouTube; it’s a 6 kilometer track that the camels must make one single circuit of, and they can run at 50 kph. It’s ludicrous, and if you stick it out until the end there’s some closeups of the bots:

Man, what a crazy future we live in.

[ Telegraph ] VIA [ Gearfuse ]

Here’s one way to make an inherently safe robot arm: use balloons. Siddharth Sanan, a Ph.D student at Carnegie Mellon, has been working on ways to make robots less dangerous for humans to be around, and he’s come at the problem differently by not using rigid components. This technique makes precision control of the robot more difficult, but for assistive robots that spend a lot of time interacting closely with humans, it could still make for a good solution. Just don’t let any of these guys near it.

While we’re here, we should also have a look at another ‘soft’ manipulator arm by Sanan, the Tubot. It’s a ‘continuum type soft manipulator,’ but I’m just going to go ahead and call it a tentacle:

The tentacle version is a slightly different solution to the the same potential issue, which is ensuring that even if a robot arm really really REALLY wants to stave your head in, it won’t be physically able to.

Also, pudding. Mmm, pudding.

[ Siddharth Sanan ] VIA [ Robots.net ]

I’d say that the craziest way of landing a rover on Mars is still the giant airbag bouncing and rolling method, but the ‘Sky Crane’ system that’ll be setting Curiosity down on the red planet in 2012 is pretty nuts. The above video shows the first test of Curiosity (or rather, the test model of the rover) deploying from the Sky Crane system, which gives a good idea of how the final landing is going to work.

On Mars, the Sky Crane will be supporting itself using rockets, and when Curiosity hits the ground, the cabling will detach from the crane using a set of pyros. The Sky Crane then flies off and crashes somewhere (sad), while Curiosity gets busy exploring. Here’s a rendering of the process:

This first test bodes well, but it’s still going to be a pretty hairy thing, and I’m going to keep my fingers and toes preemptively crossed between now and the landing just in case.

This just in: trying to touch type with crossed fingers is bizarre and doesn’t work.

[ Curiosity ]