Getting oil out of water isn’t that hard, on principle. What is hard is getting a huge amount of oil out of an even huger amount of water. If you think about it, this is really a perfect task for a swarm of robots, since it’s simple and repeatable and just needs to be done over and over (and over and over and over) again. With this in mind, MIT’s Senseable City Lab has created Seaswarm, a swarm of networked oil spill cleanup robots:

Seaswarm is designed to be simple, cheap, and efficient. To collect oil, the robots use a wide belt covered in a special hydrophobic nanofabric (about the consistency of a paper towel) that sucks 20 times its own weight in oil (and other pollutants) out of water. The belt moves around like a treadmill, which passes the befouled nanofabric back to be cleaned while simultaneously propelling the robot forward. The video talks about heat being used to separate oil from the nanofiber, while the description on the Seaswarm website makes it seems like the oil is squeezed out using rollers… Whatever floats your robot, I guess.

What I’m not too sure about is where all of that captured oil goes. Using their solar panels for power the bots can collect for several weeks at a time, and the more oil they collect, the heavier they’ll get, and the more energy it’ll take to keep them moving. The website does mention that the oil will be ‘digested,’ which I assume implies microbes, but they’ll either have to collect oil very slowly or have some wicked crazy hungry bugs to be able to get around the problem.

Seaswarm is designed from the water up to utilize swarm behaviors. To combat a spill the size of the recent one in the gulf, about 5000 fully autonomous Seaswarm units would cooperate for a month, using GPS and WiFi to organize themselves for most efficient coverage. And of course, you get all the usual swarm benefits of scalability, adaptability, and robustness.

While Seaswarm as a whole is currently just a concept, they have built an actual working prototype (in the pic above), which was just tested out on the Charles river in Boston, I guess because the designers figured they’d teach the robot some humility when it comes to pollution clean-up.

[ Seaswarm ]

18 May 2010: At ODP 889 (1256m below the sea surface), we happened upon an abandoned rice cooker or crock-pot and screwdriver upon which sat a large crab. The ROPOS pilot carefully opened the lid. Inside, we discovered a mother octopus with her brood of eggs! Collaborating scientist suggested adopting this creature as the Bubbly Gulch mascot. We’re calling her “Kraki.”

The ROPOS (Remotely Operated Platform for Ocean Sciences) is a tethered ROV operated by Neptune Canada. It has a maximum operational depth of 5000m, and carries five cameras plus two 7 DoF arms equipped with force feedback controllers, allowing the ROV pilot to open even the most becrabbed and beoctopused undersea rice cookers.

[ Neptune Canada ] VIA [ Fark ]

Vecna Technologies sent along this new video of BEAR, their Battlefield Extraction something Robot. I don’t immediately see any new capabilities, but BEAR does show a penchant for wanton (or premeditated) destruction, smashing through doors and car windows with no apparent sense of remorse. BEAR’s selling point (besides the cute ears) is its ability to lift ludicrous amounts of weight while simultaneously balancing on two extendable treads, which enables it to be (potentially) more useful than a human for performing certain heavy lifting and moving tasks. With all of that power comes a corresponding amount of infrastructure, though, and for BEAR to be really useful in the field it’s going to need to be both durable and easy to repair, and that huge betubed hydraulic backpack looks kinda fragile.

[ Vecna Robotics ]

Thanks Andy!

Now Curiosity‘s got something to smack those pesky Martians upside da head with. And, you know, for doing, like, science experiments and stuff.

[ MSL ]

When I did my review of the Neato XV-11, I contacted Evolution Robotics to see if I could take a look at the other new cleaning robot we were introduced to at CES this year, the Mint. I didn’t hear anything back, but I guess they did see fit send one to some website called CNET. What is that, a fishing site or something? Anyway, they’ve got a review up (comparing the Mint to an iRobot Scooba), and here’s some excerpts:

Using dry cloths in sweep mode, Mint captured lots of dust and hair but basically pushed other floor debris around instead of sucking it up, leaving a battlefield of rolled-up dust bunnies in its wake. It’s more effective with wet cloths, moving in a back-and-forth motion when I pushed the mop mode button, and leaving floors cleaner. Its square shape allowed it to get into corners that Scooba couldn’t reach.

On the whole, Scooba does a better job at cleaning than Mint, but I didn’t like all the maintenance it requires. Mint worked reasonably well as a light cleaner, and I loved its simplicity and nearly noiseless operation. I’d really like to see a Mint and Scooba love child, with the best genes from both, but I won’t retire my mop just yet.

Mint and Scooba love child? Oh yeah, now we’re gettin’ freak-ay. You can read the whole review at the link below, and Mint is currently available from HSN for $230.

[ Mint ]
[ CNET ] VIA [ Robots.net ]

Yesterday, we posted an update on PR2′s for sale status, and included a video from an informal contest sponsored by Willow Garage founder Scott Hassan, inviting PR2 beta teams to submit cool / funny / useful PR2 videos to be judged by himself, his wife, and his kids. The above video (from Ping Chuan Wang, Stephen Miller, Mario Fritz, Trevor Darrell, Pieter Abbeel at UC Berkeley) took first place and a cool $5000, which is way more than any person has ever been paid for folding two socks together.

Second place went to Bosch, for their PR2 mailman, whose name appears to be “Alan:”

UPenn took third place with their one robot band:

Really, each of these videos is deserving of its own post, but I wouldn’t do that to you… You can check out the other six (there’s also PR2 StrongBot, posted yesterday) after the jump. (Read more…)

Now that the PR2 has proven to be mildly successful (to put it, uh, mildly), Willow Garage is getting ready to make them commercially available. As of next month, according to the Willow Garage blog, “you can purchase your very own PR2.” They’re not talking about you, though, unless you can dig $400,000 (ish) out from under your couch cushions. The exact pricing is going to have a few more as yet to be determined aspects, of course, but I’m told that you’ll at least get to choose the color.

While $400k may not be exactly affordable for you personally (and if it is, have you considered sponsoring a quality robotics blog?), commercial availability in general means that well endowed (in the financial sense) research institutions who weren’t lucky enough to get one of the first ten eleven should be able to get their hands on one soon. And that means, more cool PR2 videos for us to enjoy and be amazed at. Oh, and open source research and development and stuff, yeah, that too.

Speaking of cool PR2 videos:

This PR2 is from Georgia Tech, and (if you have no idea what’s going on) the video was inspired by this:

This video (the first one) was part of an informal contest sponsored by Willow Garage founder Scott Hassan, inviting PR2 beta teams to submit cool / funny / useful PR2 videos to be judged by himself, his wife, and his kids. There were about 10 submissions, and we’ll have the rest of the contest videos for you in our next post.

[ PR2 ]

In a sure sign that the military industrial complex is running out of quality acronyms, Lockheed Martin has posted a concept video of their VARIOUS UAVs. I’m not yelling, I promise… The name of the UAV is VARIOUS, which Lockheed claims stands for VTOL Advanced Reconnaissance Insertion Organic Unmanned System. Now, I get the Unmanned System part, and Reconnaissance sort of makes sense, but Insertion is a stretch and I’m not at all sure where they get Organic from, not to mention the fact that putting an acronym inside an acronym is totally cheating. Still, the UAV is pretty neat, with an enclosed lift system and stealth capability… But with a name like “VARIOUS,” I just don’t see this ever becoming a reality.

[ VARIOUS Fact Sheet (*.PDF) ]

Edit- I just realized that this concept isn’t exactly new (like, 2006-2007ish), but since I already wrote that whole rant about the acronym, I’m just gonna post it anyway. It’s new to BotJunkie, at least. Enjoy!

A robot stole my job back in 2008, and things are just getting worse, according to this infographic from Focus magazine. It’s a long graphic, so check out the full thing after the break. (Read more…)

We first wrote about Handbot a year ago, when we saw it climb up a bookshelf and steal a book. Handbot relies on a spring-launched magnetic grappling hook to lift itself up off the floor to get its grippers on things up the Z axis… I especially like the cute little propellers which I’m pretty sure the bot uses to maintain its rotational orientation as it rises. Of course, without a detachable grappling hook, Handbot is good for use exactly once, which (obviously) isn’t ideal. Now, however, it’s got a switchoffable magnet, meaning that it can steal two different books. Run for the hills!

The reason that it’s called Handbot is that it’s designed to be the manipulation portion of a robot made up of individual specialized sub-robots, including Eyebots for sensing and Footbots for ground movement. The whole shebang forms “an heterogeneous robotic system” called Swarmanoid, and eventually, one Swarmanoid assemblage will be comprised of some 60 (!) individual Handbots, Eyebots, and Footbots, capable of cooperatively moving around, sensing, and manipulating in 3D space.

As long as the ceiling is magnet friendly, anyway.

[ Swarmanoid ]