Robot Plays Volleyball
With the aid of onboard, fast-moving cameras, “Mr. Tomorrow” will most likely beat me in a game of volleyball. Created by the mad scientists at Toshiba.
via UniqueDaily
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PETMAN Walks Like A Man
Looks like Boston Dynamics, the robot company that brought us BigDog and RHex, has worked out how to make a robot walk like a man. This is PETMAN, a robot that is supposed to serve humans. Currently it is used to test chemical warfare suits for the military. Link (with embedded YouTube clip)
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The Robot Cheetah
Sangbae Kim, a robot designer from MIT, is probably best known to Neatorama readers as the inventor of the Stickybot, a robot that can climb walls with feet modeled after a gecko’s sticky feet. He also used the idea of scuttling cockroaches for a robot called the iSprawl.
Kim’s latest project is a robot inspired by the cheetah. The idea is build a prototype robot from a lightweight carbon-fiber-foam composite that can run at the cheetah’s speed of 70 miles per hour.
It’s an ambitious project. Current wheeled robots are efficient, but can be slow in rough terrains. For instance, iRobot’s PackBot, which is used by the U.S. military, can only travel at speeds of up to 5.8 miles per hour.
“Most wheeled robots today can do very well on flat surfaces, but they are slow,” says Kim. That’s why he’s looking to the cheetah for ideas. The cheetah has an extremely flexible backbone that gives extra speed or force to its running motion.
The project is expected to take about 18 months. Link
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Robots + Monsters
Raise money for charity and support indie artists? What can be better than that? Joe Alterio has relaunched his website Robots + Monsters, where you can order a very cool custom drawings – the ones above are our very own Neatorama monster and robot.
Your drawing will be made either by Joe himself or one of the site’s contributors: John Martz, Travis Pitts, and Adam "Apelad" Koford. Portion of the proceeds will go to support a charity (right now it’s Water.org which provides safe water and sanitation to communities in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America) and to help support the artist.
Here’s how to get yours: Link
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The Rovin’ Pumpkin
You may recall the Dalek Pumpkin from 2006, the Snap-o-Lantern from 2007, and the Dark Detecting Jack-o-Lantern from 2008. The fertile minds at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories have announced their Halloween pumpkin project for 2009, and it’s a winner!
The Rovin’ Pumpkin’ is a simple robotic pumpkin, and a close cousin of the Snap-O-Lantern. Silently, it sits on your porch– camouflaged amongst the humble squashes.
After a minute, its green eyes start to glow, and it creeps… moving about one foot to the left… and stops. The eyes go dark again. It fades into the darkness. And it waits.
After several minutes and several steps, it reverses direction, and begins to creep the other way. Hopefully before it falls off of your porch.
The Rovin’ Pumpkin is made from Lego parts, a small motor, LEDs for eyes, and a pumpkin. Instructions and a video are included in the article. Link
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Old Robots Website
This is just about the coolest thing I’ve seen today: a giant online collection of vintage educational and toy robots from the 1980s. It made me miss my old Tomy Omnibot … Link – via swissmiss
If you like that, don’t miss the Old Robot YouTube channel.
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Teenager builds robot to solve his Rubik's cube!
[YouTube - Link]
Lithuanian twelfth grader Andrius Šutas built his own robot for Rubik’s cube solving and does not hesitate to share secrets of the build (i. e. schematics, CAD design, source code). It’s not very fast, but does the job pretty well and the simplicity of the design looks good. The solving algorithm in question is layer-by-layer (same as an average Human would use).
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Wonderful Altoids Hacks
Oobject rounded up some of the best Altoids tin hacks from around the Web. From cameras to flashlights to headphone amps, nothing is safe from the DIY community!
The almighty Altoids tin has been torn apart, beat to death and drilled upon all in the name of science. DIY enthusiasts can attest to the solid build of the tin and how delicious the mints were that formerly resided in it. This list is a collection of some of the finest hackery around that incorporates an Altoids tin.
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Robot Nurse Bear
Japan is facing an aging population and a shortage of nurses. the robotics industry, on the other hand, is booming. Introducing RIBA, which stands for “Robot for Interactive Body Assistance”. RIBA can pick up and carry people weighing as much as 135 pounds.
The cheery-looking machine has long, multi-jointed arms embedded with an array of tactile sensors that help it optimize the lifting and carrying of humans. For safety purposes, RIBA’s entire body is covered in a soft skin molded from an advanced lightweight urethane foam developed by TRI. The soft skin is designed to ensure the comfort of patients while they are being carried. In addition, the arm joints yield slightly under pressure — much like human arms do — further increasing the level of comfort and safety.
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Little Big Love
Love is hard when you’re a little robot in a big world. A little bit creepy and a whole lot of cute, Little Big Love is a bittersweet short film from Tomas Mankovsky. Link
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Bot Can Cook: Ramen-Bots Cook The Perfect Bowl of Noodle
[YouTube - Link]
Where else but in Japan do you see the ultimate combination of robot and ramen? Instead of (puny) human chefs, a restaurant in Japan has programmed industrial robots to cook the perfect bowl of ramen, each and every time with precision.
Take a look – it’s riveting!
– via gruvix
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Carnegie Mellon Scientists Create Snake Robot That Can Crawl Up Your Leg
What do you get when you cross a snake with a robot? Howie Choset and the rest of the wily geniuses at Biorobotics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University have created snakebots that can move by sidewinding, corkscrewing, rolling … and as you can see in the video clip, can also climb up your leg (yikes!)
All of us at Neatorama would like to be the first to welcome our new robot snake overlord: Link – via Suicide Bots
Previously on Neatorama: Snakebot and other robotic snakes
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Manufacturers Defends EATR
In an update on the story about the new military robot in development that refuels itself by consuming biomass, Robot Technologies and Cyclone Power Technologies Inc. issued a press release denying that its robot would consume human bodies. Wired published the release, which says in part:
RTI’s patent pending robotic system will be able to find, ingest and extract energy from biomass in the environment. Despite the far-reaching reports that this includes “human bodies,” the public can be assured that the engine Cyclone has developed to power the EATR runs on fuel no scarier than twigs, grass clippings and wood chips – small, plant-based items for which RTI’s robotic technology is designed to forage. Desecration of the dead is a war crime under Article 15 of the Geneva Conventions, and is certainly not something sanctioned by DARPA, Cyclone or RTI.
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Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot
Robotic Technology is developing a robot called EATR, which stands for Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot. It’s more than just an acronym. The machine will be able to go on long range and long distance missions and refuel itself by foraging and consuming “biomass” as well as conventional fuels. This biomass could theoretically include dead bodies.
That “biomass” and “other organically-based energy sources” wouldn’t necessarily be limited to plant material — animal and human corpses contain plenty of energy, and they’d be plentiful in a war zone.
EATR will be powered by the Waste Heat Engine developed by Cyclone Power Technology of Pompano Beach, Fla., which uses an “external combustion chamber” burning up fuel to heat up water in a closed loop, generating electricity.
The advantages to the military are that the robot would be extremely flexible in fuel sources and could roam on its own for months, even years, without having to be refueled or serviced.
Link to story. Link to website. -Thanks, Brother Bill!
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DustCart: The Real Life Wall-E
Meet DustCart, a real-life Wall-E, created by Italian scientist Paolo Dario and colleagues at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna University.
The robotic trash bin can revolutionize trash collection in small Italian towns with small and windy streets inaccessible to large garbage trucks:
Like a taxi answering a call, DustCart rode across the terrace to meet the caller.
Once the robot arrived, it asked for a personal ID number that both identifies the user and tracks the garbage. It also asked for the kind of trash being dumped — organic, recyclable or waste. DustCart then opened its belly bin, collected the trash and took it to a fake dumping site.
Fulvio Paolocci and Angelica Marin of GlobalPost has the story (and lots of photos!): Link
(Photo: Fulvio Paolocci/Global Post)
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5 Most Worthless Droids in Sci-Fi
If real life is any indication, for every android hero, there has got to be a hundred or so worthless robots floating around in science fiction. Neatoramanaut Johnny Cat has compiled his very own list of 5 worthless droids that ever graced the silver screen.
This one to the left is V.I.N.CENT, from the 1979 sci-fi movie The Black Hole:
4. V.I.N.CENT and B.O.B.
Okay, I’ll admit it. When The Black Hole came out in 1979, I was all over it. I even had the board game. This was mostly due to the effect Star Wars had on my embracing any & all space travel movies to the fullest. But as anyone who’s seen it will probably tell you, this movie SUCKED. These two whirligigs didn’t even impress my young sci-fi starved mind at the time, with their precious laser guns taking out countless other worthless sentry droids. They look like they were designed by a six-year-old with a serious head trauma. Also: Roddy McDowell and Slim Pickens do the voices. Waste.
See if you can add anything to the list: Link
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Robotic Ferret Sniffs Out Drugs, Weapons and Illegal Immigrants
Coming soon to a seaport near you: a robot dubbed the "cargo-screening ferret" that will detect drugs, weapons, explosives and even illegal immigrants hidden in cargo containers.
Recent advances in both laser and fibre optic technology now make it possible to detect tiny particles of different substances. The EPSRC-funded project team is developing sensors which incorporate these technologies and that are small enough to be carried on the 30cm-long robot, in order to detect the specific ‘fingerprint’ of illegal substances at much lower concentrations than is now possible.
When placed inside a steel freight container, the ferret will attach itself magnetically to the top, then automatically move around and seek out contraband, sending a steady stream of information back to its controller.
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Walking "Caterpillar" Gel
Forget electronics, the coolest thing in robotics may just be something squishy like a walking gel that inches along just like a caterpillar:
Shingo Maeda and colleagues made the colour-changing, motile gel by combining polymers that change in size depending on their chemical environment. This is based on an oscillating chemical reaction called the Belousov–Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction. The result is an autonomous material that moves without electronic stimulation. [...]
Polymers used in the gel shrink and grow in response to ruthenium bipyridine ions, alternately losing and gaining electrons in the cyclical reaction. That effect has been known for some time, but hasn’t been used to make a self-locomoting material on such a scale before, says Maeda.
Link (with video clip) – via Cliff Pickover’s Reality Carnival
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Homemade R2D2s
The Bay Area R2 Builders showed off four fully-functioning R2D2 units at Maker Faire. They cost around $10,000 to build, and take a couple of years of work. Link to video report. Link to website.
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BabyBot Develops Social Skills by Interacting with Humans
Nearly two years after it was introduced to the world, Osaka University’s CB2 robot (which stands for "Child-robot with Biomimetic Body") has been developing social skills by interacting with humans and watching their facial expressions, just like a human baby would:
Below the soft silicon skin of one of Japan’s most sophisticated robots, processors record and evaluate information. The 130-cm (four-foot, four-inch) humanoid is designed to learn just like a human infant.
"Babies and infants have very, very limited programmes. But they have room to learn more," said Osaka University professor Minoru Asada, as his team’s 33 kilogram (73 pound) invention kept its eyes glued to him.
The team is trying to teach the pint-sized android to think like a baby who evaluates its mother’s countless facial expressions and "clusters" them into basic categories, such as happiness and sadness.
Link – via Pink Tentacle
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Thought-Controlled Robot
And so it has begun: Honda has developed a new brain-machine interface technology that allows humans to control the Asimo robot simply by thinking:
The BMI system, which Honda developed along with Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) and Shimadzu Corporation, consists of a sensor-laden helmet that measures the user’s brain activity and a computer that analyzes the thought patterns and relays them as wireless commands to the robot.
When the user simply thinks about moving his or her right hand, the pre-programmed Asimo responds several seconds later by raising its right arm. Likewise, Asimo lifts its left arm when the person thinks about moving their left hand, it begins to walk when the person thinks about moving their legs, and it holds its hand up in front of its mouth when the person thinks about moving their tongue.
Pink Tentacle blog has more: Link (with video clip)
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Dual Quad: Fred Baier's Robot-Like Desk
Fred Baier said that his furniture are inspired by "industrial imagery," but we’re pretty darn certain that the deks above, nondescriptly titled Dual Quad, is some sort of a hidden robot that will rise and quash humanity for not using coasters when setting down their drinks on the lacquered birch countertop.
If you’d like one, it’ll set you back £11,000: Link via Gizmodo
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Tweenbots
(blip TV link)
Kacie Kinzer’s Tweenbots experiment is less about robots and more about human nature. She designed small cardboard robots with smiling faces that will move only forward. Kinzer then would set a robot down in an area of New York City with a flag that indicated its destination. The only way it could get “home” was with the help of passers-by. People really came through! Over several months and many missions, each time a robot got stuck or headed in the wrong direction, someone would set it straight or otherwise helped it along its way. My question is: would people have helped a robot that wasn’t so cute? Link -via Gizmodo
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Robot Makes Scientific Discovery Entirely On Its Own
And so it has begun: scientists have created a robotic system that has made novel scientific discovery without any human input:
Scientists designed "Adam" to carry out the entire scientific process on its own: formulating hypotheses, designing and running experiments, analyzing data, and deciding which experiments to run next.
"It’s a major advance," says David Waltz of the Center for Computational Learning Systems at Columbia University. "Science is being done here in a way that incorporates artificial intelligence. It’s automating a part of the scientific process that hasn’t been automated in the past."
[...]
Adam’s British designers, led by Ross King at Aberystwyth University in Wales, acknowledge that the robot’s discoveries have been "of a modest kind" thus far. Its proving ground as a scientist has been the genome of baker’s yeast, a popular laboratory species. Baker’s yeast is one of the best understood organisms, but 10 to 15 percent of its roughly 6,000 genes have unknown functions. The scientists hoped Adam could shed light on some of these mystery genes.
I, for one, welcome our new robot scientist overlords: Link
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Hamster-Controlled Roomba
[YouTube - Link]
Technically it’s an iRobot, but it’s pretty much the same thing. It kinda reminds me of Dr. Robotnik’s creations, only alot less evil.
– via Make
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The Humans Are Dead: Flight of the Conchords Embroidery
Photo: lilyvanilli72 [Flickr]
Lily of Lily Blogs embroidered this awesome embroidery for Craftster’s Flight of the Conchord swap. She’s got some excellent embroidery projects going on (love the Milhouse one!) – check it out: Link – via i met a possum
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Rise of the Rat-Brained Robots!
[YouTube - Link]
Mark Hammond and colleagues at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom have found a way to control a robot with rat neurons. Watch this short video by Newscientist to see the robot in action.
From the article:
This is no ordinary robot control system – a plain old microchip
connected to a circuit board. Instead, the controller nestles inside a
small pot containing a pink broth of nutrients and antibiotics. Inside
that pot, some 300,000 rat neurons have made – and continue to make -
connections with each other.As
they do so, the disembodied neurons are communicating, sending
electrical signals to one another just as they do in a living creature.
We know this because the network of neurons is connected at the base of
the pot to 80 electrodes, and the voltages sparked by the neurons are
displayed on a computer screen.It’s
these spontaneous electrical patterns that researchers at the
University of Reading in the UK want to harness to control a robot. If
they can do so reliably, by stimulating the neurons with signals from
sensors on the robot and using the neurons’ response to get the robots
to respond, they hope to gain insights into how brains function. Such
insights might help in the treatment of conditions like Alzheimer’s,
Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy.
– via newscientist
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The Rise of Discord by Greg Brotherton
Forget the clunky and boxy prototypical robot we see in bad Sci-Fi movies all the time!
Behold The Rise of Discord, the sleek and sexy mechanical representation of Eris, the Greek goddess of strife and discord by Greg Brotherton of Brotron. Check out the rest of his sculptures here: Link – via Musecrack
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Savage Chicken: Poet-Bot Loves You!
I <3 Doug Savage’s awesome cartoon series Savage Chickens (featured previously on Neatorama here). I particularly like this one – because my computer does the same thing, except it’s probably thinking of ways to cause serious bodily harm.
Link – via Nag on the Lake
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The Ponginator: A Giant Ping Pong Ball Shooting Robot
The Ponginator is a three stories tall robot that can fire ping pong balls at up to 170 miles per hour. Its inventor, Vernon Graner of the Austin Robot Group explains:
Ponginator is a robot, and as far as robots go, this one is fairly simple. It plays music, says a few words cribbed from audio files, and shoots ping-pong balls from pressurized air guns.
A Parallax Basic stamp-based microcontroller in a computer behind the robot controls the robot’s ping-pong balls, which leave the barrel at 170 miles per hour.
Link (with video)
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