1,000 days from now, NASA could start sending humanoid avatars to the moon. They would be controlled by scientists on Earth using motion-capture suits, giving the scientists the feeling of being on the lunar surface. Check out this video from the Johnson Space Center. Could it really happen that fast? Jesus Diaz at Gizmodo doesn’t see why not.
…the mission would be a lot simpler than a human-based one. It will also be quite cheaper than the real thing. First, you don’t have to care about life support systems, which will make spacecraft manufacturing a lot less complex. The whole system would also weight a lot less, reducing the need for the development of a huge rocket, and again reducing the costs.
…Now imagine these NASA C-3POs roaming our satellite, controlled by all kind of scientists using telepresence suits down here, all looking for interesting things using high definition visors, and able to move just like they would move on planet Earth.
Even better would be if they could allow non-scientists a chance to walk on the moon as well.
Link: Gizmodo
I, for one, welcome our new hexapod overlord … to a dance off! Here’s a video clip of the best dance compilation from the 4th Hexapod Championship in Hagenberg, Austria.
They’ll eat the humans after building an appetite dancing: Link [embedded YouTube]
What better way to start off a geek fight than to ask who is the greatest movie or TV robot/android? Curtis Silver of Geek Dad did just that by comparing Data from Star Trek, to just about every other android.
For example, just to add fuel to the raging Star Trek vs. Star Wars debate:
Data vs. C3PO
C3PO can understand and translate around six million different forms of communication. Mind you, he was designed and built by a young boy. While the Midi-chlorians might have been high in young Skywalker’s bloodstream, they didn’t help him build a droid with much of a backbone. Meanwhile, in a galaxy far far away Dr. Soong was busy creating a sentient android of his own with not only a backbone, but a badass positronic brain. It’s never made clear how many languages Data can speak, but one has to assume the number is just as high as C3PO. Advantage: Data
What do you think? Who’s the best robot/android that ever lived (well, in sci-fi anyhow)?
Fronted by Gamon, the Robo-Band, found object assemblage sculpture by Brian Marshall also features Johnson on lead guitar, Ritan on bass, and Topper on drums. Genre: metal.
Robot sculpture assembled from found objects by Brian Marshall – Wilmington, DE. Items included in my sculptures vary from vintage household kitchen items to recycled industrial scrap. Some of my favorite items to use are old oil cans, aluminum measuring spoons, electrical meters, retro blenders, anodized cups, and pencil sharpeners.
Will be on display at my upcoming show at the RedMohawk gallery on January 29th in Wilmington, DE.
Adopt-A-Bot [Flickr]
The Web is Agreement by Paul Downey
The Wonderful World of Early Computing
Mom Always Liked You Best: Mismatched Siblings
Some of you may remember the wonderful Leave Me Alone Box. Now you can make your very own, with step-by-step directions from Instructables. Link
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Just added to Neatoama Shop's Christmas Special, where each purchase gets you a free Mystery Bonus. It's not too late to order for Christmas delivery (last day to order is Dec 17 for US orders) : Link
These festive robots were built from RoboBuilder kits and synchronized to some classic holiday tunes. OK, just pretend that those little squeaks and servo motor noises are jingle bells. -via Geeks Are Sexy
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
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)
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
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
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
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.
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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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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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.
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
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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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
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.
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!
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)
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
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.
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
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
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)
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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