Ever wondered how a hard drive works? I mean, we know it has something to do with frikkin’ magnets, but how do they work? Luckily, the Engineer Guy is here to explain, and also to help you spend five minutes not working on a Friday afternoon. Learn about arms, actuators, heads and Lorentz forces. And learn how on Earth you store ones and zeros on a spinning magnetic disk.
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on June 11, 2011
LAS VEGAS — This weekend, tech journalist Evan Ackerman took a step into science-fiction, literally. At CES 2011, Evan became the first person in the US to try on a pair of cyber-trousers from the Japanese company Cyberdyne. Cyberdyne, I don’t need to remind you, shares a name with the fictional company that built the Terminators.
The Sci-Fi references continue: The exoskeleton is named HAL, or Hybrid Assistive Limb, and is controlled by thought. The suit is strapped to the waist and legs and sensors monitor electrical signals sent to the legs from the brain. Just as we don’t have to consciously think about taking a step, Evan didn’t have to consciously control the HAL. It just works. “Once I figured out how to stop trying to walk in the suit and just let the suit walk for me, the experience was almost transparent,” he said.
HAL is powered by small motors that assist the user. The military is, of course, interested, but medicine is another important use. Evan was using the suit on its lowest power-level (level one), and even then felt that it did all the work in taking him up a small flight of stairs. The suit goes up to level four, which could carry the weak and lame, or let people with injuries get around on their own feet.
Cyberdine also has a full body version, like the power-lifter in the movie Aliens, and the suits are in daily use in Japanese hospitals, leased for around $1700 per month. They are also finding their way into medical institutions around the world.
Cyberdine plans a rugged, weather-resistant version to allow injured or disabled people to do outdoor activities, and a new version coming later this year will have smaller and lighter batteries – the current model weighs around 10kg.
Robot Suit HAL Demo at CES 2011 [IEEE Spectrum. Thanks, Erico!]
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This post was written by Journalist on January 10, 2011
Sure, you can make a ping-pong ball float just by blowing at it through a drinking-straw, but wouldn’t a ball-levitating robot be so much more fun? Luckily for us, University of Illinois grad students Aaron Becker and Robert Sandheinrich answered “yes” to this question, and built this incredible machine:
It’s called the Robo-Air Blower, and while the principle is pretty simple, the physics behind it are complex. A gimbaled nozzle fires compressed air at 620 kPa of pressure. This jet creates a fast-moving, low pressure area around the ball, trapping it. The jet is powerful enough to lift balls of between 24mm and 194mm in diameter, and up to 188-grams of mass.
But the tricky part is control. Fluid dynamics are a chaotic thing, and the programming of the robot control multiple balls, as well as non-spherical objects, like the water-bottle in the video, is complex. The robot’s brain is fed by two stereo cameras which track the balls’ movements and adjust the jet based on an algorithm.
Despite this somewhat dry explanation, the results are spectacular. The robot can push the balls sideways and diagonally, and make them jump through hoops. It looks like some kind of iPhone or Android video-game brought to life, or an up-to-date version of the old loop-and-live-wire game we played in school.
Robo-Air Blower Makes Ping-Pong Balls, Apples Defy Gravity [Automaton / IEEE Spectrum]
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This post was written by Journalist on January 3, 2011
Phillip Roebbel, a student at MIT’s Personal Robotics Group, has used a hacked Xbox Kinect camera and an iRobot Create kit to make a Roomba-esque KinectBot that can recognize human beings and respond to their gestural commands.
In an interview with SingularityHub, Roebbel discussed about how KinectBot grew out of his research in creating robots to locate trapped or missing people in a disaster. The Kinect’s ability to do 3-D mapping of terrain and recognize and respond to human gestures could eventually work in tandem with aerial drones and rapid-response teams to launch rescue operations.
Here’s a video showing how Kinectbot was assembled and what it can do:
Bear in mind, this is just a “weekend hacking project.” Imagine what Microsoft’s Robotics team — who’ve had a lot longer to play with the tech behind Kinect than the rest of us — might be cooking up in their labs.
Still a $150 off-the-shelf sensor like Kinect opens up the option box for everybody. Add the right mix of boops and beeps, a computer hacking interface, jet packs, and the ability to serve drinks and fix starships, and we’re just a few iterations away from a full-fledged R2-D2 unit. We’re living in the future.
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This post was written by Journalist on November 18, 2010
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Robots can help children become smarter and happier. Javier Movellan, who has spent the better part of the last three decades playing with kids and robots, is sure of it.
Movellan, an associate professor affiliated with UC San Diego’s Machine Perception Laboratory, is a psychologist and a robotics researcher. He studies children’s interactions with robots for two reasons: to better understand childhood development and to build better robots. He has found that emotion and interactivity are more important to kids than humanoid appearance or abstract intelligence. Movellan answered Wired.com’s questions about his work by e-mail.
Image: Javier Movellan with Qrio Robot at UCSD’s Early Childhood Education Center. Credit: UCSD Machine Perception Lab.
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This post was written by Journalist on October 26, 2010
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Household robots could become a reality sooner than we think. But the first hurdle they would have to clear is to prove they can make great pancakes. After all, the breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
A demo posted by Willow Garage, a Palo Alto, California, robotic company, shows two robots working together to make pancakes from a mix. The robots — James and Rosie — even flipped the pancakes correctly.
As you can see in the video (the fun stuff begins at the 1:26 mark) the James robot opened and closed cupboards and drawers, removed the pancake mix from the refrigerator, and handed it to Rosie.
Rosie the robot cooks and flips the pancakes and gives them back to James. Watch for that moment of suspense when Rosie is about to flip the pancake (at the 8:35 mark) and the spontaneous applause from the onlookers when the robot gets it right.
“Behind this domestic tableau is a demonstration of the capabilities of service bots,” says Willow Garage on its blog. “This includes characteristics such as learning, probabilistic inference and action planning.”
For a robot, learning how to flip a pancake is quite a task. Earlier this year, two researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology taught a robot how to do it. The robot had to hold its hand stiffly to throw the pancake in the air and then flex the hand just enough so it could catch the pancake without having it bounce off the pan. It took that robot about 50 tries to get it right.
The latest experiment brought together two different robots: James, a $400,000 robot from Willow Garage and Rosie, a robot from the Technical University Munich. The two robots are among the most sophisticated and advanced humanoid robots today.
James has two stereo camera pairs in its head. The four 5-megapixel cameras are supplemented with a tilting laser range finder. Each of the robot’s forearms has an Ethernet wide-angle camera, while the grippers at the tip have three-axis accelerometers and pressure-sensor arrays on the fingertips. At the base of the robot is another laser range finder.
The PR2 is powered by two eight-core i7 Xeon system servers on-board, 48 GB of memory and a battery system equivalent to 16 laptop batteries or about two hours of battery life.
Rosie has two laser scanners for mapping and navigation, one laser scanner for 3-D laser scans and four cameras, including two 2-megapixel cameras, one stereo-on-chip camera and a Swiss-Ranger SR4000 time-of-flight camera.
The advanced capabilities of the robots came in handy for the task they were assigned. In the demo, one of the robots used the web to solve a cooking problem it faced. The robot looked up a picture on the web and went online to find the cooking instructions for the pancake mix that came from the fridge.
James and Rosie aren’t yet ready “for haute cuisine” say Willow Garage researchers. Nor are they likely to be in your kitchen anytime soon, unless you are ready to pay a couple hundred thousand dollars for a pancake that may not be half as good as the $5 IHOP stack.
But the experiment gives us a pretty good sense of the possibilities. And the robots are cute, besides.
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This post was written by Journalist on October 22, 2010
If you were wondering what to buy Gadget Lab editor Dylan Tweney for Christmas, her’s your answer. Send him a Mechanicard, a mailable greetings card which is also a handmade kinetic sculpture. Dylan is both a tinkerer and a sucker for cool stationery, so he’ll love it. Just don’t expect it to be a surprise – I’m pretty sure he reads this blog.
There are five different Mechanicards, from the Radial Engine seen in the picture above through the Strum-U-lator (plays music!), the Dragonfly Surprise (it has a dragonfly. Surprise!) and the wonderful Ambigulator, “featuring a hand-cranked optical effect, and a mechanism that asks more questions than it answers.”
The kits are all hand-operated with a tiny, supplied handle, and can be had fully made or in kit form. The kits begin at $45 assembled ($35 for the DIY option) and the prices rise to $75 for the more complex models. If you’re feeling stressed today, then go grab a cup (or cocktail glass) of your favorite beverage and watch the video of all the Mechanicards in action. It’s hypnotic, and very relaxing.
Mechanicards mailable sculptures [Mechanicards]
Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.
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This post was written by Journalist on October 14, 2010
Teddy bears are not just cuddly creatures for kids at bed time. Fujitsu Labs has developed a prototype teddy bear for adults that’s packed with some sophisticated hardware and can interact with and respond to humans. The stuffed bear is being called a “social robot with a personality,” and can make simple gestures, eye contact and small talk.
The hope is to use them for “robot therapy” in geriatric medicine for patients that suffer from dementia, says Fujitsu.
Fujitsu’s teddy bear robot is reminiscent of Pleo, the green robotic dinosaur capable of displaying basic emotions through animatronics and reacting to its surroundings. Despite Pleo’s innovative approach and tech capability, the robot didn’t really become a mainstream sensation –largely because it was positioned as a toy.
Fujitsu’s teddy bear robot comes with loftier ambition. The robotic teddy bear can be plugged to a PC using a USB port. Sensors stuffed into it help it make some gestures such as lifting one of its furry hands up in response to external stimuli.
The bears have a miniature camera built into their nose so they can automatically wake up from sleep state when they sense a person nearby and can turn in their direction. A voice synthesizer inside the device lets it channel the voice of a young boy. The sound is projected from a built-in speaker and synchronized to the robot’s behavior.
The robotic bears are capable of up to 300 movement patterns including raising its arms, looking downwards and kicking its feet. The movement are combined with display of “emotions” to signal happiness, sadness and anger, says Fujitsu. And since the robot can be connected to the PC, new movements can be recorded and displayed.
What makes these robots interesting, says Fujitsu, is that it is interactive and real, in a world that is increasingly filled with virtual interactions. The bears can be played with and are likely to integrate easily into people’s lives, says the company.
Fujitsu hopes its teddy bear can help develop “robot therapy,” a way to use robots to help people overcome challenges or problems–much like how animals are used to cheer up patients in some hospitals today.
If you want to see how the robotic teddy bears work, check out this video:
Photo: CEATEC JAPAN Organizing Committee
[via Dvice]
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on October 7, 2010
Pondering the problem of philosophy, and how to achieve the necessary leisure to practice it, Aristotle concluded that slaves are an unfortunate but necessary evil. How else manage the drudgery of menial tasks and squeeze in a few solid hours of thinking?
As Discover Magazine’s Cosmic Variance blog noted recently, Aristotle did contemplate another solution:
There is only one condition in which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing slaves.
This condition would be that each (inanimate) instrument could do its own work, at the word of command or by intelligent anticipation, like the statues of Daedalus or the tripods made by Hephaestus, of which Homer relates that
Of their own motion they entered the conclave of Gods on Olympus”
as if a shuttle should weave of itself, and a plectrum should do its own harp playing.
So robots will make us free. Or, more precisely, they will make our servants free. Sounds incredibly prescient.
On the other hand, it’s hard to tell if he meant that ironically, drawing as he does from magical examples in poetry. “There is only one condition” sets this up as a ridiculous possibility, completely out of reach. So, if this was a joke, maybe it was on him. Or us?
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on October 6, 2010
Imagine a typical young child: impulsive, vindictive, cruel and prone to lashing out during screeching tantrums, yet also harmless due to its tiny stature. Now imagine that same little monster, only now it’s inside a mech-suit, an unstoppable wearable robot with arms that could knock aside Smart-cars and hydraulic hands that could crush its kid-brother’s skull. Imagine no more. The nightmare is real. Behold: The Kid’s Walker, by Sakakibara Kikai
For just $21,600* you could turn your child into a merciless, unstoppable killing machine, a 1.6-meter (5′3″), 180Kg (400lb) gas-powered cyborg capable of pulling the legs off his playmates the way a normal kid pulls the legs off flies, a hissing, hydraulic horror with the conscience of a serial-killer.
There is one ray of hope in this otherwise dreadful scenario: Like the original Daleks, the Kid’s Walker appears incapable of negotiating stairs or any kind of rough ground. So, if you ever glimpse this children’s exo-skeleton around the neighborhood, make sure you hold little Jimmy’s next birthday party atop some kind of small hill. A grassy knoll, perhaps. What could possibly go wrong?
Kid’s Walker [Sakakibara Kikai via Gizmag]
*$21,600 is the estimated price. Thankfully, the machine is not for sale.
Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on October 4, 2010
When I saw this Raytheon XOS 2 suit, I immediately thought of the scene in Iron Man 2 where a poor “volunteer” soldier is almost broken in two, his body snapped and wrung by an experimental exoskeleton he is wearing. So you can see how surprised I was to see Agent Phil Coulson from Iron Man wearing it in this YouTube video.
The XOS 2 is an upgrade to the original XOS built for military use by contractor Raytheon. It is lighter, faster and uses half the power of the XOS, and according to one of the uninjured test-soldiers – lets you press 200-pounds or do pushups with 150-pounds on your back without even feeling it. Check this thing out:
While the suit is clearly perfect for fighting, when it makes it into service in five years it will be used just like Ripley’s power-loader in the movie Aliens. A tethered, full-body XOS would be used for loading weapons and supplies (and, of course, fighting Alien queens in airlocks). A pants- only version, encircling legs and waist, could be used in the field to help troops carry heavy loads.
After seeing that soldier twisted like a pretzel in Iron Man 2, I have had an irrational fear of exoskeletons. But I’d love to take this one out for a spin. Imagine doing sports with this thing: you’d slug every ball out over the stadium walls.
For more on exoskeletons in the military in general, and suspiciously timely celebrity appearances in particular, check out the coverage over at our sister blog Danger Room.
Raytheon Unveils 2nd Generation Exoskeleton Robotic Suit [Raytheon]
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on September 30, 2010
The folks at BotJunkie didn’t trust their brand new Mint floor-mopping robot, so they decided to spy on it. Whilst testing out the little square bot’s cleaning skills, reviewer Evan Ackerman took these long-exposure photographs to track Mint’s movements in the dark, when it thought it couldn’t be seen. The one above shows Mint in sweep-mode, running back and forth in straight (ish) lines to brush dirt from uncarpeted floors. The blank section you see at bottom left was caused by Ackerman’s evil cat, which Mint politely avoided.
The next photograph shows Mint mopping. When loaded up with a wet, soapy mop, the robot scrubs back and forth on a spot to get things shiny and clean. You can see the zig-zagging pattern in the picture.
Overall, Ackerman likes the Mint. It’s silent (no vacuum cleaner) and cheap ($250) and when it stops to work out where it is (using a separate “North Star” box that projects a Mint-visible pattern onto the ceiling), it flashes its lights as it thinks. Ackerman calls this “cute” and “adorable.” Ahhh. Best of all, it works tirelessly and behaves itself, even when you’re not watching. Not like that damned cat.
Evolution Robotics Mint Sweeper [Bot Junkie]
Photos: Evan Ackerman
Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on September 30, 2010
The MacArthur Foundation’s 2010 fellowship class honors 23 innovators, providing them with $500,000 grants, national recognition, and a few people throwing around the word “genius.” One of the fellows is Amir Abo-Shaeer, a teacher whose high school physics and technology curriculum centers on designing and constructing robots.
Abo-Shaeer teaches at Dos Pueblos High School in Galeta, CA. In 2001, he created the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy to challenge the idea that American high school students — and particularly high school girls — weren’t interested in science or engineering. Abo-Shaeer was a Dos Pueblos alumni, studied engineering at UC-Santa Barbara, and worked in aerospace and telecommunications R&D. He knew that this just wasn’t the case.
“My first class, there were 35 students, and there were two girls,” Abo-Shaeer says. He brought his female students to the junior high schools to directly recruit more girls into the program. The students attracted attention by aggressively competing in the FIRST Robotics international high school competition, while Abo-Shaeer secured grants to build up the school’s robotics lab.
Now, Abo-Shaeer says, “we’ve had a line out the door of people wanting to get into our program,” — which is now composed of more than 50% girls. This summer, the Academy began construction of a 12,000 square-foot campus that will let them triple their current enrollment. The Perfect Mile author Neal Bascomb is writing a forthcoming book about Abo-Shaeer and his program titled The New Cool: A Visionary Teacher, His FIRST Robotics Team, and the Ultimate Battle of Smarts.
Recently, Abo-Shaeer’s Academy augmented its physics and engineering program with entrepreneurial and business components. It lets students focus on not just learning the science and tech to construct robots that work, but thinking about practical use-cases, cost, and marketability.
In a recent article for the Atlantic, “School For Hackers,” Make Magazine’s editor-in-chief Mark Frauenfelder argues forcefully that these are precisely the skills students should be learning, that building robots and gadgets is the best way to learn them, and that the current push towards quantifiable assessment is squeezing them out of American education. “When a kid builds a model rocket, or a kite, or a birdhouse, she not only picks up math, physics, and chemistry along the way, she also develops her creativity, resourcefulness, planning abilities, curiosity, and engagement with the world around her. But since these things cant be measured on a standardized test, schools no longer focus on them.” Let’s hope the MacArthur Foundation’s recognition of Dos Pueblos helps turn some of that momentum around.
2010 MacArthur Fellows [MacArthur Foundation]
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on September 28, 2010
Aman Behal’s automated robotic arm functioned perfectly. Outfitted with sensors that could “see” objects, grasp them with enough force to hold but not crush them, and return them to the user, it easily outperformed the same arm under manual control on every quantitative measurement.
Except one. The arm’s users — patients with spinal cords in an Orlando hospital — didn’t like it. It was too easy.
“Think about the Roomba,” Behal told Wired.com. “People like robots, and they like them to work automatically. But if you had to watch and supervise the Roomba while it worked, you’d get frustrated pretty quickly. Or bored.”
This wasn’t what Behal had expected. This was the new sensor’s system first time in the field; the user satisfaction survey was supposed to be one more data point, secondary to measuring the performance of the device itself. But it made his team rethink their entire project.
Behal, an Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida, had initially used the arm in a 2006 study at the University of Pennsylvania funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. In addition to weakening physical control, MS often impairs attention and memory, and the complexity of the arm’s controls overwhelmed them. At that time, the arm’s sensors and AI were much more limited, and users were mostly frustrated by its complicated controls.
For these patients, according to Behal, something that might seem as simple as scratching their heads was a prolonged struggle. They needed something that took the guesswork of movement, rotation, and force out of the equation.
The quadriplegics at Orlando Health were the opposite. They were cognitively high-functioning, and some had experience with computers or video games. All had ample experience using assistive technology. Regardless of the extent of their disability or whether they were using a touchscreen, mouse, joystick, or voice controls, they preferred using the arm on manual. The more experience they had with tech, the happier they were.
It didn’t matter that the arm performed faster and more accurately when it was fully automated. Users were actually more forgiving of the arm when they were piloting it. If the arm made a mistake on automatic mode, they panned it. Harshly. (“You see a big vertical spike downward,” when that happened, Behal said.) On manual mode, the users learned how to operate it better — and how to explain their problems with the device to someone else.
To users accustomed to navigating the world in a wheelchair — and frequently having to explain how their chair worked to others — this made the arm both more familiar and more useful. It felt less like an alien presence, and more like a tool: a natural extension of the body and the will.
This feeling is essential for anyone’s satisfaction using technology, but particularly so for disabled users, according to John Bricout, Behal’s collaborator and the associate dean for Research and Community Outreach at the University of Texas at Arlington School of Social Work.
“If we’re too challenged, we get angry and frustrated. But if we aren’t challenged enough, we get bored,” said Bricout. He’s seen this repeatedly with both disabled and older adults.
In an interview with Wired.com, he expanded on this, drawing on psychologist Mihly Cskszentmihlyi’s theory of flow: “We stay engaged when our capabilities are matched by our challenges and our opportunities,” Bricout said. If that balance tilts too far to one direction, we get anxious; if it tilts to the other, we get bored. Match them, and we’re at our happiest, most creative, and most productive.
Behal and Bricout hadn’t anticipated, for example, that users operating the arm using the manual mode would begin to show increased physical functionality.
“There’s rehabilitation potential here,” Bricout said. Thinking through multiple steps to coordinate and improve physical actions “activated latent physical and cognitive resources… It makes you rethink what rehabilitation itself might mean.”
For now, Behal, Bricout and their team plan on repeating their study with a larger group of users to see if they can replicate their results. They’re also going back to users with MS, and perhaps traumatic brain injuries, early next year. Colleagues at other institutions are experimenting with the arms with even more diverse disabled populations.
The engineering team has already given the robotic arm a “voice” that announces its actions and makes it feel more responsive and less alien, even on automatic mode. They’re revamping the software interface again, including exploring the possibility of adding haptic feedback, so users can feel when the robotic arm can grasp an object — or the user’s body itself. If you’re going to scratch your head, the fingertips benefit from touch almost as much.
“You have to listen to users,” Behal said. “If they don’t like using the technology, they won’t. Then it doesn’t matter how well it does its job.”
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Patient Bob Melia demonstrates the capabilities of the robotic arm in development. (Jason Greene/University of Central Florida)
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Robotic arm’s big flaw: Patients say it’s ‘too easy’ [UCF Press Release]
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on September 27, 2010
by Mark Brown
In the latest episode of stop teaching them so much, scientists have created a humanoid robot that teaches itself how to accurately hit a target with a bow and arrow.
The cute, childlike robot, named iCub, was designed by researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology. Armed with a bow, an arrow, a cute (if politically incorrect) Native American headdress and a complicated computer algorithm, the robot learns from his missed shots iteratively, until he makes the bull’s-eye.
The task of firing an arrow, the researchers say, was picked for its inherent and obvious reward, and simultaneous marriage of motor control with image processing. Nothing to do with arming a bunch of human-hating robots to the teeth, allegedly.
iCub uses a learning algorithm called ARCHER (Augmented Reward Chained Regression), which implements a camera to process the bull’s-eye image, and his previously fluffed attempts, to figure out the perfect angle, force and trajectory to make the winning shot.
The first iteration of iCub hit the bull’s-eye, standing three and a half metres from the target, in eight attempts. Heres hoping the next few iterations dont whittle it down to two or three trials while replacing the bow with a shotgun.
Its the latest robotic creation at the technology institute in Italy that learns complicated tasks through a series of iterative trial and error attempts. Earlier this year, the same institute taught a Barrett WAM 7 robotic arm to flip pancakes. That one took a slightly more lengthy 50 trials to master.
The archery-mastering iCub will be presented at the Humanoids 2010 conference in Tennessee this December. According to the conferences program, hell be joined by a passenger carrying biped, musical conducting robots, a Mini-Humanoid Pianist and a robot that can play table tennis.
Originally published on Wired UK.
Photo credit: Petar Kormushev/Wired UK
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on September 27, 2010
Marathons are not just for humans. A robot has decided to take on the challenge of walking 300 miles from Tokyo to Kyoto. The tour is part of a publicity tour organized for Panasonic’s Evolta batteries.
The 7-inch tall very cute humanoid robot that take on this project will be pulling a two-wheeled cart behind it. It’s a tiny machine but hopes to get to the finish line successfully.
The robot originally comes from the stable of Japanese company Robo Garage. It has been constructed using lightweight plastic, carbon fiber and titanium and weighs about 2.2 lbs. The entire machine will be powered using 12 AA batteries and operated using remote control, according to the Pink Tentacle site.
The robot will travel from sunrise to sunset, say the organizers, who will be tweeting its progress (@evoltatoukaidou) and livestreaming the event.
The robot can travel at a rate of about two to three miles an hour. So without any breakdowns or problems, the robot is expected to complete the journey in about 49 days.
It’s not the first time that this robot has undertaken adventure sports. In May 2008, it climed a 1740-ft rope suspended from a cliff at the Grand Canyon and a year later drove for a day around the Le Mans race circuit. All of this has already earned the robot a place in the Guinness World Records book.
For its current adventure, the robot has a wheel circling it so it can move over uneven surfaces. The handcart behind the robot is expected to hold extra batteries. The batteries will have to be recharged at least once every day.
Head over to the Pink Tentacle site to see photos of the very cute Evolta Panasonic robot as it gets ready to head out on its latest project.
Check out some photos of the Evolta from its earlier adventures:
The Evolta covered 14.8 miles at the Le Mans race circuit. Photo Courtesy Panasonic
Evolta robot's creator looks on proudly. Photo courtesy Panasonic
The Evolta robot has already set two records. Photo courtesy Panasonic
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on September 22, 2010
Graphic by Christine Daniloff, via MIT News Office
Sometimes when one of my remotes is missing, I interrogate the others: “Where’s your friend? I know you know something!” In the future, with wireless positioning systems, a version of that method might actually almost work.
Researchers at MIT’s Wireless Communications and Network Sciences Group think networks of devices that communicate their positions to each other will work better than all of the devices transmitting to a single receiver. The latter is how GPS works, and if you’ve used it, you know it isn’t always very precise. In the lab, MIT’s robots can spot a wireless transmitter within a millimeter.
This seems almost intuitive: the more “eyes” you have on an object, the easier it is to triangulate — the robot version of “the wisdom of crowds.” But the key conceptual breakthrough here isn’t actually the number of transmitters or their network arrangement, but what they’re transmitting. MIT News’s Larry Hardesty writes:
Among [the research group's] insights is that networks of wireless devices can improve the precision of their location estimates if they share information about their imprecision. Traditionally, a device broadcasting information about its location would simply offer up its best guess. But if, instead, it sent a probability distribution a range of possible positions and their likelihood the entire network would perform better as a whole. The problem is that sending the probability distribution requires more power and causes more interference than simply sending a guess, so it degrades the networks performance. [The] group is currently working to understand the trade-off between broadcasting full-blown distributions and broadcasting sparser information about distributions.
Much of this research is still theoretical, or has only been deployed in lab settings. But Princeton’s H. Vincent Poor is optimistic about the MIT group’s approach: I don’t see any major obstacles for transferring their basic research to practical applications. In fact, their research was motivated by the real-world need for high-accuracy location-awareness. Like precisely which cushion my remote control is underneath.
Warning: Very Dry Flash Video Of Robots Finding Things Follows
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on September 10, 2010
After Microsoft’s Surface multitouch table premiered, early implementations were limited: retail stores, hotels, restaurants, bored executives goofing off in board rooms, and university researchers modeling totally kickass Dungeons & Dragons games.
But why waste your time controlling virtual armies of NPC henchmen when you can control REAL armies of tiny robots? Or giant ones? That’s the Doctor Doom move. You don’t even need to peek at your WWDDD? bracelet from inside your hideous metal mask.
Nobody at the UMass-Lowell Robotics Lab (as far as I know) has a hideous metal mask. And they haven’t even built the robots yet — so this is still at the D&D level of virtual awesomeness/villainy, not cartoonish super-villainy.
But there’s important, amazing, yet simple tech at work in this proof-of-concept demo. The researchers use multitouch to send the robots scurrying around to execute commands, but also to pan and zoom a map of where they’re operating, create virtual subcontrollers, and display text and video data, all within the same interface.
The lab’s work focuses (among other things) on human-robot interaction, robot vision, interactive learning, and disaster response. The ease-of-use of multitouch controls is clearly valuable in all of those scenarios. As Evan Ackerman gushes at BotJunkie, “Its not even that theres anything that innovative going on here, strictly Its just that Surface is able to merge existing hardware and existing controls into a new interface, which makes all the difference.” Ackerman also notes that very little innovation in robotics research is happening at the UI level; the fact that a consumer/commercial product can be introduced on this end solves a slew of practical problems for existing robotics, not to mention potentially putting control of the technology in the hands/fingertips of many more people.
Now imagine if this research merged with the retail applications of Surface already in use. You go to a bar, touch a table, order a drink — and a robot navigates the room and brings it to you.
From UMass-Lowell Robotics Lab via the Microsoft Robotics Blog and BotJunkie.
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Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on August 26, 2010
Roboscooper: a cute little toy or an exercise in excruciating frustration? You decide. The six-wheeled robot is like a cross between Wall-E and the 1980s “favorite” Big Trak. In fact, the product page even bills it as “WowWees answer to Wall-E” (WowWee is the manufacturer). Unlike Wall-E, this ‘bot looks like it would have trouble lifting anything weighing more than an empty potato-chip packet. Which brings us to the frustration.
You can control Roboscooper by remote or leave it in “autonomous” mode, whereupon it will scoop up anything it encounters, dumping it into the tiny flatbed at back. If the Roboscooper actually had a scoop, it would probably manage this ok. But those hands look to be as slippery and grip-free as the claw in an arcade toy-grabbing machine, and as pathetic as my sleep-weakened fingers as I reach from the bed and try to lift the bourbon bottle to my lips for my first “helper” of the day. In short, the Roboscooper looks like it will scoop precisely nothing. Or at least, nothing heavier than one ounce, the weight limit for those little arms.
It does have one feature that Wall-E doesn’t. It can talk, offering such trite and annoying phrases as “Let’s get to work!” and “One step closer to a cleaner world.” Ugh.
So, it might not replace your Roomba, but then it comes at a decidedly un-Roomba price: $70, and ready for pre-order now, should there be a kid in your life that you hate enough to give them this as a gift.
Roboscooper [Robots Rule. Thanks, Robert!]
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Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on August 2, 2010
A four-legged robot nicknamed “Ranger” has set a distance record, walking 14.3 miles before it ran out of juice.
That amounts to 108.5 laps around the 1/8-mile indoor track at Cornell University’s Barton Hall — or 65,185 steps of Ranger’s spindly metal legs.
The robot’s journey took it 10 hours, 40 minutes and 48 seconds, using about a penny’s worth of electricity for each 3 miles it traversed. Although several humans accompanied it for parts of its stroll, Ranger was never touched by human hands during the journey.
Earlier versions of Ranger walked just 1km in 2006 and 9.07 km (5.6 miles) in 2008.
Ranger’s steps are coordinated by 6 onboard microprocessors, but the robot’s steering is done via remote control. The “eyes” and “ears” on the robot are not sensors, but foam padding, designed to protect the robot in case of falls.
The research team that built Ranger were aiming for distance, not speed. By comparison, Boston Dynamics’ BigDog, an eerie quadrupedal robot built for carrying 300-pound loads, set the previous robot walking distance record of 12.8 miles. But BigDog is loud and frightening, while Ranger is quiet and kids love him (at least, one kid appears to).
See below for more photos and a video showing Ranger’s long walk. And for details and more photos, see the Cornell Ranger 2010 page at Cornell.edu.
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Jason Cortell, Lipeng Yuan, Matthew Proudlove, and Fatemeh Hasaneini accompany Ranger as it rounds the curve on an indoor track.
Humans Jason Cortell (on cart) and Lipeng Yuan may be at the limits of their endurance, but Ranger walks on.
At the end of the marathon walking session, Ranger and Jason Cortell take a much-needed break. Somebody call Beer Robot!
Top photo: Ranger completes a lap around the track, accompanied by Fatemeh Hasaneini, the 6 year old daughter of one of the students who worked on the Robot.
Photos and video courtesy Cornell University.
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Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on July 27, 2010
If things carry on like this, then soon cameras won’t even need human beings to take a photograph. We’ll be relegated to a means of transport, our soft meat-sacks merely following orders from the machine and pointing it in what ever direction it tells us. The Nadia camera, a device which rates you photos for you, even has a human name, all the better not to scare us.
Instead of an LCD screen to check your pictures, the Nadia judges them for you and assigns a percentage score using the automatic rating engine Acquine. It does this even before you press the shutter, allowing you to compose and recompose, with Nadia offering an electronic opinion every time. When you judge the number to be high enough, you press the shutter and take the snap.
Nadia doesn’t even contain a proper camera. Inside the black box is a Nokia N73 cellphone which talks to a nearby Mac via Bluetooth. The Mac sends the image off to Acquine’s “aesthetics inference engine” on the web and gets back a score, which it then displays on screen. Somewhat ironically, submitting the photo of the Nadia to Acquine gives a score of just 32.5%, while a screenshot of this article in draft scores a wondrous 45.5%.
The project, by Andrew Kupresanin, is clearly just an experiment but as we rely more and more on our cameras to automate the photography process, it’s not hard to see almost completely autonomous cameras in the near future.
Nadia [Andrew Kupresanin via Oh Gizmo]
Acquine [Acquine]
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Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on July 26, 2010
Imagine a giant, deadly robot hummingbird. Now imagine it not with wings, but with four buzzing rotor-blades that work in concert to keep it as steady as a real hummingbird while sipping nectar from flowers. Now, finally, imagine that instead of sipping flowers, the robot beast teams up with other robots to cause the death of the human race (or just to lift some wood).
The video shows a team of these terrifying beasts working together to pick up objects. The quadrocopters are equipped with grabbing hands to lift, carry and drop loads. Because their movements are controlled by computers and sensors, they are capable of incredibly accurate movements and now, in a network, they can haul objects together.
Quadrocopters are basic beasts and therefore cheaper and easier to make than single-rotor machines. Because they can tip themselves up to provide forward propulsion, the rotors themselves don’t need to do anything but spin, keeping them simple.
But forget about the lifting: it’s nothing more than a fancy coin-op grabber-hook fairground trick. The real menace is that these things now move in coordinated swarms, and will soon, no doubt, be able to hunt and destroy weak, fleshy humans just like an eagle toys with a mouse before swooping down mercilessly. Be afraid.
Cooperative Grasping and Transport using Quadrotors [TheDmel/YouTube via Engadget]
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Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on July 13, 2010
