A Roomba for Cheapskates

Another cool bot forwarded to me by Steven Hodson (he’s been on a roll sending me stuff lately), is a much smaller version of the Roomba for those with limited budgets and small areas to clean called the Mini Robo Vacuum.

It runs about $20, it’s powered by only a couple AA batteries, and he’ll pick up “pencil shavings, breadcrumbs or other debris.”

My wife thinks it’s pretty cool, so it’s probably going to end up being a new addition to the family soon. Hopefully I’ll have some video and a short review so you’ll know if it’s worth a couple tenspots.

Veronica Belmont Looks at the Spykee

If you recall, just before Christmas I was drooling over the Spykee robot.  Unfortunately Santa didn’t bring me a telepresence bot for Christmas, but that hasn’t stopped my obsession.

I was poking around online today, and James Lewin has a clip of Veronica Belmont from CES getting a quick run-down of the current Spykee lineup.

Ghost in the Shell: SAC Tachikomas Become Reality

One of my absolute most favorite anime series of all time is Ghost in the Shell. Aside from the groundbreaking first movie, the slightly disappointing sequel and the outstanding series Stand Alone Complex, there are very few other entertaining programs that contain the depth of analysis combined with spectacular art and story.

One of the characters from the series is the Tachikoma, which essentially is a set of sentient hive mind controlled armored tanks. They are one of the more “cuddly” characters on the show, since their intelligence and persona are evolving from an innocent starting point, constantly questioning it’s own existence.

Apparently, according to Impress, the Japanese are actually on the job trying to get a real one of these knocked out. It’s a “personal edition,” and fully contains the driver, with the outside view projected inside the one-person cockpit.

It’s a bit of a far cry from the fully-autonomous battle tank controlled by a AI hosted on a server on a satellite, but it’s one heck of a start.

I’m definitely interested in hearing more about this one, and so far, it’s just this one 10 second video and a bit of rough translation making it’s rounds around the blogosphere. 

Anyone heard any more on this? So far, I haven’t even found out the company or research group behind it.

Name the Next Mars Rover [Essay Contest]

There’s no denying that the Mars rover was a great success in both raising awareness of interplanetary travel as in scientific numbers. The way NASA promoted the mission via social media avenues like Twitter and displayed their flawless engineering and execution has raised the interest levels in the Mars program quite a bit.

According to a recent post at robots.net, NASA is already working on the next rover, and is going to further cash in on the public’s interest by engaging students in an essay contest, with the reward for winning being the privilege of naming the next rover.

K-12 students can write a short essay suggesting a name, and may even win a trip to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to meet the engineers who built it. The winner will also have the chance to sign his or her name on the rover prior to its launch.

Have a kid interested in traveling to Mars (at least in name only)? You can find the details at the JPL website.

Trossen Robotics is Planning Something Nefarious [Ahh Jou Sarah Connah]

I can definitely relate to the need for boasting whenever you have a whole bunch of new kit to show off to all your other geeky friends, particularly when they’re the parts for a new robot you’re building.

[spoiler alert: I’ll probably be doing that soon]

One of the sites I follow pretty regularly for my robotics news is the company blog for Trossen Robotics. They’re a shop that sells robot kits, parts and a few bots that are put together.

Today, though, on their blog they’re a little proud and a little worried about an upcoming project, the parts for which are pictured above:

Luckily, Sarah Conner hasn’t showed up yet … [b]ut we’re preparing for when she shows up to blow us away, because this might very well be the start of Skynet.

Well, at least nobody can accuse us of under-engineering. Yup, that’s a pyramid of RX-64s. This is a teaser photo of a new project brewing in the Trossen Robotics Lab for the upcoming Mech Warfarecompetition. A fully custom aluminum frame and bracket system is being machined courtesy of Big Blue Saw, our sponsor on the project. Did we mention we’re giving it weapons? /snicker

Good stuff.

Do. Want.

Chobu 01: 1950’s Era Parallel Time Transportation Unit

You’ve seen the pictures of this somewhat bizarre and interesting looking bot, but you’ve probably not heard the backstory yet. I’ve seen the images on every gadget blog there is, but Evan Ackerman at BotJunkie has translated enough of the original Japanese to make sense of the story:

Imagine if you will a world where human beings drive giant mechas around to get from place to place. Imagine also that the humans drive these giant mechas from seats mounted in a place that, if the bots were humans, you wouldn’t be allowed to straddle in public. The Chobu 01 was created by Japanese 3D artist Kazushi Kobayashi, and is from “a parallel 50s where the robots are the most popular transport system.” Pardon me, can you point me in the direction of this parallel universe of which you speak?

There are only 200 of these 1/12 scale models, and if you want one, they cost $315 and you’ll have to assemble it yourself. Lots more possibly naughty pics of Japanese schoolgirl types riding piloting the Chobu can be found over at Hobbymedia.it.

The models in the images are of impeccable quality, and without reading the Japanese (and without sufficient English posts to divine if it was a bot or a model), I couldn’t even determine the scale..

It’s a cool concept bot, and you gotta know I’d love to ride one of these to work, if I could.

CES 2009 Robotics Round-Up

Rather than restate what is an excellent roundup of the 2009 CES robot items, I’ll point you to Andrew’s excellent writeup at Trossen Robotics.

Robots and Human Expression

I’ve actually been looking at telepresence robots, in anticipation of the fact that I might actually invest in one.  More on that later, but a couple of bots I saw profiled today has turned my attention to the expressiveness of robots, in human terms.

I was watching the BBC’s Where’s My Robot? the other day on the Science Channel (a great channel to tune into if your cable provider has it). Remember that Japanese professor some time back created that robotic doppelganger? In watching the robot in action on the show, it was very clear that there still is a great deal of work to be done in making humanoid robots that look like humans and aren’t distractingly slightly less than perfect.

That’s why these clearly not human robots are very interesting and fun to watch in action.

The first one is the TOFU, which is squishy and very reminiscent of the type of stuff my kids watch on Nick and Noggin. It looks a little like a Furby in the still pictures, but watching it make expressions in the video really sells it.

The second bot is an inevitably prohibitively expensive yet still awesome bot focused on emotional expression named Nexi (pronounced Nix-ee).

From watching both, it’s very clear that these robots do a much better job than any of the bots you see from the Where is My Robot? show impersonating a human, in spirit at the very least.

Breaking the Fourth Wall of Robotics

I’m mainly posting this here because I’m tired of my friend Rich stealing all the rare and cool phrases from Google and monopolizing them.

At some point, I’ll write a very scholarly sounding paper under this title.

Until then.. enjoy this. :-)

Are We Doomed with Inevitable Utopia?

People like me are often accused of being terminally “glass half-full” because we’ve made peace with the fact we’ll be living under robot overlords by the end of our lifetime. I’ve made no secret of the fact I’m a huge fan of Ray Kurzweil and put a lot of stock in his predictions of the inevitable fusion of the race of machines and humans.

Michael Anissimov at The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies has put out a piece entitled “Inevitable Positive Outcome with AI?” that talks about how people like me trivialize the idea that “benevolence or moral common sense” is a foregone conclusion when it comes to our new robot overlords.

If you read anything by Kurzweil, or most of his supporters like me, I think you’ll find that the potential for catastrophic disaster is acknowledged every step of the way, though.

I think that the probability is that we’ll figure out how to make it all work without creating a technologically induced second dark age, just based on our past performance throughout history… and by it’s very nature, predicting the nature of the future assumes that there will actually be a future to predict.  I think that any prediction of existence in 30, 50, or 100 years is sort of preceded by the obvious proviso “if we haven’t completely blown ourselves up by then …”

As an interesting sidenote, SlashDot had a pretty interesting look at how Kurzweil’s predictions look ten years in last week:

marciot writes "It's interesting to look back at Ray Kurzweil's predictions for 2009 from a decade ago. He was dead on in predicting the ubiquity of portable computers, wireless, the emergence of digital objects, and the rise of privacy concerns. He was a little optimistic in certain areas, predicting the demise of rotating storage and the ubiquity of digital paper a bit earlier than it appears it will actually happen. On the topic of human-computer speech interfaces, though, he seems to be way off." And of course Kurzweil missed 9/11 and the fallout from that. His predictions might have been nearer the mark absent the war on terror.

I’ll hopefully have more on that later.

iRobot’s Brand Spankin’ New YouTube Channel

iRobot, the maker of the Roomba and the Scooba, have launched a YouTube channel for those of us who just can get enough footage of robots in action. Aside from the generic “here’s my vacuum robot doing something cool,” it also acts as a forum for iRobot product users to interact with the engineers.

Of course, the channel also serves as a place for funny videos of your kids doing things with your iRobot as well.