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February 07 2012
Black Box Bot Soaks Up Heat, Then Follows You Around and Keeps You Warm
When it gets cold out, staying warm usually means either cranking up the heat—and, thus, the heating bill—or piling on the sweaters and straying from the radiator’s immediate vicinity only when absolutely necessary. But your days of dashing between warm spots, or paying extra for the privilege of not, may soon be at an end. A new robot can keep you warm by saving up the heat you’ve already got until you need it.
HAGENT, as the robot is called, isn’t much to look at; it’s just a plain black cube with a couple barely visible wheels peeking out the bottom. But when HAGENT senses warmth—from an oven, a radiator, or any other heat source—it rolls over and soaks up the heat with its internal phase change material, stuff that turns liquid and stores energy when it’s heated up. Once the bot has its thermal fill, it makes its way to wherever you are and emits the stored heat. Its insides re-solidify in the process, so once it’s made your toes suitably toasty, it’s ready to do the whole thing again. In other words, it’s the automated answer to a housecat that soaks up sunlight, then curls up on your ...
February 03 2012
“Here, Listen to My Underpants”: The Robot Psychics of India
As technology marches ever onward, robots have taken on more and more of life’s necessary jobs: heavy lifting, precise mechanical manipulations, and, of course, predicting the future.
Peppering the fairs and festivals of India, striking in their boldly colored if battered armor, are a fleet of robots that are part fortune cookie, part street-corner psychic. These bots wait in perpetual readiness to dispense their pre-programmed wisdom, and for only 5 rupees or so, the robot’s handler will allow you to plug a pair of headphones into its metallic underpants and listen as it tells your fortune.
The fortune-telling robots come in a range of shapes and sizes to best suit your fortune-telling needs (there is, in fact, a Flickr pool devoted to the various specimens). One of our favorite designs is the mod/retro combination of a smattering of LED lights and an analog clock, for those mortals bogged down in the worldly concerns of time (below).
The robots’ wisdom, apparently, comes on prerecorded tapes, audio fortune cookies that foresee the future in Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, and Telgu. Not having heard the tapes ourselves—and not having any languages in common with the robots—we ...
August 17 2011
The Fastest Human-Like Robot Has Creepy Knees and a 9-Minute Mile
MABEL here is a fast lady. At 6.8 miles per hour, she’s the quickest human-like runner in the robot world. She is also the owner of some of the freakiest knees, right up there with Dr. Seuss’s ominous pale green pants and the spider-like prancings of BigDog, the defense robot you hope you never meet coming through the woods at night.
Running robots could transport baggage and participate in rescue operations where rugged terrain makes wheeled vehicles useless, which is why DARPA funds projects like the quadruped BigDog, which is already fairly well developed and has a top speed of about 5 mph. MABEL is a biped bot, which means she’s probably less stable than a quadruped, but more able to potentially stand in for humans in activities like climbing stairs (and certainly a more useful instance of human biomimicry than some robots we could name). Watching her strut her stuff around a little indoor track in the video above, you’ll notice the springing motion of her legs, which is very similar to a human running–both spend about 40% of their time in the air, according to her builders, a team of roboticists at University of ...
July 14 2011
Mouth Robot Croaks a Nursery Rhyme, Provokes Nightmares
Several years ago, researchers in (you guessed it) Japan put together a reasonable facsimile of the human vocal apparatus in an attempt to help hearing-impairing people learn to better modulate their voices. The details of how this process works can be perused here, but we’d just like to treat you to a trailer of this creepy little puppy in action, moaning the nursery rhyme “Kagome, Kagome,” before some major film studio options it for a B-grade horror flick. Titles, anyone?
(via PopSci)
July 01 2011
Coming to a Dental School Near You: The Dental Robot With the Sex-Doll Face
Good news dental students: soon you will no longer have to approach your first victim patient with shaky, unsure hands. Researchers at Showa University in Japan have unveiled a new dental dummy, a realistic robot for dental students to practice on before taking the drill to real, human mouths.
I use the term “dummy” here loosely. Showa Tanako 2, as the researchers call her, has a wide range of human-like features. She can engage in simple conversations, flinch, roll her eyes, cough, and close her mouth like a real patient suffering from jaw fatigue. Oh, and she has a gag reflex.
So how did a group of dental researchers build such a realistic—albeit slightly scary—looking robot? Naturally, they sought help from Japanese sex doll maker, Orient Industry, who helped fashion the robot’s skin, tongue, and mouth. If the doll’s face didn’t look realistic, it wouldn’t “have the same effect on users psychologically,” Showa University professor Koutaro Maki said in the video released by DigInfo. “How doctors and students actually feel in the presence of a patient is a really big factor.”
On top of her movements, speech, and look, Showa Tanako 2 has one final similarity to human patients: she judges. ...
May 04 2011
Throwable Robot Can Climb Aboard Ships, Spy on Pirates
ReconRobotics has unveiled a reconaissance microbot that can provide anti-piracy forces with valuable surveillance information. Yep, that’s right: There are now tiny robots that board pirate ships.
Pirate-fighting forces often have to board a ship with incomplete information, not knowing exactly what’s going on below decks, how many pirates are on board, or how the ship’s crew is faring—putting them at a dangerous disadvantage. To help these forces take stock of the situation before going in, ReconRobotics is making a seafaring version of its ReconScout Throwbot, a one-pound remote-controlled robot that can be tossed into a building and zip around taking video surveillance, sending the feed back to its controller. This new bot has magnetic wheels that let it drive straight up a vertical metal wall—meaning that if anti-piracy forces toss the robot onto a ship’s hull, it can climb on board and send back valuable video recon.
The Throwbot can take useful video even in it’s pitch black below decks, using infrared illuminators. ReconRobotics is also developing a marsupial robot deployment system, which is exactly what it sounds like: a big robot that carries around the recon robots, then shoots them out ...
April 25 2011
Me First! Flesh-Harvesting, Hair-Transplanting Robot Gets FDA Approval
Some bald men are willing to go to great lengths to grow hair, including paying a robot to punch holes through their scalp skin. Recently approved by the FDA, a new robot takes out tiny pieces of your flesh in order to harvest hair follicles that can then be manually implanted into your bald spots.
Dubbed the ARTAS System, this automated robot images your head to single out a follicular unit, and then uses its robotic arm to make 1 mm-diameter “dermal punches” into your scalp. It continues extracting hair follicles from parts of your head that have sufficient amounts of hair (a process known as follicular unit extraction, or FUE), and these bits of flesh and hair are then stored until a doctor implants them into your bald and thinning areas. Within a few months, these newly-planted hairs start growing just like your other ones.
Having a robot punch out small pieces of your flesh certainly beats the alternative: strip harvesting. This technique does exactly what its name implies: It harvests skin-strips from your scalp. Then your doctor carefully extracts the follicular units from the strip, and implants then ...
April 01 2011
This is Not a Game: Fukushima Robots Operated by Xbox 360 Controllers
When it comes to redemption stories, gaming consoles aren’t usually the first items to come to mind (or even on the list). But the Xbox 360 has made a surprising comeback in Japan after last month’s tsunami swept over 5,000 consoles out to sea: One company has deployed Xbox’s hand-held controllers to help maneuver robots at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
Meet the Talon robots, which were sent to Japan by a Virginia-based tech company called QinetiQ North America. With Xbox pad in hand, Fukushima workers can now remotely drive these robust bots around the plant, where it would be far too dangerous for human workers to go. Without putting themselves in danger, operators can peer into the darkest parts of the plant using Talon’s night-vision cameras. They can also gauge the temperature and air quality around the plant, as well as identify over 7,500 hazardous substances using the robots’ chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive (CBRNE) detection kits (as long as they’re within the robot’s over-3,000-foot operating range).
It may seem odd to use Xbox 360 pads for such important ...
March 28 2011
Time (Eats) Flies: Clock Powers Itself by Catching & Eating Bugs
Cat clocks. Cuckoo clocks. Grandfather clocks. Often times, clocks are named after the objects, animals, or people they resemble. Not so the fly clock: This mechanical wonder is billed as the first-ever carnivorous clock, sucking energy from decomposed fly carcasses (giving new meaning to the phrase “eating up time”).
The mechanics are quite elegant: Unsuspecting flies get stuck on the clock’s flypaper, which is rigged as a corpse-carrying conveyor belt. A blade on the clock scrapes the catch into a microbial fuel cell. As it digests the fly, the fuel cell extracts electrons to power the LCD screen. As flypaper keeps trapping and the wheels keep turning, you have yourself an Earth-friendly, critter-ridding timepiece the likes the world has never seen.
UK engineers got the idea of a carnivorous clock from Chris Melhuish at the Bristol Robotics Lab, whose team previously developed another fly-powered robot, according to MSNBC. But the idea of carnivorous robots goes back at least a decade, to the aptly named Slugbot.
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Science Not Fiction:
March 22 2011
Finally, a Spy Robot That Does Floors…
As every covert agent knows, it’s hard to keep up with housework when you’re always lurking behind corners, evading double agents, and thinking of ever more complex ways of mixing martinis. With the new robotic spying vacuum, life just got easier.
Dubbed the Tango View, Samsung’s latest robotic vacuum model is like a mixture of one of James Bond’s gadgets and the Jetsons’ Rosie the robot: In vacuum mode, it automatically maneuvers around your home, making your floors (nearly) spotless just like a Roomba; in surveillance mode, you can guide the robot via remote control and have it live-stream video to your smartphones, laptops, and other gadgets. Thanks to its microphone and low-light camera, you can drive the robot around your house and secretly listen and watch your friends and family. (We’re not condoning this kind of paranoid behavior, by the way.)
So at the convenience of your couch, you can check on the family pet, see what your kids are up to, or just snoop around unbeknownst to anybody else (it’s “just vacuuming,” after all). From asking your spouse a question in another room to investigating things that go bump in the night, ...
March 07 2011
Most Realistic Android Yet: Have We Passed the Bottom of the Uncanny Valley?
The latest Geminoid robot is the most lifelike one yet, and yet I still something creepy about its glazed, deadbeat expression and evil (OK, I might be reading into it) side-long glance.
His name is Geminoid DK, and yes it’s a he: Henrik Scharfe of Denmark’s Aalborg University worked with Japan’s Kokoro entertainment company to create this avatar of himself. The android holds the distinction of being the first Geminoid modeled after a non-Japanese person (it’s also the first facial-haired bot of the lot).
Like DK’s Geminoid predecessors, he is controlled remotely via a motion-capture system: When Scharfe frowns, the robot frowns, and when he smiles, the robot smiles. In addition to facial expressions and lip movements, this Internet-linked robot also captures the professor’s body movements.
In the near future, Scharfe plans on testing his robotic twin on his university class before shipping it back to Denmark’s new Geminoid Lab for further tweaking.
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Discoblog: In Japan, ...
March 03 2011
Next Jobs Outsourced to Robots: Killing Snakes, Playing Basketball, Self-Replicating
To make a dent in brown snake populations, feed them poison-stuffed mice; to devastate brown snake populations, create robots to do the job for you. That’s what conservationists want to do in Guam to stop these pesky reptiles from further destroying the native bird population. The robots would have to stuff mice with 80 milligrams of acetaminophen (poisonous to snakes), glue the mice to cardboard strips, and then attach paper streamers to these monstrosities—all so that these modern day Trojan horses get lodged in the snake’s forest canopy when they’re lobbed out of airplanes (and hopefully wind up in a snake’s tummy).
But that’s not all the the mischief that robots have been up to recently:
The U.S. Navy wants to start dabbling in robots too: Semi-autonomous micro-robot swarms that could themselves manufacture their own robots. Cute, huh? In a project proposal for scientists, the Navy says it’s looking for a few good robots that can “pick and place, dispense liquids, print inks, remove material, join components” and “move cooperatively” to manufacture “novel materials and structures.” Prepare now for the robot apocalypse! (No, ...
February 24 2011
And They’re Off! World’s First Robot Marathon Gets Underway
First there was RoboCup, in which teams of robots kicked soccer balls around indoor fields. And now, as I write these words, five robots are competing in Robo Mara Full, the world’s first marathon for our plastic and metallic friends.
This video shows the competitors in a practice run:
Funded by the city government of Osaka, Japan, and organized by the robotics company Vstone, the race began on Thursday. These robots aren’t exactly speed demons–the winner is expected to finish sometime on Sunday. The race is taking place on an indoor track at Osaka’s Asia-Pacific trade center, a business complex in Osaka. Tto complete the 26.2-mile marathon, the robots will have to make it around the track 422 times.
The competition is a cross between a traditional, human-run marathon and a NASCAR race: The robots must complete the marathon without the help of humans, but the teams are allowed to switch out their robots’ batteries and to make repairs. If you think it’s not fair that the engineers get to repair their robots during the marathon, keep in mind that the time taken for these repairs counts in the racing time.
To warm up for the big race on Thursday, ...
February 17 2011
Jeopardy Champion: Of Course Watson Kicked the Humans’ Butts—It Wasn’t a Fair Fight
This post is from Discoblog contributor LeeAundra Keany, a one-time Jeopardy Champion. After blowing all her winnings (a story for another blog post), she had to go back to work as an executive communications coach. In her spare time, LeeAundra has written written articles for Discover, including “Anatomy of a Brain Fart,” “20 Things You Didn’t Know About Death,” and “Can a Drunk Person Fly the Space Shuttle?“
I haven’t watched Jeopardy! in years. Prepping a little too intensely for my 2005 appearance soured me on the show. (Who brings almanacs, Shakespeare for Dummies, and the periodic table to Burning Man?) It was only Watson that brought me back into the fold. And it was an unsettling reunion to say the least. Watson was flabbergastingly good and I knew within the first few minutes of Monday’s inaugural match that he would’ve cleaned my clock. But now, even as the mighty Brad Rutter bows in defeat and heretofore unstoppable Ken Jennings “welcomes our new computer overlords” (he actually wrote that under his answer in Final Jeopardy after the last game), I for one am urging humanity to not give ...
Japan Wants to Send a Tweeting Companion-Bot to the Space Station
It’s official: The robots are taking over the space station.
It will start with Robonaut 2, the humanoid maintenance bot that NASA is sending to the International Space Station next week. And now Japan’s space agency (JAXA) has announced plans to send its own bot to the ISS. JAXA’s humanoid robot will not only talk and Twitter, but it will also act as a space nurse, monitoring the health of the astronauts.
The researchers behind the project say the bot would have a number of attributes that would make it a valuable crew member. For example, they say, it would never have to sleep–so it could keep watch when the flesh and blood astronauts are in dreamland.
And then there are its conversational skills, which would make it a lively companion for those lonley spacefarers. “We are thinking in terms of a very human-like robot that would have facial expressions and be able to converse with the astronauts,” JAXA’s Satoshi Sano told the AP.
Finally, the bot could take up that crutial task: manning a Twitter feed. The researchers note that NASA’s bot has a Twitter feed, but ...
January 26 2011
Robot to Human: Go Ahead, Smash my Hand With a Hammer. I Can Take It.
Robots aren’t only getting smarter nowadays–they’re also getting stronger. Researchers have now created a robot hand that can withstand hammer hits and other hard blows.
Led by Markus Grebenstein, the researchers at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) created a robot hand that functions virtually as well as a human’s appendage. The dexterous hand has 19 degrees of freedom–considering that the human hand has 20 degrees of freedom, that’s pretty good. The hand’s delicate movements are controlled by 38 tendons, each linked to a separate motor on the forearm. From IEEE Spectrum:
Another key element in the DLR design is a spring mechanism connected to each tendon. These springs … give the tendons, which are made from a super strong synthetic fiber called Dyneema, more elasticity, allowing the fingers to absorb and release energy, like our own hands do. This capability is key for achieving robustness and for mimicking the kinematic, dynamic, and force properties of the human hand.
The tendons, when tensed, are what allow the hand to withstand hits. But just how strong of a hit can it endure? The ...
January 12 2011
Power Line Inspector Bots: The Newest High Wire Act
If you see a five-foot-long, 145-pound robotic stranger roaming your neighborhood in the near future, don’t be alarmed. It may just be TI, your friendly, box-shaped power line inspector, who may soon be coming to a power line near you.
Created by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), TI–short for Transmission Inspection–is designed to tightrope along power lines in search of flaws. Since power lines aren’t designed to hold heavy robots, TI technically travels along shield wires, the metal lines that hang above power lines to shield them from lightning.
As TI plods along power lines, covering a few miles each day, he’s able to independently evaluate the data his sensors gather–and if he finds a glitch in the power flow, he calls it in via radio signal. In addition to the automatic mode, TI’s computerized “Cirque du Soleil” act can also be controlled remotely.
When it comes to perceiving power line flaws, TI is as good as human. Infrared sensors monitor hot spots on wires, while lidar-equipped sensors use scattered light to tell whether power lines are too close to tree branches or other menaces. On top of all this, TI ...
December 14 2010
Video: Watch a Sprinting Robot Fall Down
In pursuit of a glorious future in which robots can outrun humans (what could possibly go wrong?), researcher Ryuma Niiyama has unveiled Athlete, a bot that’s intended to sprint.
The bipedal robot’s upper legs are modeled on the human musculoskeletal system, while the lower legs are fashioned from the spring-like blades that amputee runners use (and use so effectively that some have called the blades an unfair advantage).
Erico Guizzo of IEEE Spectrum explains:
Each leg has seven sets of artificial muscles. The sets, each with one to six pneumatic actuators, correspond to muscles in the human body — gluteus maximus, adductor, hamstring, and so forth…. The researchers are now teaching Athlete to run. They programmed the robot to activate its artificial muscles with the same timing and pattern of a person’s muscles during running.
Niiyama described his bot at the IEEE conference on humanoid robots last week, and has published a paper (pdf) on the project in the journal Industrial Robot. The challenge is to get all those artificial muscles working in sequence as the bot bounds across the landscape.
It’s a big challenge. So far, Athlete can take only three to five steps before tumbling to the ground. Still that’s pretty impressive compared to a hopping prototype from 2007 (seen in the video below), which took one great leap for robotics and promptly fell down. Humans, maybe you don’t need to run for your lives just yet.
Related Content:
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Video: Ryuma Niiyama
November 24 2010
Geckos Always Land on Their Feet—and So Does This Gecko-Bot
The gecko robot just keeps getting better. Not only can the robot climb up walls like the sticky-toed lizard, but it can automatically right itself while falling.
Geckos, like cats and buttered toast, can naturally turn themselves around in midair. Cats are able to right themselves because they are flexible and can twist their bodies around. The gecko, on the other hand, uses its large tail’s inertia to twist its body around to the correct orientation, explains Cosmic Log:
Within about a tenth of a second, the geckos flipped their tails around to induce body rotation. Then they spread out their tails as well as their feet into a “belly-down skydiving posture” position to stabilize the fall. All of the geckos that used their tails in this way landed on their feet, even in wind-tunnel tests–while none of the tailless geckos could do the same trick.
Hit the jump for a video of the gecko-bot in action.
After studying the gecko’s movements, robotics engineers at UC Berkeley were able to create a robot that could do the same tricks. They used the “stickybot” gecko robot designed by Sangbae Kim at Stanford University, which has sticky feet that allow it to climb up walls. They modified the tail so it could swing around and create inertia, successfully righting the robot as it fell.
The researchers published their findings in the journal Bioinspiration & Biomimetics. Check out the video below for high-speed footage of the gecko free-falling, and a brief demonstration of the gecko-bot in action:
But what if you buttered the back of the gecko?
Related Content:
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DISCOVER: Oh, to Climb Like a Gecko!
Image: Flickr/Joslynan Video: UC Berkeley/Ardian Jusufi et al.
October 21 2010
Robot, Build Thyself: Machine Made of Lego Builds Models Made of Lego
3D printers are beloved by geeks the world over. Enter the Lego 3D printer: it’s not only MADE of Legos, but it also PRINTS with Legos.
With only a few tweaks, this LegoBot could even take over the world print copies of itself, maker Will Gorman told Wired:
“There is a recursiveness to this whole thing,” says Gorman.
“I love the idea of self-assembly and the Star Trek replicator and I love Legos,” he says. “I wanted to bring those two worlds together.”
Gorman built this recursive masterpiece for the LegoWorld expo, happening from Oct 22th to 26th in the Netherlands. Dutch lego enthusiasts can visit the expo to see LegoBot in action, the rest of us can check out his website for detailed instructions on how to build your own.
Hit the jump for more info on his Lego-contraption and a video of it in action.
For now, the bot requires a human operator to stack bricks into the feeder system and program it with a design from MLCad (a computer-aided Lego designing program) through a PC, which determines the printout instructions. Currently the system uses only normal Lego bricks (not the Lego robotics NXT components) in the 1×2, 2×2, 3×2, 4×2, and 8×2 sizes, and can print up to 12 bricks tall. The printer itself is made out of 2,400 bricks.
Related content:
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Science Not Fiction: I Have Seen the Furniture, and It Is Robotic
Science Not Fiction: Knight Rider: 3D Printing
Bad Astronomy: Smart girls at the party
Bad Astronomy: Compasskirt
Image: Will Gorman
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