Archive for November, 2008

Ten billion Euros! That’s 12.9 billion dollars! It’s also how much the European Space Agency and Innovation Minister Lord Drayson have decided to spend on a new space budget. Some of the money is going toward things like funding Galileo, the European GPS service, and a feasibility study for a returnable spacecraft. But the most intriguing plan to emerge from the Agency’s two day conference is the agreement to build a research center at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire.
One of the center’s main objectives will be to develop space robots. ExoMars is such a bot–it will be designed to search for life on mars. Space robots and discovering aliens all in the same project? Simply out of this world.

[BBC] VIA [The Register]

Hit the link to check out the new T4 Motion poster. Yes, a poster that moves. It won’t tell you anything new about the movie, but it’s still pretty sweet.

[Gizmodo]

Two students from Louisiana State University’s department of computer science know a couple fundamental facts about Americans: 1. We’re lazy, and 2. We don’t got a lotta dough right now to be throwing away on a different robot for each household job that needs to be done. To that end they’ve created a single robot that can be customized to perform a number of household duties. While your Roombas and Scoobas chug away with their specialized functions, LSU’s AgBot is able to do a range of things. Need a bot to mow the lawn? AgBot will raze those unruly blades. Need the same bot to keep your house under surveillance? Some minor tweaks and you’ve got a robot that has night vision, motion detection, an alarm, and the ability to email pictures of any home intruders.
S.S. Iyengar, chair of the computer science department, said, “What is most impressive about this robot is that it is multi-functional and no one else is currently designing multi-functional robots.” Well it’s a good thing somebody’s looking out for my desire to sleep 18 hours a day while a robot whirs about the house keeping things in order. “The ultimate goal for the AgBot is to be completely customizable. With minor adjustments, the robot can support five or six different applications including picking up mail, say the students.” What will the future bring? Ten applications? Twenty? It’s only a matter of time before Rosie is cooking me breakfast, I just hope the housekeeping robots of tomorrow don’t use the same brush for cleaning the silverware that they use to clean the bathroom…or do I?

[Wired]

Robot fun with cans.

Canstruction is an international charity competition that opened last Thursday at the Winter Garden and Courtyard Gallery of the World Financial Center, featuring giant structures built entirely out of cans of food. Top architectural and engineering firms in over 100 cities across North America participate in Canstruction, collecting millions of pounds of food for local food banks — the New York City show features local architectural and engineering talent. At the close of the competition, all of the food from the show will be donated to City Harvest.

[Neatorama]

Ah Wakamaru. Is there anything you can’t do? Now the little bot has set his sights on an acting career. The robot now has an active part in theater. At the Osaka University in Japan, Wakamaru is officially becoming a thespian. In the play Hataraku Watashi, Wakamaru is winning hearts and dressing the part as part of the first ever human robot play.

[Cnet]

Who doesn’t love Futurama? Now you can celebrate the holidays with Santa Bender and Robot Santa, from the classic Futurama Christmas episode, A Tale of Two Santas. You get 6-inch tall bendy desktop versions of Santa Bender and Robot Santa to pose any perverted way you want. The set will run you $54.99.

[Amazon] VIA [Technabob]

We’ve seen quite a few robots that can play music. Two percussion-playing bots from the Robotic Musicianship Group at Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology are just further proof of robots cheapening our humanity. But I suppose they also evince human intellectual achievement by being engineering works of art (oh snap).
Not only can the drum/marimba playing bots make music, they can also play along with live musicians, thereby producing the effect of improvisation. The process used by the robots to play music is similar to the way Deep Blue plays chess–a series of options is analyzed to see which best fits the kind of music being played. The algorithms determining what to play are comparable to those used to model genetic evolution in biology.
Gil Weinberg, director of the program, explains:

The processing allows [the robots] to analyze and improvise. In one of the applications, we use a genetic algorithm… You have a population of something, and then you do mutations to all of these little things–in my case it’s musical motifs–mutations and cross-breeding between the musical genes, in our case, and then you have a new population that better fits to the environment.

Very fast, it runs [about] 50 generations of mutations that are cross-bred between the genes and tests whether this is similar to a motif that the saxophone player played, for example. And it plays something back that is a combination of musical genes of what the saxophone player played, what the piano player played–something that is unique that only can be the product of genetic algorithm.

The drumming robot is Haile and has been around for a couple years. The marimbot is called Shimon and was introduced in early November. If things continue the way they’ve been headed–an barring a human vs. robot war, they will–we can expect to see a fully robotic Partridge Family by 2012.
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It was just a matter of time and we all knew it would happen eventually. Wall-E has now become a learning laptop. It will teach your dumb kids all kinds of things, but mostly it will teach them that daddy is a cheap bastard. What they really want for Christmas is a high end gaming rig for a 5 year old.

[vtechkids]

Make no mistake, this robot is not sophisticated. At all. The Co-Robot is cheap because of that fact. It uses just a single motor and a wobbly gear-drive system. No smooth moves here. He spastically moves around and when he falls, which is often, he can pick himself up. Check out the video for a good laugh. He’s $29.95 and should probably come with a helmet and a drool bucket.
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Chief Cook is a learn-by-doing robot that cooks. Apparently he needed to get out of the kitchen, because he’s back. This time playing Pong with a friend. His attitude sucks as he repeatedly says “You are a loser.” I mean, that’s just mean! Video below.
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