Robot Central

Ever Seen a Packbot Fly? Check this out!

Ray Renteria — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 04:39:23 +0000

Okay, so the video isn’t exactly “fresh” but the real news is that iRobot recently kicked off a video channel on YouTube called iRobot iTube which I just read about on the ieee Spectrum site.

It’s Official: Japan’s Got a lot of Robots

Ray Renteria — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 04:16:24 +0000

Using data from the International Federation of Robotics and the International Labour Organization, the guys at ieee Spectrum Online put together a few visualizations that show what most suspect: Japan’s got more industrial robots than anybody–10 times the world average and more than 3 times that of the US.

Japan has a robot density almost 10 times the world average.

Robot Birds You Can Shoot Down Again and Again

Ray Renteria — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 12:30:37 +0000

WowWee’s been accelerating its pace of product releases since the release of ith the Rovio with a new projector technology, a new upcoming RoboSapien called “JoeBot” (which has some mixed reviews), and my favorite, a robot bird you can shoot down again and again with an accompanying laser gun.

Have you Seen This Robot?

Ray Renteria — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:26:54 +0000

A robot was stolen from a Portland State University professor’s car earlier this week and he wants it back–no questions asked. The $5,000 robot was donated to the university by Parallax Incorporated. Poor little guy.

Breakthrough: Tiny Fingers that Pinch

Ray Renteria — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 01:32:53 +0000

The biggest challenge nanotechnology is the mass-production of nano stuff. One-offs can be made but mass production is required to produce enough to make the technology practical or cheap. In a recent breakthrough, Peter Bøggild and his colleagues from the Technical University of Denmark have created a gripper that could be used in nanoassembly. Previously, such grippers were too weak to be useful.

Formidable Consumer Robot Platform Gets Ready to Take the Stage

Ray Renteria — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 06:45:58 +0000

The South Korean company Roboware has a monumental hit on their hands with their robot E3–for Emotional, Entertaining, and Eductional. The combination of a good technology architecture and a sound business model is what will make this robot a winner among personal and field consumer robots.

In an interview on Engineering TV, Roboware CEO Mike Kim recognizes the value of content as well as mobility capabilities. “Most companies focus on the movement of thier robots,” explains Kim. “Roboware will focus on both movement and content for E3.” The company’s strategy to is make the platform open source and allow application developers to use common technologies such as C# or Flash to control the robot.

The robot’s architecture is very conducive to application-level development. There is a low-level “RAPI” (Robot API) for scientists and researchers and a high-level RAPI for application developers. Researchers have access to an entire suite of technologies; a camera, microphones, sonar, touch sensors, 17 body joints, omni-directional platform, and many more goodies.

Application developers don’t have to worry about any of that stuff because they can use the high-level RAPI to interact with the user via a touch screen, microphone, and a motion tool provided by Roboware.

Roboware Platform Architecture

Among the most powerful technologies on board is the wifi connection to the internet. It opens the door for the now quasi-cliche telepresence applications as well as downloadable behaviors, software updates, or simply content acquisition. “Would you like to buy Dog Feeding Version 2.3?”

Kim explained that the robot would be available by Q2 for “under $3,000 USD.” That’s an obvious sticking point to mass-adoption of the platform but I’m very optimistic that these guys have got their stuff together enough to evolve the technology down to something more affordable. E3 reminds me a little of a robot we wrote about in ‘07 named SPC-101C by Speecys. The robot costs about the same as E3 and we touted its programmability and WiFi capabilities.

Speecys WiFi robot platform SPC-101C.

SPC-101C is in the same class as E3 in both price and programmability but Speecys as a company is ahead of the pricing curve. According my friend Norri Kageki at GetRobo, Speecys is now making smaller version of SPC-101C called NNR-1 which will start selling around the same time as E3 but cost between $570 - $760 USD.

Nevertheless, against SPC-101C, E3 is clearly the dominant robot with regards to features, mobility, and system completeness. Additionally, E3’s omni-directional platform has mobility, stability, and practicality over bi-pedal humanoid robots. An annoying factor in bi-pedal personal robots is how slow they are in moving around. E3 appears very zippy and doesn’t have any trouble keeping up.

The NNR-1 will bring Speecys into the same pricing ballpark as some other robot platforms we’ve covered.

Spykee is still being positioned as a toy and although the manual says that its API is open source, nobody can seem to find it. In spite of such obstacles there are those who are brave enough to crack something open to make it work. Check out the iPhone-controlled Spykee project at Mr. Blog.

The window is slowly closing for Mecanno's sleeper Spykee.

Mecanno has an opportunity with Spykee that is slowly fading. They were the first on the market with their “toy” but quickly thereafter iRobot came out with their telepresence robot ConnectR and WowWee came out with Rovio. All three fall into a comparable class but Spykee appears least mature. With the coming Speecys ‘bot, the market is getting more crowded.

There is something that all these personal robot companies lack–except for Roboware. It is the vision that the robot is a platform that should be open and easy to build and sell content for. This vision is what lifts Roboware above the others and is what compels me to believe that they will be the market leaders in the personal robotics space.

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See the interview with Roboware CEO Mike Kim via Engineering TV:

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Sources:

Ingenious Device lets Robots See Over Walls

Ray Renteria — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 17:07:09 +0000

Imagine a little box just 4 inches tall squirting out a rigid mast 8 feet straight up! A configuration is available that will allow a larger unit that can lift 200lbs 20 feet. The unit is from GeoSystems Inc and is called a Situational Awareness Mast (SAM). Travis Deyle at Hizook brings several sources together to show us more about the device.

Watch out Bad Guys, Here Come the Bots

Ray Renteria — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:59:11 +0000

The assurance of mutual destruction was a profoundly effective peace keeper between the USA and the USSR. There is no equivalent threat today against the scattered terrorists deliberately embedded within innocent society across so many countries–a tactic that only works against their civilized enemies such as the USA. Our effort to create and deploy robotic technology on the battlefield is the result of our value for human life and our desire to surgically weed out our enemies.

John Pike wrote a powerful article in the Washington Post in which he describes the trend well. Here’s an excerpt:

Within a decade, the Army will field armed robots with intellects that possess, as H.G. Wells put it, “minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic.”

No truer words were ever spake. With the coming Singularity riding on the tsunami of Moore’s Law, this suggestion is entirely plausible. With the coming generation of autonomous robots such as Northrop Grumman’s X-47B fighter, a foundation is being laid for robots to make more and more decisions on their own in the field.

Source:

Coming to the Battlefield: Stone Cold Robot Killers

Formal Study and Military Anecdotes Observe Human-Robot Attachment

Robot’s Portfolio Performs Worse than Human’s

Ray Renteria — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 17:10:25 +0000

It seems that a robotic stock trader isn’t as good as a knowledgeable human trader. James Daw writes about how his robot’s portfolio lost 40% of its value while investors in the stocks tracked by the S&P/TSX composite of the Toronto Stock Exchange “only” lost 33%. Check out his article here.

FSR Conference: Call For Papers

Ray Renteria — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 05:05:55 +0000

The 7th Conference on Field and Service Robotics (FSR) will be held at MIT this year between July 14 - 16. The conference is soliciting papers to be submitted on a number of topics. Notably absent is the topic of ethics. I was a little surprised considering the nature of field and service robots–working closely with humans–and the recent buzz from the academic community on the subject.