Automaton

Spectrum associate editor Josh Romero on his favorite robots from the Faire:

If there's one thing you can count on at Maker Faire, it's the presence of robots. They're everywhere in all shapes and sizes. Sure, it was impossible to miss the giant electric giraffe, but size isn't everything.

Take Herbie the Mousebot (a robot kit from Solarbotics) - if you judged just by the number of delighted smiles and giggles coming from children's faces, this had to be the winner. The little robot has a light sensor that it uses to follow around a beam of light from a flashlight. It also has whisker and tail sensors that make it turn around when it hits your foot or starts to go under the couch. Brilliant! It's smart, cute, and simple. Made solely of discrete components, it looked fun both to build and to play with:

Continue reading "Robot Highlights from Maker Faire" »

I recently had a chance to play with the LEGO Mindstorms NXT kit. I mentioned the Mindstorms in a previous post about robot kits, but this is the first time I've had free reign with one -- and the first time I've used one of the NXTs. Keep reading for the review.

Continue reading "Review: LEGO Mindstorms NXT" »

Automaton reader Ingo Lütkebohle is a PhD student at Bielefeld University in Germany studying how roboticists develop their software. His team has posted a survey for software developers to complete. An initial pilot study has already been done and those results will be presented at this year's IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation. This survey is part of the larger study, so they need a broader audience to respond to it.

You can take the survey here.

Apparently the "uncanny valley" concept relevant to so many robots is cool enough to have made it into a recent episode of 30Rock.

Thanks, Drew!

If you missed it Friday, NPR's Science Friday last week had a show called "Building a More Sociable Robot." Guests include Helen Greiner (chair and co-founder of iRobot), Peter McOwen (a computer science professor from Queen Mary, University of London), Dean Kamen (inventor of the iBot, Segway, and founder of FIRST), and Grant Cox (member of FIRST champion team The Thunder Chickens). Greiner and McOwen talk about what average people expect out of robots in terms of interaction, the relationship between interactive technology, price, and consumer demand, and what the state of technology is to get robots interacting with the environment and with us in a "natural" way. Kamen and Cox, meanwhile, talk about the FIRST program, how it's encouraging people to follow science, engineering, and technology as careers, and why robotics is so effective in doing this. (They also give a nod to former President Bush's thought that FIRST is like "the WWF, but for smart people," which he observed while giving a speech at FIRST's closing ceremonies two weeks ago)

You can download the podcast here.

First the robot snow shoveler. Then the robot urinal cleaner. Robots are getting better at doing our jobs, and I knew it was only a matter of time before I too became obsolete.

And now that day has come.

Senior design students at Texas A&M have designed a robot that can play the popular video game Guitar Hero (version 3, to be specific), by reading the pixel pattern on the screen as the notes stream and using actuators to hit the fret and strum buttons on the guitar controller appropriately. As a seasoned Guitar Hero myself I can see some room for improvement in efficiency (namely, it'd be great if it could hold down the fret buttons for repeated notes), but what can I say? I can't get 97% accuracy on expert on that song.

There's another video for a different song here.

From TechEBlog via Fark

Tonight at 8 PM is the second monthly installment of Boston Robotics Drinks at the Enormous Room in Central Square. Last month a small group of engineers from a few companies suggested an informal get-together for the robotics professionals in the area, and through chains of email about twenty-five or thirty people showed up throughout the night from several different companies in the area. It was a great opportunity to get to know the folks in industry and academia from the area and find out what everyone is working on. It's modeled off of the internationally successful Green Drinks, a similar monthly networking event for the sustainable/green engineering community.

So -- in the Boston area? Come on by tonight!

Not in Boston? Start your own and let us know!

If you're near San Jose, Calif., you might want to check the "Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon" exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art.

The exhibit features sculptures, paintings, photographs, multimedia installations, and other creations by more than 20 artists, who respond to the evolution of robotics technology "with optimism, pessimism, and humor, presenting work that ultimately explores our ambivalent attitudes towards robots."

In the video below, JoAnne Northrup, a senior curator at the museum, gives an overview of the project:

Here are some photos and videos. The exhibit runs through 19 October.

Photo: Ugobe

Spectrum senior editor Tekla S. Perry and her kids—ages 9, 12, and 16—adopted a ­dinosaur for two weeks. We're talking about Pleo, the AI-powered toy dino. The kids, who quickly decided that Pleo was a girl, liked its realistic movements and sounds. But Perry thinks the robot needs better batteries—and a behavior software update. The Perry family is keeping the cats.

The brainchild of Ugobe, a robotics ­company in Emeryville, Calif., Pleo looks and acts the way you’d expect a baby Camarasaurus to, thanks to ­sophisticated ­robotics. She has two 32-bit and four 8‑bit ­microprocessors, ­fourteen motors, a ­camera, two ­microphones, eight ­sensors under her ­rubberized skin, a tilt ­sensor, an infrared mouth sensor, fourteen force-­feedback sensors, and four switches in her feet.

First, the good: the ­movement and sounds are indeed amazing. My ­daughter handed Pleo to a friend to cuddle, and Pleo nestled in and wrapped her tail securely around the friend’s arm, completely freaking her out. Our cats considered Pleo real and scary—they ran for cover whenever we tried to get them to meet her.

[...]

When I first saw Pleo two years ago, at a conference for emerging technologies, I was impressed by Ugobe’s claim that the dinosaur would develop a personality based on how it was treated. But now the company says it will provide most of that malleability only later, via free software updates.

Read the entire review, and for a look under the skin of Pleo, here's a video showing how its sensors work.

A strange-looking fly has been seen buzzing around the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. And we have the video.

It's the robotic fly built by Robert Wood and his colleagues at Harvard. Click here or on the image below to go to the video player:

Want to learn more? In "Fly, Robot Fly," Robert Wood describes how he built his artificial fly. This other article, "Fly Like a Fly" is about how real flies ... fly.