Automaton

In yet another great step towards insect-size robots Petter Muren, current world record holder for the smallest remotely controlled helicopter, today announced plans for his pocket-size "Black Hornet" helicopter. Built by newly founded Prox Dynamics, the helicopter will weigh in at less than 20 grams, and feature a video camera with wireless transmission to stereo-vision goggles. The ultimate surveillance tool, it will be ready for launch within seconds to give immediate situational awareness to police, fire fighters, military and special forces.

Like Muren's previous designs, the "Black Hornet" will rely on his patented Proxflyer rotor system, centered around a dual coaxial counter-rotating rotor. This design combines a number of advantages making it well suited for surveillance applications, including passive stability, high efficiency and a very low noise level.

Muren's past projects include a series of very small to tiny helicopters (see IEEE video), with his current record holder a mere 70 mm long, weighing less than one gram, equal to 1/5 of a sheet of paper. And Muren has big plans for the future: "Our long term goal is to establish a 2% market share in a US$ 3 billion market, currently growing over 10% per year”. With more than 2 million of his past helicopters sold he means business. The first version of the "Black Hornet" is expected 2009.

Image: Prox Dynamics 2008

Whew! I have just recovered from helping out at the Boston FIRST Regional that took place over the weekend (see our previous coverage of FIRST). The Regional was a celebration of science and technology, and especially of robotics -- we had air, land, and sea unmanned vehicles stationed in the lobby, Roombas cleaning the floors between matches, and of course, the 51 competing robots. There was also a special entrance by MIT Professor Woodie Flowers, one of the co-founders of the FIRST program and an all around excellent guy.

What Woodie is hanging on to is a robot from Atlas Devices. It's designed for the military to use to rapidly ascend and descend ropes safely -- from their website, "Its powerful lifting capacity can directly hoist fully-loaded soldiers or firefighters at unprecedented speeds. Utilizing the ATLAS with standard rescue equipement can magnify its capacity even more, enabling effective lifting and towing capacities in excess of 1,000 lbs." Woodie was trained on it on Wednesday evening and it seemed like a pretty shallow learning curve. It's all fun and games watching it descend, but it's when it ascends (so smoothly and quickly) that it looks really impressive. Here are a few more videos for your pleasure.

I'll be attending the RoboBusiness conference in Pittsburgh next Tuesday and Wednesday. They have an excellent set of conference sessions lined up and I'm excited to see the companies that are boothing (especially Ugobe, whose Pleo I have yet to see in person). Have any questions for the exhibitors or speakers? Let me know!

Photos: Sci Fi Channel

So "Battlestar Galactica" is back for its final season. "Battlestar," which some call the "smartest sci-fi TV show ... maybe ever," is probably also the most theorized series on television these days, full of mysteries, twists, and parallels to real world events.

The show chronicles the journey of the last human survivors as they search for the long-lost Earth and are chased by Cylons, a cybernetic race created by humans that decided to take over. Some Cylons look like the metal robot above, left. Others look like Tricia Helfer, right.

In the episode that aired last Friday, viewers are left wondering who is a Cylon and who is not, and I found one dialogue particularly interesting. Lee Adama, a character that some say "represents the 'conscience' of Battlestar," tells his father, Commander Adama:

- Dad, what if Zak had come back to us in that Viper? If my brother had climbed out of that cockpit would it matter if he were a Cylon? If he always had been? When all's said and done, would that change how we really feel about him?

That may well be one of the greatest questions not only in "Battlestar" but also in the field of artificial intelligence. Will we, humans, one day truly love robots just like we love other humans? Will love for a person and for a robot be indistinguishable?

Those questions lead to another: If robots reciprocate our feelings, will their emotions be just a very sophisticated simulation, or could we see them as the "real thing," the same kind of "stuff" as our own emotions?

IEEE Spectrum is preparing a special report that will discuss many of these issues and we'd love to know what you think. Leave a comment below or write to automaton@ieee.org.

(If you aren't familiar with "Battlestar," you can catch up by watching this 8 minute summary.)

A Japanese friend pointed me to an article on the history of the Actroid robot series. I don't speak Japanese, but the article features 9 video clips showing the robot's incredible progression since 2003. The clip below shows a video of the actroid Repliee Q1 from April 2007.

The Actroid series is jointly developed by Japanese entertainment firm Kokoro and Hiroshi Ishiguro, well known for building a robot doppelgänger of himself. Kokoro offers the Actroids for rent to greet customers and provide information in up-market coffee shops, office complexes, and museums or "old houses".

Will life-like robots like these make for more cases like 33-year old Zoltan, who fell in love with and married a robot? [Editor's note: The previous two links lead to pages that contain adult material and language.] If the comments on the youtube page are any indication then that's a yes.

Thanks, Mototaka!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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!