The big downside to all the toys and gadgets you get to see and play with at CES is that often times it takes a while for them to officially hit the market. Such was the case with Evolution Robotics Mint Sweeper cleaning bot, which was one of the cooler things I saw at CES 2010 back in January, but has only recently become available for sale.

Over on our sister site BotJunkie, Evan Ackerman has just posted his review of the Mint Sweeper and if you want to know what he thought about the $250 alternative to the Roomba and other robotic vacuums, you’ll want to head on over and read all about it.

[ BotJunkie Review: Evolution Robotics Mint Sweeper ]

By Evan Ackerman

Last week was National Robotics Week, and over on BotJunkie we posted a lot of great stuff, including a bunch of live event coverage. If you haven’t checked it out yet, here’s some highlights:

-Video of the first public demonstration of Stickybot III, the latest version of Stanford’s climbing robot that uses the same type of sticky material that gecko toes are made of to stick itself to a sheet of glass.

-Video from the back seat of Junior III, a robotic car that can drive (and park!) itself.

-Video demonstration of the world’s fastest industrial robot, the Adept Quattro, as it goes up against a moving platform controlled with a Wiimote.

There’s more coverage over on BotJunkie.com, so come check it out!

[ BotJunkie ]

By Evan Ackerman

The problem with true three dimensional displays (displays that you can walk around) is that they require pixels to be floating in space. This has been done with lasers and plasma, but such technologies are super expensive and limited in many ways. MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory in collaboration with ARES Lab (Aerospace Robotics and Embedded Systems Laboratory) has hit upon the idea of creating huge free form three dimensional displays out of individual “smart pixels” made up of micro helicopters carrying LEDs:

Gigantic 3D displays made up of swarms of micro helicopters that can be released into any open space… How awesome is that? More, after the jump.

We’ve talked about the benefits of swarm robotics before over on BotJunkie: it’s relatively cheap because the individual robots are simple, if any one robot breaks it’s easy to replace, and it’s easily scalable since you can just toss more bots into the mix. You can even use swarms to compensate for things like batteries: if you initially launch your robots in waves, you can have a whole other group of standby robots that dynamically replace the performing robots as their batteries run out, flying up with their LEDs off to switch places without anybody noticing.

The tricky part, of course, is getting everything to work together. MIT has big plans for the system, though…

The Flyfire canvas can transform itself from one shape to another or morph a two-dimensional photographic image into an articulated shape. The pixels are physically engaged in transitioning images from one state to another, which allows the Flyfire canvas to demonstrate a spatially animated viewing experience. Flyfire serves as an initial step to explore and imagine the possibilities of this free-form display: a swarm of pixels in a space.

You could even play an HD movie on system… Let me see, to play a movie in 1080p (trying to get it to do 1080i with half the number of bots would be pretty interesting but probably impossible, unless you could get them to do barrel rolls at 60 Hz or something to form the interlacing) you’d need over 2 million micro copters to form the base screen, plus however many more are required to swap out for recharging. Fun to think about, but maybe it would be better to just stick with standard def, since you’d only need about 350,000 bots.

While the video is a rendering, the robots are real enough, and hopefully we can expect to see some live demos of the entire system sometime soon.

[ Flyfire ] VIA [ BotJunkie ]

By Evan Ackerman

I don’t know enough about molecular biology for how this works to make any sense to me, but apparently, researchers at NYU have created an autonomous bipedal walking robot out of a single strand of DNA with a linkage in the middle. I’m going to just let them explain how it works:

The walking device consists of a strand of DNA that contains a 5’,5’ linkage in the middle. One leg is called L-E and the other is called L-O. It walks on a track consisting of a series of stem-loops (T1-T4) that are part of a stiff DX motif. It is fueled by a pair of successive stem-loops (F1 and F2) that are in solution. The driving force for its motion is the formation of more base pairs than exist at any given time. The system is shown below…

Read more at BotJunkie…

By Evan Ackerman

We covered the Neato Robotics XV-11 robot vacuum in detail on BotJunkie back in December, and last night at Digital Experience here at CES we got a chance to check it out in person. Just to recap, the Neato is unlike most other robot vacuums in that it isn’t a gussied up Roomba knockoff but rather an original design, the flagship feature of which is a laser based room navigation system that can clean much faster and more efficiently than a Roomba’s pseudo-random patterns. Check out our earlier post on BotJunkie for more details, or just watch the demo, narrated by Neato Robotics CEO Max Safai, right after the break.

Notice how the XV-11 finished cleaning its little area in exactly the time of the demo… That’s precision PR, folks. Seriously though, it’s striking just how different the XV-11′s cleaning technique is from a Roomba. It undocks, looks around the room, and then makes one circuit around the wall (notice how precisely it avoids its dock) followed by an overlapping pattern to cover the center of the floor. And then, it’s done. It moves slower than a Roomba does, but since it knows where it’s been and where it’s going, overall it cleans much, much faster.

The XV-11 only has one brush on the bottom, and it’s supposed to be really good at not getting all kinds of stuff tangled up in it. The dustbin is fairly spacious, and lifts out of the top of the robot, making it somewhat easier to access without either having to lift the robot or get dirt all over the floor, as with a Roomba.

It remains to be seen how well the XV-11 performs in a more realistic environment, like my living room, which is full of furniture, hardwood to carpet transitions, electrical cables, and miscellaneous random crap all over the floor. The key here is going to be whether or not the XV-11 can actually do what the Roomba was supposed to be able to do: vacuum by itself without you having to prep the floor and pay attention to make sure that it doesn’t get stuck, try to smash things, or kill your pets.

You’ll be able to get an XV-11 in March, for $399… It’s significantly more expensive than an entry level 500 series Roomba, but it also has the potential to be a significantly better vacuum.

[ Neato Robotics ]

By Evan Ackerman

We’re continually bemoaning the fact that the selection of practical robotic vacuums is extremely limited here in the US (although not so much elsewhere). Besides iRobot’s Roomba, you’ve got… Well, you don’t have much. Today, Neato Robotics (yep, their real name) unveiled the first new model of consumer robot vacuum we’ve seen in the US in quite a while: the XV-11.

Now, I hate to describe the XV-11 in terms of the Roomba, but for better or worse, that’s just kind of the way it is…

Read more at BotJunkie…

By Evan Ackerman

Even if you’ve got a micro air vehicle that provides its own power for thrust, like a Rhinoceros beetle with an implanted optical lobe stimulation controller, you still need power for the communication system itself. One ideal solution is to try and harvest electricity from the insect, but a more realistic approach (at the moment) might be a dependable long-life battery, and nothing is more dependable and long-life and potentially dangerous than a nuclear battery.

Don’t worry, it’s not at all dangerous…

Read more at BotJunkie… ]

Introducing Autom™ from Erica Young on Vimeo.

By Evan Ackerman

We first met Autom two years ago, back when she was a resident of the MIT Media Lab. Since then, she’s been significantly redesigned and her parent company, Intuitive Automata, is almost ready to unleash her upon the overweight world. Autom is sort of like your own personal weight loss coach, except she doesn’t annoy you by being human and in better shape than you are. Instead, she simply tracks your eating and exercise habits and talks to you about your daily progress. She’s able to figure out what works best for you and what doesn’t, adapting to your needs as they change. And she does a good job, apparently: people using Autom to help with their weight loss will keep to a diet and exercise routine for twice as long as people using more traditional methods…

Read more at BotJunkie…

By Evan Ackerman

This article, from Israel’s Yediot Acharonot newspaper, is titled “‘A Vacuum Cleaner Captured a Snake.” It looks like “captured” is a bit of an understatement… The Roomba 560 appears to have totally pwned what we’re told is a deadly viper threatening some kids (and possibly a cat) by sucking it up around one of its rotating brushes…

[ Read More At BotJunkie ]

By Evan Ackerman

Could someone please explain to me why, exactly, roboticists seem to think that it’s such a good idea to give their creations swords? Like, I get that it’s a way to demonstrate grasping and dexterous movements, but if you start with robots demonstrating swords, you move on to robots fighting each other with swords, and this will be our terrifying future. And swordplay seems to be a bad idea for HUBO here more than most, since it repeatedly hits itself in the head with a sword that is thankfully not made out of anything dangerous…

Read more at BotJunkie…