Everyone loves robots. Everyone loves things that clean for you. And your wife doesn’t love cleaning. The aforementioned facts are exactly why the improvements in the new Roomba 500 Series are that much more awesome. Besides interchangeable face plates, a $300 starting price, and more room for all those crushed Doritos it’s bound to clean off your floor, the 500 Series features twice as much suckage. Neat! Check out a full comparison after the jump.
Subaru, (aka Fuji Heavy Industries) and Sumitomo have teamed up and created a robo-janitor! His name is Tondon and he currently resides in the the outdoor hallways of a new 14-story Bali-themed luxury apartment complex in Tokyo. Tondon works unsupervised, sweeping and cleaning, and relies on an optical communication system to control the building’s elevators, allowing it to move from floor to floor. It has also been strengthened, to better endure the elements, and has added cameras, to prevent unwanted collisions. It also pulls double duty as a security guard. Looking at this thing’s ink I know that it has been to prison before. At least twice.
The RoboCup soccer tournament in Atlanta has drawn to a close; congrats to team NimbRo who won the “kidsize” 2v2 competition. There are of course lots of videos of RoboCup 2007 kicking around on YouTube, but here’s an especially close quarterfinal match pitting NimbRo against the Darmstadt Dribblers. If you’re a soccer fan, you’ll appreciate the dramatic saves from the goalies (well, sometimes dramatic) as well as the unbridled robot-on-robot brutality. And of course, just like real soccer players, you’ll catch these robots taking dives from time to time when nobody is anywhere near them.
This is a photograph of a soccer field for robots, part of the RoboCup games taking place though July 10 at Georgia Tech. There are various size brackets for different robots to compete in, and this particular field is smaller than a grain of rice (each of the ‘defenders’ are about the width of two hairs), designed to challenge robots smaller still, called nanobots. Nanobots generally weigh in the tens to hundreds of nanograms, while your average grain of sand is a hefty three hundred thousand nanograms.
The Nanobots face three challenges (while spectators watch under microscopes):
-The 2-Millimeter Dash: Each nanobot chooses the optimal time for a goal-to-goal sprint across the playing field. -Slalom Drill: Robots race from goal to goal while avoiding “defenders” (polymer posts) that block the path. -Ball-Handling Drill: Robots “dribble” as many microdisks as possible into a goal within a 3-minute period.
Here’s a video of a Swiss nanobot practicing the ball-handling drill:
Given the fact there have been 12 people who actually walked on the moon I have to wonder if there’s even a need for a lunar rover these days. But I guess if you’re a kid who dreams of designing the next Mars, Venus or even Pluto rover you have to start somewhere.
This Lunar Rover kit includes the rover itself, a remote control and the necessary software and cables to program and control the robot with a PC. However it doesn’t include a rocket capable of actually sending the rover to the moon or the satellite and communications backend needed to talk to the device while it’s 238,857 miles away.
And I have to wonder how old this kit actually is given it boasts compatibility with Windows 95 & 98, includes what appears to be a parallel port cable and supplies the software on a floppy disk. At a whopping $595 from Pitsco you’re probably better off to pick up the latest LEGO Mindstorms kit instead.
My apologies for the lame (but obligatory) headline. Vortex Regenerative Air Movement Mobile Robot Platforms (that would be VRAMMRPs) employ patented “tornado in a cup” technology to suck themselves onto flat surfaces including walls and ceilings. They then use 6 drive wheels to get around, and can send back video via secure Bluetooth. Current versions are controllable with a joystick, but they have the capacity for autonomous operation and room for a variety of payloads. Although the website says they’ve “minimized audible sound emission,” if you made it to the end of the video above (the first two scenes are muted, as far as I can tell), I think you’ll agree that they sound more like a dust buster. These bots may not quite be ready for stealthy deployment, but as the video above shows, being able to drive on walls does have distinct tactical advantages.
These helium blimps, nicknamed “Blubber Bots,” are fully autonomous robots that gracefully float from place to place, searching for food ( represented as LED lights) and companionship. Created by Jed Berk, the fat and happy form factors of these ALAVs (Autonomous Lighter than Air Vehicles) belies the hardcore wireless brains that are slung beneath them. Their blimp brains are powered by Sun SPOT chips, which are able to sense and react to movement, sounds, lights, and heat. In addition to being equipped with blinking LEDs themselves, they have cell phone vibrators attached to their helium envelopes, and when the vibrators go off, the blimp resonates at a specific frequency, allowing it to “talk” to other blimps, and to you. That’s right, besides interacting autonomously with each other, the blimps are able to socialize with humans via cellphones. You can chose to talk to the blimps as individuals or as a group, and based on your actions, they’ll react with different behaviors. Check out the video to see what I’m talking about:
If you happen to be in the LA area, you can sign up to make your own Blubber Bot (with the help of the designer) for $185.
Hysteria is rising over the upcoming Transofmers movie. It’s understandable. So maybe it makes sense to see some Korean company trying to cash in on the action… by releasing Gundam speakers. No, Gundam is in no way related to Transformers, but they share many of the same elements: robots, anime and awesome 80s looks. That’s of course where the similarities end, and these Gundam Head Speakers aren’t really all that exciting once you get over their looks. The speakers use batteries for power, and the actual speakers are revealed only once you open the flaps on the back of the head.
No word on price or availability, but chances are this is Korea only.
Matsushita Electric’s Power Pedal robot suit is a wearable exoskeleton (exo-lower torso, anyway) that provides the wearer with up to seven times more leg power. The robot legs are controlled via foot pedals, and with six axes of movement, the legs will remain stable even over rough ground. It’s designed for a good cause of course (namely helping disabled and elderly people to walk), but you can get your own for any good or evil cause you want for about $167,000 in August of this year (which is pretty darn quick). In under ten years, Matsushita expects the price to drop to around $30,000.
There’s no detailed info on how fast these things move or exactly what they are capable of, but it’s good to know that we’re making strides toward an alien queen ass kicking machine (Aliens movie clip most likely NSFW).
It’s pretty clear, from a commercial point of view, what the next generation of personal robots is going to be all about, and the answer is transparency. When I say “transparent,” I don’t mean invisible robots (however cool that might be)… I’m talking about robots like the Roomba, which are designed to make our lives easier without us actively noticing that they are doing so… You just notice every once and a while that your carpet is cleaner. The AUR is to desk lamps what the Roomba is to vacuum cleaners: it’s smart enough that ideally, you never notice that it’s helping you out.
The AUR robotic desk lamp is currently in the prototype phase and information on its specific capabilities is scant, but from the video below, it looks to be able to tell where the user is, and adjust its position and intensity to afford the best lighting on the working surface. It can tell when to turn on and off, and also has some sort of seek mode where it can help you find things around your desk. Now, am I the only one who thinks this thing looks uncannily like Max from the 1986 Disney sci-fi classic Flight Of The Navigator? Since the video of AUR in action didn’t come with a soundtrack, I mixed in the theme from Flight Of The Navigator (which actually syncs up pretty well); mute the video if you’re not a fan of nostalgic 80s synth:
Related Tags: awesome, Robots, roomba
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By Ryan Nill
By Andrew Liszewski
Matsushita Electric’s Power Pedal robot suit is a wearable exoskeleton (exo-lower torso, anyway) that provides the wearer with up to seven times more leg power. The robot legs are controlled via foot pedals, and with six axes of movement, the legs will remain stable even over rough ground. It’s designed for a good cause of course (namely helping disabled and elderly people to walk), but you can get your own for any good or evil cause you want for about $167,000 in August of this year (which is pretty darn quick). In under ten years, Matsushita expects the price to drop to around $30,000.
