Robotics

DARPA Urban Challenge

DARPA just announced the 36 teams that will advance to the next stage of the competition. The next stage of the competition will be October 26-31, 2007. The final competition will be November 3rd, in Victorville, California at what used to be George Air Force Base. The vehicles will have to conduct military supply missions in a mock urban area filled with traffic.

Robotics Prof Sees Threat in Military Robots

The increasing deployment of gun-toting robots by the U.S. military and other armed forces around the world could end up endangering civilian lives and giving terrorists new ideas. The prospect of armed, autonomous robots is enough to rattle Noel Sharkey, professor of computer science at the University of Sheffield, England. "One of the fundamental laws of war is being able to discriminate real combatants and noncombatants," he says. "I can see no way that autonomous robots can deliver this for us."

Robotic Cell Phone Friends

Japan, known for their advanced cell phone technologies, has come out with a new advancement that will allow you to truly call your phone a friend. In April 2008, Softbank Mobile Corp, a Japanese company, will release the PhoneBraver, which is a new type of cell phone that doubles as a little robotic friend, ready to chat. Simply attach it’s little arms and leg to your phone and it will display various different faces on the phone. PhoneBraver, cannot actually move, but can learn habits and display text messages to you when you make certain actions on the phone.

RoboCup 2007 Humanoid League: Darmstadt Dribblers vs. Nimbro

Highlights of the quarter final Darmstadt Dribblers vs. Team Nimbro at RoboCup 2007 in Atlanta. This was a very exciting game, with a score of 4:2 for DD after the first halftime, 5:5 after the second, and finally 6:8 after extended playtime.

Video, 4 min 55 sec

Strange But True

Before the Army builds any system, it rigorously defines requirements to ensure stuff fielded to the troops works well and only essential items are included. One reason is to save grunts from having to tote extraneous gear on their already overloaded backs. Defining requirements for the Army's troubled Future Combat Systems -- which has an estimated final price tagof $230 billion, which tops the annual gross domestic product of Norway ($216 billion) -- took a real skid when it came to a requirement for a robot that a soldier would carry on his or her back, called a man-packed robot. Officials with iRobot told GAO that the Army has imposed a requirement that the 30-pound robot come equipped with a fire extinguisher. Even small fire extinguishers -- such as the one in my house -- weigh more than 4 pounds.

First-Ever Robotic Pancreatectomy Combined with Auto-Islet Transplant

Surgeons performed a groundbreaking robotic pancreatectomy in a 39-year-old man to relieve him of debilitating pain. They also performed an autologous islet cell transplant to prevent him from developing surgical diabetes. He is the first patient in the world to undergo the robotic procedure.

RoboCup 2007 Future Vision, Highlights Magdeburg

Lego robots

Video, 2 min 23 sec

Animal-Assisted Therapy and Loneliness in Nursing Homes: Use of Robotic versus Living Dogs

We compared the ability of a living dog and a robotic dog (AIBO) to treat loneliness in elderly patients living in long-term care facilities. Interactive robotic dogs can reduce loneliness in residents of long-term care facilities and that residents become attached to these robots.

Antarctic Lake Robot Probe Sets Sights on Outer Space

A robotic probe designed to draw an underwater three-dimensional map showing the biological and geochemical composition of an ice-bound Antarctica lake may prove to be the ideal tool to search for life on other planets or moons where ice is known to exist. The probe that will map Antarctica's West Lake Bonney, a two-and-a-half mile long, one-mile wide, 130 foot-deep lake located in the continent's McMurdo Dry Valleys. Bonney lies perpetually trapped beneath 12 to 15 feet of ice. "Our goal is to build a submersible autonomous underwater vehicle to map in 3-D the geochemistry and biology of this ice-covered lake. NASA is interested in the project because a modified version of the vehicle may be used to probe beneath subglacial ice and look for signs of life, past or present on Jupiter's Europa, which essentially is an ice-covered ocean.

The Real Transformers

I was introduced to my first sociable robot on a sunny afternoon in June. The robot, developed by graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was named Mertz. It had camera sensors behind its eyes, which were programmed to detect faces; when it found mine, the robot was supposed to gaze at me directly to initiate a kind of conversation. But Mertz was on the fritz that day, and one of its designers, a dark-haired young woman named Lijin Aryananda, was trying to figure out what was wrong with it. Mertz was getting fidgety, Aryananda was getting frustrated and I was starting to feel as if I were peeking behind the curtain of the Wizard of Oz. Mertz consists of a metal head on a flexible neck. It has a childish computer-generated voice and expressive brows above its Ping-Pong-ball eyes — features designed to make a human feel kindly toward the robot and enjoy talking to it. But when something is off in the computer code, Mertz starts to babble like Chatty Cathy on speed, and it becomes clear that behind those big black eyes there's truly nobody home. In a video of Aryananda and Mertz in happier times, Aryananda can be seen leaning in, trying to get the robot's attention by saying, "I’m your mother." She didn't seem particularly maternal on that June day, and Mertz didn’t seem too happy, either. It directed a stream of sentences at me in apparently random order: "You are too far away." "Please teach me some colors." "You are too far away." Maybe something was wrong with its camera sensor, Aryananda said. Maybe that was why it kept looking up at the ceiling and complaining. As she fiddled with the computer that runs the robot, I smiled politely — almost as much for the robot’s sake, I realized, as for the robot maker’s — I thought, if this thing wails "You are too far away" one more time, I'm going to throttle it.

RoboCup 2006 SSL Champion Highlights

The small-size robots

Video, 3:08

2057 - The City

The City: Cars without drivers? Humanoid robots in every household? Cyber-hacking? Intelligent camera surveillance systems? Learn about today's scientific advances that will shape our networked cities of tomorrow. What would you see and experience if the clocks rolled forward 50 years? In a unique blend of drama and science, this three-part series shows you the world of tomorrow. Will we have flying cars? Will advances in medicine help us stay young forever? What about "printing" custom-made vital organs? What will our cities look like? What will tomorrow's wars be about? Will we have robots helping around the house? Will solar power be the new oil? Supported by the world's leading scientists and research institutes, we embark on a quest to answer some of society's most fundamental questions and reveal the dramas of tomorrow's world along the way. State-of-the-art computer graphics in combination with a dynamic story line will create a world usually only seen in feature films, but with the accuracy and relevance of a documentary. This series is all about opening the window of our future based on science fact, not science fiction.

Video, 43 min