Category Archives: Robots

Robot and robotics news and information – keep up with the latest engineering breakthroughs

New iRobot Product: Gutter Cleaning Robot

irobot Looj gutter cleaner

iRobot originally offered the Roomba vacuum cleaner. They have added several items to their inventory including a pool cleaner and floor washing. Their latest product is the iRobot Looj, a gutter cleaning robot. Place it in your gutter and it sweeps out debris (up to 60 feet). In October the Looj received the Digital Life award as the best Gift for Adults. It has also received the CES Innovations 2008 Award for best home appliance.

Find more cool products on our Gadgets and Gizmo page. Related: Huge PC monitor – Asimo Robot: Running and Climbing Stairs – Digital Pen – Toaster Design – Wired NextFest 2007 webcasts – Robo-Salamander

CMU Wins $2 million in Urban Robot Auto Race

CMU wins $2 million in urban robot race

Carnegie Mellon University won the $2 million first place prize in DARPA’s urban robot race this weekend, stealing the thunder from 2005’s Grand Challenge leader, Stanford University. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Urban Challenge awarded a total of $3.5 million in prizes on Sunday, a day after the race. Stanford University took second place, with a $1 million cash prize, and Virginia Tech won $500,000 for third place.

The Urban Challenge was a six-hour test of driverless vehicles on the suburban roads of the former George Air Force Base in Oro Grande, Calif., where the robotic cars were required to complete three missions while obeying traffic laws and avoiding obstacles and collisions with other driverless vehicles. The challenge was the first ever to test robots driving among other robots, and it was significantly harder than DARPA’s 2005 desert Grand Challenge because of that interplay and the urban setting, according to race officials.

Robotics Engineering Degree

Robotics Engineering Degree at Worcester Polytechnic Institute:

WPI has established the nation’s first undergraduate Robotics Engineering degree program to teach people like you. This unique, innovative program was built from the ground-up with future Robotics professionals in mind. In this program, you’ll develop a proficiency for mechanical, electrical and computer engineering which will teach you to build the robot’s body. You’ll also become proficient in computer science, which will help you control the robot’s behavior.

In this program, you will be building robots during your first year of study. You will not find this hands-on approach to Robotics anywhere else but WPI.
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Students graduating from the Robotics Engineering program will have many options for future employment across a wide range of industries including national defense and security, elder care, automation of household tasks, customized manufacturing, and interactive entertainment. New England is home to a strong and growing Robotics industry. Massachusetts alone boasts over 150 companies, institutions and research labs in the Robotics sector, employing more than 1,500 people.

Interesting. via: eContent. Related: Toyota Robots – Tour the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Lab – Applied Engineering Education – Best Research University Rankings – 2007

Wired NextFest 2007 – Cool Webcasts

Above: The humanoid robot REEM-A walk among people at Wired Nextfest 2007. Cool webcasts from Wired NextFest 2007 in Los Angeles:

Human-Carrying Walking Robot
Multi-Touch Collaboration Screen – There are two very wide (around 16 foot wide) LCD screen. You can drag and move object like the scene in the Minority Report.
Wired NextFest Highlights – Shot by Mark Hefflinger and edited by Graham Kolbeins for Digital Media Wire
Wired Nextfest Executive Director Discusses Tech Future
Hanson Robotics talks Zeno

Highlights of the 2006 Wired NextFest Expo in New York City

Robot Hall of Fame

Robot Hall of Fame at Carnegie Mellon

Two categories of robots are honored in the Robot Hall of Fame:

Robots from Science – These are real robots that have served useful or potentially useful functions and demonstrated unique skills in accomplishing the purpose for which they were created. These may also be robots created primarily to entertain, as long as they function autonomously.

Robots from Science Fiction -These are fictional robots that have inspired us to create real robots that are productive, helpful, and entertaining. These robots have achieved worldwide fame as fictional characters and have helped form our opinions about the functions and values of real robots.

The web site is not exactly great yet but the idea seems to have merit and the location is sensible; Tour the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Lab.

Robo Insect Flight

photo of flying robot on a hand

Robotic Insect Takes Off

“Nature makes the world’s best fliers,” says Robert Wood, leader of Harvard’s robotic-fly project and a professor at the university’s school of engineering and applied sciences.

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is funding Wood’s research in the hope that it will lead to stealth surveillance robots for the battlefield and urban environments. The robot’s small size and fly-like appearance are critical to such missions. “You probably wouldn’t notice a fly in the room, but you certainly would notice a hawk,” Wood says.

Recreating a fly’s efficient movements in a robot roughly the size of the real insect was difficult, however, because existing manufacturing processes couldn’t be used to make the sturdy, lightweight parts required. The motors, bearings, and joints typically used for large-scale robots wouldn’t work for something the size of a fly. “Simply scaling down existing macro-scale techniques will not come close to the performance that we need,” Wood says.

Cool. How annoying are those pop up ads after you follow the link though? Extremely yucky usability.

Robotarium X – Robot Zoo

Robotarium X, the worlds first zoo for artificial life, has opened in Alverca, Portugal.

The robots are all original, created specifically for the project, representing 14 species classified by distinct behavior strategies and body morphologies. Obstacle avoidance, movement or sunlight detection and interaction with the public are some of the robots skills.

Robotarium X, the first zoo for artificial life, approaches robots very much in the way as we are used to look at natural life. We, humans, enjoy watching and studying other life forms behavior and, sadly, also to capture them. However, in this case, although the robots are confined to a cage it can be said that, not like animals, they enjoy it. In fact the Robotarium is their ideal environment with plenty of sun, smoothness, tranquility and attention. There are no fights or aggression and the only competition is to assure a place under the sunlight.

Ok, I must admit the “zoo” seems to be a bit small and primitive but imagine what similar, more advanced, exhibits we will likely see in the future. The robots really look like sushi don’t they? via: The World’s First Robot Zoo

Another Humanoid Robot

promet3 - Humanoid Robot

Kawada Industries press release on HRP-3 Promet Mk-II (link to Google translation from Japanese to English). The robot is waterproof and does not need the power backpack most other humanoid robots require. It can work in real environments (small spaces, uneven flooring…) – see links for videos and more photos.

They refer to the pose to the left as the work pose. So I guess the device in its hand is a power tool not an advanced laser weapon – though it does resemble such a weapon when I look (maybe that shows my bias).

robot Watch story (link to the Google translation of Japanese to English) – many photos and links to more info.

Kawada Industries HRP-2″Promet”,G on the previous version (with several videos):

The total robotic system was designed and integrated by Kawada Industries, Inc. together with Humanoid Research Group of National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). Yasukawa Electric Corporation provided the initial concept design for the arms and AIST 3D Vision Research Group and Shimizu Corporation provided the vision system.

HRP-2’s height is 154 cm and mass is 58 kg including batteries. It has 30 degrees of freedom (DOF) including two DOF for its hip. The cantilevered crotch joint allows for walking in a confined area. Its highly compact electrical system packaging allows it to forgo the commonly used “backpack” used on other humanoid robots.

Robot Navigation Using Prediction

Guessing robots predict their environments, navigate better (they broke the link so I removed it. what phb removes news release web pages. They really need to find some students that actually know what the internet is and replace whoever they have running their site now.)

Engineers at Purdue University are developing robots able to make “educated guesses” about what lies ahead as they traverse unfamiliar surroundings, reducing the amount of time it takes to successfully navigate those environments. The method works by using a new software algorithm that enables a robot to create partial maps as it travels through an environment for the first time. The robot refers to this partial map to predict what lies ahead.
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Future research will extend the concept to four robots working as a team, operating with ant-like efficiency to explore an unknown environment by sharing the mapped information through a wireless network. The researchers also will work toward creating an “object-based prediction” that recognizes elements such as doors and chairs, as well as increasing the robots’ energy efficiency.

National Underwater Robotics Challenge

See the National Underwater Robotics Challenge web site for information on the event in Arizona June 8th through 10th. They offer a remote underwater vehicle kit for $250.

The ROV-IN-A-BOX is intended to help get teams involved that are new to underwater robotics. Buy purchasing this kit, it helps put an inexperienced team, or a team with young students like elementary school kids, into a comfort zone to allow them to take on the Underwater Challenge. It reduces the stress, time and resources needed to acquire all the parts to complete an ROV for the competition. The kit can also be used by a more mature team as a starting point for the ROV they may want to build.

There will be a live video stream June 9 at 8pm MST and will continue to until about 2am MST June 10. The video will come from both the ROV and in the pool with event cameras in and around the submarine. Once the video has been processed and mixed poolside by Arizona State University’s Applied Learning Technologies Institute, it will then be channeled to Chandler High School’s television studio, where it will be broadcast to a view gallery and simultaneously sent to a server at ASU where it will be webcast to the world.

Video of the ROV in a box:
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