An important development from Industrial Perception, Inc. — a new start-up from the guys at Willow Garage — may enable robots to make new inroads into the package-handling business. As you can see in the video below, robots can now throw around and otherwise abuse packages just like human delivery personnel.
All kidding aside, this video does demonstrate some fairly impressive visual perception and dexterity for a an industrial robot arm. I just hope that’s not my box it’s tossing around!
[Via IEEE Spectrum.]
ROPO-1 was a whimsical robot event that took place last week in Tokyo. The event is a lighthearted parody of the semiannual Robo-One competition. Robots-Dreams has posted a number of videos from the event; here are some of my favorites, gathered together for your viewing pleasure. Read more…
Here’s one I couldn’t resist passing along: Hajime Sakamoto in Japan is making notable progress on a real-life mobile suit — a 4-meter tall robot you can pilot from the inside.
No stranger to biped robotics, Sakamoto-san has built a number of successful bots over the years, starting with normal hobby-sized Robo-One robots. But for Hajime, biped robots are much more than a hobby; he founded a company (Hajime Research Institute) to drive relentlessly toward bigger and bigger robots, eventually to build something very much like the Gundam mobile suit of science fiction.
In the video released just this week, you can see how far he’s come — he has the lower half of a 4-meter-tall mobile suit working. That’s Hajime himself in the pilot seat, controlling the legs as they carry him for a short walk in the shop.
I’ve posted about Herkulex servos before. In case you’ve been living in a cave, these are a new line of smart servos from a Korean company called Dongbu. I love ’em — they’re strong, compact, affordable, easy to mount, and smarter than even the Other Leading Brands of smart servos.
But until now, if you’ve wanted to actually build a bot out of these things in the United States, you had pretty much two options: buy a full humanoid robot kit, or make all your own brackets from scratch. That’s because the Herkulex brackets and other accessories were simply not available here. I even got so desperate as to look into buying them online in Japan or Korea, and having them shipped here, but got discouraged when I started adding up the fees, not to mention the complications.
That’s why today’s news is such good news: Road Narrows Robotics has started carrying a wide range of Herkulex brackets, wheels, and other accessories. You’ll find pretty much everything you need here to build whatever bot you can imagine from the ground up, and all quite reasonably priced. For example, you can get four of this U-bracket for $3; that’s less than a buck apiece.
I know it again sounds like I’m working for Road Narrows, but I’m not; I don’t even get a coupon code for all this blogging. (They’re probably respecting my journalistic integrity!) It’s just that I really do think these Herkulex servos are the greatest thing since sliced bread, and want to see more hobbyists building cool bots with them. But without brackets, it’s hard to do very much with them; and some of us don’t have the metal-bending or 3D-printing skills to easily make our own. These are the same brackets used in the Hovis Lite, Evo, and Genie robots, but buying them separately lets you start small (with, say, a 4-servo walker), or design something entirely different, like a hexapod or a chicken walker.
So, props to Road Narrows for carrying this great new line of gear. Go buy some!
Here’s something new. An autonomous robot from the Seoul National University of Science and Technology finds a (small scale) basketball hoop, walks across the court, and throws a ball through the hoop, all by itself. The video below comes to us from the recent Robot Japan 5 event in Tokyo, via Robots-Dreams.
Not only is this the first example I’ve seen of an autonomous robot playing basketball, but it’s also one of the few bipeds to use the mech-style reverse-knee leg design (sometimes called a “chicken walker”).
We have a very long way to go before NBA players need to worry about robots taking over their jobs. But this is a clear advancement, requiring progress in machine vision, eye-hand coordination, and other skills that any robot will need to get around in the real world. Just as with humans, sports can push robots to new heights. I hope we see more robot basketball in the future!
The Machine Perception Lab at the University of California, San Diego has taken delivery of a new robot simulating a robot baby. Diego-san, as they call it, is sized more like an 8-year-old, standing 130 cm tall and weighing 30 kg. But it’s intended to be a research platform for studying the cognitive development of infants.
Part of that research includes “natural communication,” including nonverbal communication through facial expressions. For that reason, they invested in a top-of-the-line android head made by Hanson Robotics. Thanks to 27 moving parts in this head alone, Diego-san can make a variety of facial expressions, which you can see in the video below.
Australian heavy-metal band Compressorhead is actually made of metal — about six tons of it! It features three and a half musicians which rock the house on drums, lead guitar, and bass guitar. (What, no keyboard? We can only assume that’s coming.)
The lead guitarist is “Fingers,” perhaps so named because he has 78 of them. That’s Fingers pictured at right. Fingers was created by Kernschrott Robots in Germany.
On drums is “Stickboy,” the oldest member of the band. He features 4 arms, and plays a 14-piece drum kit with double-kick bass. He gets a bit of assistance from Stickboy Junior, who you can just see crouching under the hihat in the video below. Stickboy was created by Robocross Machines, also in Germany.
The newest member of the band is Bones, on bass guitar. Bones is the most humanoid of the three, right down to his human-looking hands, but he still rocks out on a standard bass.
Japan’s NHK television organization recently aired a 5-minute segment on Robot Pro Wrestling, an event covered here before. But the new video contains some really great footage of the robots, as well as the crowd’s reaction. Watch for some of those amazing take-downs that we’ve begun to see lately.
Bot Scene 