Surveyor SRV-1: The Front!

Here’s a picture of the new Surveyor SRV-1 chassis, which is replacing the last version.  As you can see, the electronics are the same, but everything is recessed into the body now, which looks pretty slick.  The front plate that the laser pointers mount into also comes up to cover up the camera’s PCB.

The biggest differences are far from cosmetic, though.  The tracks are now driven by four motors instead of two.  Those of you with extra deep-pile 1970’s-era shag carpeting (we know you’re out there) don’t have to worry any more.  Surveyor Corp heard your call and answered it.  Backing up this quadruple-whammy of a drive system is a 7.2 V, 2000 mAh Lithium Polymer battery pack.  The new battery pack (a welcome upgrade from the older model’s bulky Li-Ion cells) boasts a runtime of 4 hours!

Surveyor SRV-1: The Back!

GUESS WHAT. We sell these things, too.  If you’re planning a project that will require a number of small autonomous or wirelessly-controlled rovers, you don’t need to spend precious development time designing the bots!  The SRV-1 is a great out-of-the-box platform for swarm or solo applications; or any time you find yourself in need of a camera-equipped, Wi-Fi-enabled, internet-controllable, compact track-bot with a powerful main processor an killer battery life!

For development journals and all of the latest software updates, check out the Surveyor web site.
To see more detailed specs, or to purchase the robot, go to our Surveyor SRV-1 product page.

Last month's issue of Discover Magazine featured the "Top 100 Science Stories of 2007," a look back at some of last year's important discoveries, developments, and advancements in scientific fields.  Not surprisingly, a few of these stories were robotics-related; and one that I found particularly fascinating was titled "Robots Evolve and Learn How to Lie."  In a swarm of robots, whose behavioral software was evolved by successive generations of natural selection, the tendency to deceive others for personal gain arose naturally in some of the robots.  Of course, if this were the predominant outcome of natural selection, the species would fail.  Thus, it's also interesting to note that altruism developed as well, allowing the swarm as a whole to survive.

Though it wasn't mentioned explicitly in the article, a little digging revealed that this experiment was carried out by the team that developed the "Swarmbot" and "Swarmanoid" projects.

Check out Discover.  For a limited time, their online archive of articles (from 1992 up to the current news stand issue) is available for free, no subscription or registration necessary.  Regardless, I urge you to pay for a subscription.  It's a fine publication.

[Edit:] Found another article about this from New Scientist, with a few more details:

"Robot swarms ‘evolve’ effective communication"

No keyboard or mouse needed! Teach your robot what to do by using motions and gestures.

Skilligent is taking a new approach to the area of human robot interactions, their press release explains:

Skilligent Robot Learning and Behavior Control System is a software product which enables robots to learn procedures and skills directly from human users. The product is a set of software components specifically designed for straightforward integration into control loops of PC-controlled robots.

The software needs to be integrated with sensors, motors, actuators and robot’s control system via a set of open APIs. On one side, the software controls every motion of the robot. On the other side, the software uses a video camera, a microphone and other sensors to receive guidance from a human user.

The software analyzes human’s gestures, looks at the objects presented by the user, listens to the sounds and tries to guess what robot is supposed to do.

Through trial and error, the robot understands what needs to be done and associates learned behaviors with stimuli used by the human. Over a few training sessions, the robot refines its understanding of the domain, the procedures and skills required to serve the user.

Robot Learning Technology is especially useful in the following domains:
1. Industrial/service robots for small and medium sized businesses
2. Defense and law enforcement
3. Health-care and Elder-care robots
4. Research and Education robotics

Skilligent is currently seeking partnerships for further sales and distribution of their software packages. Interested parties can contact them through their website.

Skilligent LLC is headquartered in Dallas, Texas and operates an off-shore research and development center.

http://www.skilligent.com

We just received a nice heads up about a video from speaker Hod Lipson’s demonstration at the TED Conference.

Here’s what TED had to say about about Hod:

Engineer Hod Lipson demonstrates and talks about a few of his cool little robots, which have the ability to learn, understand themselves and even self-replicate. At the root of this uncanny demo is a deep inquiry into the nature of how living beings learn and evolve, and how we might harness these processes to make things that learn and evolve.

We checked out the video, and I must say, Hod is working on some amazing stuff! I recommend checking this video out; He has a pretty interesting perspective on robotics.

You can download the video here, or check it out on TEDTalk

Michael Somby has done an great job at breaking down some of the top Robotics Software Platforms into short and sweet overviews in his article, “A Review of Robotics Software Platforms“. There are still some that he hasn’t had the chance to fully review (but he still provides some good resources for), but this will definitely help those (including myself) who like to get the question “Yes, but what is it?” answered quickly without having to read through 80 pages of documentation. He touched base on Evolution Robotics ERSP, Microsoft Robotics Studio, OROCOS, Skilligent, URBI, Webots, Player, Stage, Gazebo, iRobot AWARE, OpenJAUS, CLARAty.

Visuals are always nice to give a little taste, so here’s a table that I grabbed from Michael’s article:

Read the article!

Using the HRP-2 Promet Humanoid, Japanese researchers, Shin’ichiro Nakaoka and fellow colleagues, have developed software that allows this 5ft (154cm) tall humanoid to imitate dance routines without falling on it’s a@# via video motion capture technology.

The HRP-2 “watches” a routine, then accurately reproduces it just minutes later. More details about it can be found in the International Journal of Robotics Research (please don’t ask us where:) ).

Dr Nakaoka said: “The result that the robot stably imitated human dance motions including dynamic-style step while keeping the original motion rhythm is a novel achievement for biped humanoid robots.�

Click here to check out the video.

Read the full article at the Telegraph.co.uk

Thanks to rep001 in the Robosavvy forums for the heads up:)

Asimo, take some notes;)

Using 1930s theories from a physiologist by the name of Nikolai Bernstien, roboticists are able to build the world’s fastest dynamically walking robot!

Runbot is a small, biped robot which can move at speeds of more than three leg lengths per second, slightly slower than the fastest walking human.

Bernstein said that animal movement was not under the total control of the brain but rather, “local circuits” did most of the command and control work.

The brain was involved in the process of walking, he said, only when the understood parameters were altered, such as moving from one type of terrain to another, or dealing with uneven surfaces.

How does Runbot walk you ask?

• Frames 1 - 3: The robot’s momentum causes the robot to rise on its standing leg and a motor moves the swinging leg into position
• Frame 3: The stretch sensor of the swinging leg is activated, which triggers the knee joint to straighten
• Frames 3-6: The robot falls forward naturally, with no motor functions being used, and catches itself on the next standing leg
• Frame 6: As the swinging leg touches the ground, the ground contact sensor in the foot triggers the hip extensor and the knee joint of the standing leg and the hip and knee joints of the swinging leg to swap roles

Read the full article via BBC News

Check out the creator of RunBot, Tao Geng’s page

We will pay for our hubris.

We can always count on Stephen Colbert to let us know when we should be cowering in fear. According to last week’s ThreatDown, the robots are coming. They are coming, and they hate America. He cites a facial expression imitating robot that is disgusted by our president; the ever popular CB2 toddler robot, which will undoubtedly grow enormous and wreak havoc; and of course BEAR, the cuddly and heroic battlefield extraction robot, which Colbert fears is teaching us to trust bears a bit too much. Click the following link if you want to learn more about the threats posed to us by robots, bears, robots, bears, and robot-bears.

And I’ll leave you with one last visual:

A human imitating a robot imitating a human. How deliciously recursive.

On Stephens Island in New Zealand’s storm-wracked Cook Strait, the tuatara—one of the most ancient reptile species on Earth—is getting a hand from distinctly 21st-century science (see a New Zealand map).

Researchers have placed in the wild a very special male that, like its wild cousins, can put on physical displays to establish its dominance.

But this reptile’s skin is made of rubber, not scales, and its “heart” is a nickel-cadmium battery.

The alpha male in question is “Robo-Ollie,” a robotic tuatara created to help researchers understand the behavior of these rare reptiles, the last species in a family that dates back 200 million years.

Specifically, postdoctoral student Jennifer Moore wants to know how male tuatara establish dominance—how they attract and keep females.

Understanding critical behaviors could help tuatara translocation and captive-breeding programs, perhaps by guiding conservation managers to the genetically fittest, most productive males.

Read the Full Article

This man is crying on the inside.

The pasty figure on the right in this picture is “CB2,” a name which is derived from “Child-Robot with Biomimetic Body.”  This highly advanced robot, meant to mimic the behavior of a human toddler, was created at Osaka University by the Japan Science and Technology Agency.  It’s body movements and facial expressions are controlled by 52 pneumatic actuators, and it has roughly 200 tactile sensors embedded in its skin.  It receives input in the form of audio, video, and the aforementioned tactile sensors.  Though it cannot speak, it does communicate vocally by making a series of squawking sounds.  Just like a real child.  The robot’s movement, for the most part, is surprisingly fluid and lifelike.  It’s all very impressive, technically, but there is one other consensus among those who have seen the videos of CB2 in action:  This thing is creepy as hell.  The short stature, overlarge eyes, gray skin, and muted facial features make it look like something that’s about to beam me into its ship and perform orifice-violating medical experiments on me.

OH DEAR GOD GET IT AWAY FROM ME

This robot fell into the Uncanny Valley and hit every rock on the way down.

Video 1 (YouTube)
Video 2 (YouTube)

From Daily Yomiyuri, via Endgadget.