Building the best robot you can is difficult and stressful. You know what isn’t difficult or stressful? Building the worst robot you can, and then seeing if it can manage to be even more terrible than a bunch of other robots trying to do the same thing. This is Hebocon, and we love it.
As hard as we’re trying, it’s going to be a very long time before we’re able to build a robotic insect that’s anywhere near as capable or versatile as a real one. So for now, we rely on a cybernetics approach to get real insects to do our bidding instead. Over the past several years researchers have managed to steer large insects using electrical implants, a sort of brute-force method with limited real-world usefulness.
Now engineers at the R&D company Draper, based in Cambridge, Mass., are hoping to overcome those limitations by creating a cybernetic dragonfly that combines “miniaturized navigation, synthetic biology, and neurotechnology.” To steer the dragonflies, the Draper engineers are developing a way of genetically modifying the nervous system of the insects so they can respond to pulses of light. Once they get it to work, this approach, known as optogenetic stimulation, could enable dragonflies to carry payloads or conduct surveillance, or even help honey bees become better pollinators.
How do you make a robot toy that’s both interesting and affordable? It’s a hard problem: Making an interesting robot means giving it intelligence and creative autonomy, and giving a robot intelligence and creative autonomy is generally not compatible with it also being cheap. At CES a few weeks ago, we were introduced to Bots_Alive, a small company of roboticists who have managed to develop a robotic critter with a carefully thought-out animal-like personality. And by hacking an existing robot toy and using your phone as a brain, they’re ready to sell it to you for 35 bucks.
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):
Massimiliano “Max” Versace traces the birth date of his startup to when NASA came knocking in 2010. The U.S. space agency had caught wind of his military-funded Boston University research on making software for a brain-inspired microprocessor through an IEEE Spectrum article, and wanted to see if Versace and his colleagues could help develop a software controller for robotic rovers that could autonomously explore Mars.
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):
Kitchen appliances were no exception, and Bosch announced both a connected fridge and a connected oven. While an oven that you can control remotely and a fridge that knows what’s inside it are handy enough by themselves, the whole point of a kitchen is to use the food you have in combination with the necessary appliances to create tasty and nutritious meals. Mykie is a little countertop robot that Bosch developed in order to help tie your kitchen hardware together to recipes to make cooking easy and fun.
In 2015, several of the world’s top poker players faced down a supercomputer-powered artificial intelligence named Claudico during a grueling 80,000 hands of no-limit Texas Hold’em. Beginning tomorrow, a rematch of humans versus AI will test whether humanity can hold its own against an even more capable challenger.
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!):
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