Automaton

Researchers at the Technical University Delft will present the smallest flying flapping robot carrying a camera today. With a wing span of just 10 centimeters and weighing in at a mere 3.07 grams, the remote controlled dragonfly is half the size of Borneo's Tetracanthagyna plagiata dragon flies.

The video below shows the DelFly Micro's first test flight indoors. The smaller picture in the bottom right corner shows video data transmitted from the robot in-flight to a ground station. Using image recognition software developed by the DelFly team, objects can then be recognized automatically. This may allow the robot be operated from - or by - a computer.

Guido de Croon, developer of the vision-based control system of the DelFly, already has applications in mind. When a university building burnt-out recently he thought of his team's MAVs: "Since there was some risk of collapse, people could not enter it, and we proposed to attempt to fly into it with the DelFly or a quad-rotor." With the new DelFly Micro still in development, a quad-rotor was deployed to survey the site, but was found too large to enter the building. "Unfortunately, we did not succeed in getting in," De Croon explains, "However, we did gain some experience in what problems one can encounter in such a situation."

Thanks Guido!

Photo: Takanishi Lab

Toyota's Partner plays the violin and trumpet, and Honda's Asimo has even conducted the Detroit Symphony.

Atsuo Takanishi wants to build an entire humanoid robot orchestra. Takanishi, a professor of mechanical engineering at Waseda University, in Tokyo, started with a flutist.

From John Boyd's "This Robot Toots Its Own Flute" story in Spectrum:

Getting the robot to produce a melody turned out to be a monumental task. First, the researchers worked with professional players to create a performance index of what constitutes the best flute sounds. They translated these sounds into mathematical formulations, to which the robot refers. The researchers then programmed the robotâ''s organs to create a sound. Once a sound was produced, they used the parameters controlling the organs that produced the sound as a base and then adjusted those parameters repeatedly until the sound improved and eventually approximated a target sound in the performance index.

â''We had to teach it everything,â'' says Takanishi. â''The different positions of the lips and fingers, the strength of the air pressure, everything. There are any number of parameters [making it] almost impossible to engineer.â'¿ It was a very slow process.â''

The result? See for yourself -- here's a video of the bot in action: http://spectrum.ieee.org/ns/video/flutebot.mp4

Another creation of robot maker and animator Crabfu. I'm a big fan of this guy! His robots are not only simple and beautiful -- they have a lot of "personality" as well.

Description from his site:

PutterBot uses 2 standard size servos for the tracks, each with the potentiometer popped out, and servo taped to the top of the servo. This is an easy way to make the servos continuous, and you can adjust the trim with the potentiometer or with the radio. The tank chassis is a kit from Tamiya, and directly driven from the servo horns. The tread mesh is not perfect, but it works ok. One micro servo is used for the putter, and another one used for the head, and mounted in the back of the Putter Bot, driven through wire linkage. The reason using a linkage system, instead of directly mounting the head/light to the servo, is to lower the head for a better center of gravity... and it just looks cuter with the head down low. Radio mixing is used, so that the right stick controls the tank movements, and the left controls the putter and head.

Students from Singapore's Nanyang Polytechnic university have won this year's Embedded Development invitational challenge of Microsoft's Imagine Cup 2008. Their solar powered robot, dubbed EMS (Environmental Monitoring System), processes air quality on the fly while autonomously navigating indoor and outdoor environments. It then transmits the air's Pollutant Standards Index (PSI), temperature and humidity wirelessly to a remote user.

This year's finals in Paris saw 370 finalists chosen from a pool of more than 200,000 students from over 100 countries and regions competing in nine categories centered around the motto: "Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment." The yearly event organized by Microsoft and endorsed by the United Nations is one of the largest student technology competitions.

With this year's winners announced, registration has opened for next year's Imagine Cup to be held in Egypt.

The IEEE Women in Engineering group has just put out a new issue of their magazine that does a fantastic job of showing many aspects of the robotics industry and the women who have contributed to it. Fortunately, even for those who don't have a paper subscription, there's an online version here. You can download a PDF for easier reading as well.

It profiles people like Ellen Purdy (a part of the Army's Future Combat Systems), Helen Greiner (cofounder and chairman of iRobot), and a DARPA Grand Challenge team member, as well as fun stuff like Disney Imagineering and the intersection of robotics, engineering, and music (who knew Guitar Hero was so important to the industry?).

I'm pretty tempted to get paper copies of this.

UPDATE: There's no better way to understand Kiva's systems than seeing it in action. Here's a video Josh Romero and I prepared:

There's been a lot of press about Kiva Systems, the Boston-area startup that developed mobile robots to automate pick-and-pack warehouse operations. No article, however, has really explained the technology that lets the Kiva robots do what they do -- swarm a warehouse by the hundreds and in a highly coordinated bot ballet deliver inventory to workers, racks of products arriving one after another in seconds, flawlessly.

Photo: Joel Eden Photography/Kiva Systems

In other words, there have been few or no details about the robots' control system, their mechanical design, and the overall resource-allocation algorithms. Until now. Spectrum has filled this gap with an in-depth article ("Three Engineers, Hundreds of Robots, One Warehouse") by yours truly in the July issue.

The two things that most impressed me about Kiva's technology were the distributed control and the robots' mechanical design.

The robots don't just follow orders from a central, know-it-all computer. They have software agents that interact with agents on a warehouse-management server and on PCs at pick-and-pack stations. All the agents act independently, each trying to optimize its own tasks using heuristic methods like greedy algorithms. What's even more interesting is that the robots, which navigate by reading barcode stickers on the floor, detect how far off their bodies are from the center of the stickers and report these readings to the warehouse server. By sharing this information -- by using a "wisdom of the crowd" approach (the proper term is distributed estimation) -- the robots can improve their navigation capabilities.

As for the bots' mechanical design, they have a lifting mechanism capable of jacking up half a ton of stuff that's one of the most beautiful pieces of machinery I've seen recently. It's a custom-machined hard-anodized aluminum ball screw powered by a single dc motor (Kiva was very forthcoming with technical details, but sorry, they didn't allow us to include photos of this piece). The really cool thing is not the screw itself, but what Kiva did to prevent the inventory rack from rotating while the screw turns: the robot's control system makes its wheels rotate in the opposite direction at the exact speed required to keep the rack motionless. Neat!

The article also has details on Kiva's business side and its three founders and early (and cold) startup days in Boston. The whole story is online, or if you're an IEEE member you can download the PDF at Xplore.

LEGO today announced the WeDo kit, which is meant to be not just a younger kid version of the Mindstorms but is designed to appeal to "emerging markets" -- developing countries -- and even interfaces with the OLPC XO computer to do so, which I think is pretty sweet.

Like the Mindstorms kit it comes with a kit of LEGO bricks and sensors and has a similar building-block software interfaced based on LabView, though it's simpler and aimed for a younger audience. The press release describes something of the curriculum they have in mind for it:

Working in teams, children invent their own solution by building a LEGO model and programming it to perform a certain task. Cause and effect learning is enhanced by the models remaining tethered to a computer; similar to scientists in working labs, children can test and adjust their programming in real time. After reflecting on what did and did not work, students can consult with peers, adapt programming, adjust models or begin again.

Unfortunately it's not up on the LEGO website up, and there's no hint on how much it'll cost. Only info at this point is that it will be available in January 2009.

Thanks, Trisha!

I saw "WALL-E" last night with some folks from work and it was universally agreed to be an excellent movie. The characters are fantastic, the animation is as always impressive, and the story is fun. Fans of Apple products will find a few winks to Macs and iPods, and I'm pretty sure EVE is exactly what an Apple robot would look like. For his part, WALL-E bears a striking resemblance to Johnny 5.

I can't wait till I can have my own. For now I'll have to do with the LEGO version, I guess.

Go see it. Cute WALL-E wants you to.

Image from Disney/Pixar

This month's issue of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society's magazine discusses the newly launched RoboticsCourseWare.org, "an open repository for robotics pedagogical materials." From the magazine:

RoboticsCourseWare.org is similar to MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative ... the repository is searchable, browsable, and open for downloads. No registration or login is required for accessing the posted materials. Materials are typically made available under a Creative Commons License ...

... we have published materials for four courses: Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots; Robotics: Science and Systems; Introduction to Robotics; Motion Planning and Applications. Materials available for these courses include lecture slides and notes, course exercises, examinations, laboratory projects, code repositories, videos, and other media.

For a little fun on a Monday morning... if you've recently downloaded the new Firefox 3, try typing "about:robots" into the address bar and hitting Enter.

That is all.

Via Fark.