You walk into the brightly lit space, and a delicate-looking plaster statue catches your eye. She has a peaceful expression, and is dressed in a modest gown with puffy shoulders and a broad skirt. Her arms stay close to her body, but the palms of her hands face gently forward, as if asking for something. As you approach, she suddenly glides forward to meet you. Her name is Diamandini, and she's a robotic statue.
Kids these days! Why, back when I was a kid we had to use, you know, our imaginations when playing with toys. Now, thanks to robotics, toys can spring to life and react intelligently to a child's input. The latest example of that is IXI-Play, an owl-like robot that can dance, make sounds, and interact with children.
The rising interest in quadrupeds over the past few years has led to the development of several exciting new projectsbased on Cheetahs. One such robot is Cheetah-Cub, a compliant quadruped developed at the Biorobotics lab at the EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. To put Cheetah-Cub in motion, the EPFL group teamed up with researchers from the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), who have recently managed to transfer horse-like locomotion to the robot.
This time next week, we'll be making our way from touring robotics labs in Switzerland up to Karlsruhe in Germany for ICRA, followed by a weekend in Stuttgart for ROSCon. But that's next week, and it's not next week yet, it's this week. So while we frantically start packing (how many pairs of underwear does one generally need for two weeks in Europe?), help yourself to some Video Friday.
What are the odds of us having two articles this week about robotic turtles? As of today, it's 100 percent, thanks to this robotic baby sea turtle, um, thing. It's called Flipperbot, and it's designed to help biologists figure out how animals with flippers move in sand, and to help roboticists figure out how to get robots with flippers to do the same.
Last year, we posted about a study investigating whether people care if a robot friend of theirs gets unfairly stuffed into a closet, featuring one of the saddest robot videos ever. Turns out, people do care. A lot. And they care even though robots don't have feelings. Today, we're looking at another study from researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany that uses a functional MRI procedure to see just exactly how much people empathize with robots compared to humans.
IEEE Spectrum contributor Charles Q. Choi has a detailed story on this, with psychologists and experts in human-machine interaction describing how they see the experiment. Below, I include some more details and also my own take on the results.
We've turned insects into cyborgs using nerve stimulation, and that's pretty cool. But insects aren't scary. You know what's scary? Turtles. Turtles are scary. Researchers at KAIST in South Korea have managed to hack a live turtle, adding a noninvasive steering system that they've successfully used to get the animal to follow an arbitrary winding path. Yes, this means that we have cyborg turtles now. Everybody very slowly panic.
As much as we love the PR2, it's not a robot that anyone would likely describe as "quick." Not that it's trying to be quick or anything, but it does have a tendency towards being absurdly slow, generally because it's doing very complicated things.
However, for a robot like the PR2 to be useful in any sort of versatile industrial setting (which is slowly but surely becoming a huge market for robotics), speed, efficiency, and reliability is very important. Some talented roboticists have been working away at this problem, and they've managed to get a PR2 to pick and place (or at least, pick and drop) objects at a rate of one every seven seconds from a conveyor belt moving at over a foot per second. This is quite possibly the fastest I have ever seen a PR2 move.
