There's a reason why Oreos exist in their present form: they're a carefully formulated combination of exactly the right amount of cookie with exactly the right amount of creme. But that's just not good enough for humans, because humans are crazy, and rather than just buying some chocolate cookies or some frosting, we instead insist on disemboweling our Oreos to separate the creme from the cookie the hard way. We're willing to go to absurdly awesome lengths to do it, most recently including CMU's HERB robotic butler.
With a little duct tape, a touch screen tablet, and their new Kinect API, the Microsoft Research Cambridge team built an augmented reality system to help brain surgeons visualize 3D brain scans. Kinect Fusion supplies 3D modeling of anything, which could fuel some seriously neat medical innovations. (The Cambridge team also built KinEtre, which lets you posses anything.) At the 13th annual Microsoft TechFest, Ben Glocker demoed a prototype system that would allow neurosurgeons to prepare for surgery by looking inside a patient's brain before they cut it open. Doctors could see the skeleton, brain, blood vessels, and the targeted tumor on a tablet—which they can move around the patient's head—helping them to plot the best brain surgery path.
The Fusion API will be released in the next Kinect for Windows SDK, which researchers say will be out very soon.
Last week's was a record-breaking edition of Video Friday, with a total of 12 videos. But don't worry. We're outdoing ourselves this week: Sit back and enjoy 12 new awesome robot videos and one audio.
Antarctica looks all nice and smooth, but lurking beneath the snow are the gaping maws of crevasses of doom. Doom, I say! And it's not just me saying it: the threat of crevasses means that moving anything from one place to another on the ground is a slow, potentially deadly process. That's why some researchers from Dartmouth came up with Yeti, a GPS-guided robot that can drag a ground-penetrating radar around to detect impending doom. This robot has been around for several years now, but its masters have just published a paper in the current issue of the Journal of Field Robotics, showing that Yeti can make a huge difference in polar logistics.
Robots aren't people. This is why we get them to do all kinds of stuff that we'd rather not do, whether it's dull, dirty, dangerous, or other sinister words that start with "d." Robots don't have parents, they don't have feelings, they don't experience pain, and they don't hold it against you if you shoot them. So how much trouble can you get in for shooting them? Apparently, not much. At least in Ohio.
As if equipping a household robot with a LASER CANNON wasn't scary enough, Neato's autonomous vacuum now comes in evil, evil black. Meet the Signature Series, which brings you 50 percent more power for sucking up dust thanks to "a new aerodynamic design," and as far as we can tell, not much else.
Want to know what this thing is? Here's a hint: it's a miniature inchworm. And it's quite possibly the fastest miniature inchworm robotin the world, even though it uses just one single motor.
Of all the robotic kids we've had the pleasure of meeting, Roboy somehow manages to be one of the least creepy. Even if he is, you know, skinless. But hey, at least he looks friendly-ish, doesn't he? Maybe not-spend-time-with-him-alone-in-the-dark-friendly, but robot babies are always a work in progress. See what Roboy's got going on, plus lots of other stuff, 'cause it's Video Friday!
A lot of UAV research is focused on making flying robots that can navigate by themselves using sophisticated sensor systems, intelligently avoiding crashing into things. This is a fantastic goal to have, but it's not easy. EPFL is doing away with just about all of that with a new version of AirBurr, a robot that's specifically designed to run into everything and crash all the time, building maps as it does so.
