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The French start up Aldebaran-Robotics based in Paris has high hopes for its humanoid robot called NAO.  The device is 57 cm high and weighs 4.5 kilograms (about the size of a 6 month old baby) and you may be about to see a lot more of it. The company has sent a simplified version to 16 teams playing in the Robocup humanoid football league this year. Read More...  View(40)  Comments(0)

John Palmisano of the Society of Robots website writes,

"I wanted to bring to your attention my product release - a microcontroller designed to be simple enough for any beginner, but powerful enough for any expert. Its built from an ATmega640, can handle 29 servos, has 3 UART + USB, built in power bus, and a built in bootloader."

The latest episode of the Robots podcast features interviews with two experts in self-reconfiguring and modular robotics. Kasper Støy, famous for his pioneering work with robots such as the CONRO (also see previous post), shares his recent experience at the ICRA Contingency Challenge. Robert Fitch, currently research fellow with the Australian Centre for Field Robotics, presents his latest self-reconfiguring robot. Read More...  View(33)  Comments(0)

The 2008 Summer Olympic Games will be held from August 8 – 24, 2008 in Beijing, China! We are challenging all you to create a robot that can compete in one of the summer sports on the Olympic program.You have until Sunday August 31, 2008 to enter your robot. See the Summer Olympics Building Challenge NXTLOG for more details. Read More...  View(25)  Comments(0)

The Teaser Trailer for the new Terminator Salvation movie is available. The movie will come out sometime around the summer of 2009 (May?). In the trailer, Christian Bale sounds like Batman and tells us we're all going to die. Sweet! The trailer flickers to the old T2 theme music and it's a bit annoying but you get to see glimpses of something that looks like it's going to be a really awesome movie! ... Read More...  View(12)  Comments(0)

The robot stories have been piling up, so it will probably take a couple of robot roundups this week to get caught up! In the last roundup, we mentioned the robot page embedded in the new Firefox 3 browser. Rog-a-Matic noticed that Firefox fans in San Francisco built a giant robot in Dolores Park to celebrate the launch of the browser. Several readers sent links to Nuvations air hockey robot... Read More...  View(26)  Comments(0)

Hold on to your smart caps: researchers have determined that Robots are deemed less intelligent than humans, still. This study proves conclusively that humans would rather interact with other humans than with robots because robots are STUPID! Poor robots never get any respect. Even though it's probably not earth shattering news to most of us that humans are smarter than robots, it really drives home the fact that AI and robots are just not where we would like them to be. So it looks like robots are great for assembling autos but aren't likely to be accepted in nursing positions anytime soon. Read More...  View(7)  Comments(0)

Spike the Ultra Dinosaur walks, roars, snorts and rears up to devour galkers, but only under remote control as sold. Using a Basic Stamp or similar microcontroller, Spike looks like a great candidate for hacking by a enterprising robotisist who wants to bypass the drudgery of mechanical design. Made by Fisher-Price and sold through retailers like Toys-R-Us for around $140, Spike stands 27" tall and runs on a rechargeable 9.6v battery. At the very least, computer control of Spike's impressive array of LEDs should create an awesome Christmas display. Read More...  View(23)  Comments(2)

2008机器人足球世界杯再有15天就要在苏州正式举行了。这不仅是目前为止，苏州承接的最高级别的赛事之一，也是这个比赛首次在中国举办。为了保证赛事的成功举办，我们苏州已经做好了各种准备。今天下午，独墅湖高教区管理办公室举行了比赛开始前的最后一次誓师动员，要求260多名志愿者弘扬志愿服务的精神，全身心的投入到赛前最后的准备工作中去。据了解，由于此次比赛有30多个国家的300多支参赛队，1300多名选手抵达苏州，无论从参赛接待、后勤服务和宣传策划等方面都有大量的工作。所以去年11月，组委会就发出了招募志愿者的信息。一下子，苏州及周边地区有一千多名大学生报名申请。 Read More...  View(22)  Comments(2)

Last week we brought you a podcast about a vision of robots beating soccer players. This week, we report the reality of a robot beating humans at air hockey. Designed by General Electric Fanuc and programmed by Nuvation Research Corp, the robot plays a mostly defensive strategy. Its vision tracking system send coordinates to a board every 10 milliseconds. Using 32-bit ColdFire microcontrollers and a C program, the robot will defend its goal, only attacking when it is confident about the puck's position. The developers claim that the robot has "defeated even the best human air hockey players by a ratio of three to one." There is a video of the robot. Read More...  View(11)  Comments(0)

In 2006, CMU researches began thinking about how to use robot building as a way of boosting technological fluency in middle school girls. They hoped to improve the "dismally low number" of women in computer science and engineering fields by offering a more motivating alternative to traditional education. The result was Robot Diaries, a series of workshops where girls built robots (photos of another workshop). Read More...  View(12)  Comments(0)

The relatively young field of science known as connectomics, which we first reported on earlier this year, has already produced some intriguing new results about the human brain. The idea is to build a "connectome" or neural connection map of the entire brain. Like the human genome project this was initially met with skepticism as a seemingly impossible task. Early projects involved removing the brain, slicing it, and scanning the slices. The Brain Mysteries blog reports on a new method based on diffusion MRI scans of living human brains. The result is the first high resolution map of millions of neural pathways in the brain. The map showed something unexpected, a single network hub "that may be key to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain". Even more interesting is the researcher's conclusion about the relationship between neural connections and dynamic activity: "we can measure a significant correlation between brain anatomy and brain dynamics. This means that if we know how the brain is connected we can predict what the brain will do". For more on this interesting new discovery, see the researcher's paper, Mapping the Structural Core of Human Cerebral Cortex. Read More...  View(8)  Comments(0)

A reel of film from Fritz Lang's 1927 Metropolis containing a section thought to be lost was discovered recently at a cinema museum in Buenos Aires. Claiming the title of the most expensive silent film of the time, Metropolis is the story of a futuristic city where the major class division is between laborers and the thinking elite. A gynoid robot is used in a battle of forces to create a just society. Read More...  View(11)  Comments(1)

The latest episode of Robots, the podcast for news and views on robotics, takes a look behind the scenes of Robot Soccer. Manuela Veloso, professor at Carnegie Mellon University and President-Elect of the International RoboCup Federation, discusses the state of the art and the future of artificial dribblers. She also shares her thoughts on the daring RoboCup prediction that by the year 2050, "a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots ... can win against the human world soccer champion team". Will it really happen? Listen to the podcast and vote on the forum! Read More...  View(10)  Comments(0)

《华尔街日报》报道，在GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)峰会上，IBM宣布和欧盟伙伴合作开发新软件，可以改进性能和大幅度减少移动web设计时间。名为Milepost的欧洲项目的合作伙伴除了IBM，还有爱丁堡大学，法国研究院和INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所），目的是将人工智能整合进GCC，通过一个月的工作实现性能提高10%——通常这需要几年时间才能完成。 Read More...  View(21)  Comments(1)

Some of you may remember those photos I posted recently of a big robot built from styrofoam packing material that turned up at a local art gallery in Dallas. Well, the folks at DVICE have spotted an artist who makes even bigger foam robots. How big? Try 22 feet tall. The artist is Michael Salter of the University of Oregon and he hasn't built just one but quite a few giant robots. For more see the photo gallery of his robots at Comptemorary Art 06 or his exhibit at the Lump Gallery in 2005. He also did an exhibit at the University of Texas at Arlington in which he built a giant robot out of cardboard boxes. So why does he do it? His bio says "he is currently interested in cognitive behavior and its relationship to particular visual stimuli, and the continued construction of styrofoam robots." If your interest in Styrofoam robots follows a more diminutive bent, don't forget RobotGrrl and her Styrobots. Read More...  View(33)  Comments(0)

Intel is hinting at the possibility of a future with processors containing hundreds or even thousands of cores. While graphics applications seem to be driving much of this trend, I see the possibilities for robotics as truly monumental. Software development for real-time response and control of actuators and sensors has always been a bit awkward with asynchronous interrupts bumping into each-other and cumbersome state machine loops. A possible solution to this mess, and to a much-needed advancement in robot performance are multiple processor systems with additional processors providing centralized supervisory control. When that trend takes hold, a programmer will be able to instruct a mobility routine to approach the refrigerator using a group of processors dedicated to that task, and not risk crashing the battery monitoring routines in the process. It seems to me that the trend is more towards a massively parallel array of much simpler processors - something between neural networks of biological systems and the overburdened, highly complex, single-processor systems of today. Processors of the giant array can be simpler, slower and die without bringing down the whole system. The result will be a faster and more fault-tolerant system that is easier to program, and even cheaper to produce. Read More...  View(6)  Comments(0)

The Guardian published a piece by Charles Arthur titled, "Artificial intelligence: God help us if machines ever think like people", in which he questions the idea that Humans are a good model on which to base machine consciousness. Why? "We don't build skyscrapers based on the same principles as the human spine; if we did, then they'd be constantly falling down or showing signs of significant weakness. We don't build transport systems that work like the human body, using muscle-like elastic bands snapping back and forth to power them." He notes that even the Human body is a mess because "evolution is a terrible designer". His premise is based on a recent book by Gary Marcus, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind which investigates the conflicts between the millions of years old features of the brain that are now conflicting with the relatively recently acquired features based on language. In the end he suggests that giving a machine a mind as badly designed as ours would be an act of cruelty. Read More...  View(6)  Comments(0)

Randy of Instructables.com writes, I want you to know about the Instructables and RoboGames Robot Contest. We are looking for instructions on how to make, build or design all things robot-related. Maybe you built the ultimate manipulator arm, designed a killer sensor array, reused some great trash, or just made a gorgeous housing - pick something you're proud of, and share how you made it. The grand prize is a trip to San Francisco for the 2009 robogames. Other prizes include a RoboPhilo Walking Android kit, and instructables Robot gear. Entry deadline is July 13. They've already got some interesting entries like DIY air muscles and the Elvinator (a cross between the terminator and a WowWee Elvis robot). Read More...  View(18)  Comments(1)

Michelle writes, "Time.com has just put up a photo gallery of some of the world’s most awesome (and cutest, natch) robots". Many of the robots will be familiar including the Sommelier Robot, the Fujitsu HOAP-3, the Shadow robot hand (who knew a hand by itself could be cute?!), Toyota's musical instrument playing robots, and Wall-e. It's always interesting to see what mainstream media thinks about robots. In this case they make no distinction between real robots, fictional robots; between research projects and commercial gadgets. What's your pick for cutest robot ever? Read More...  View(14)  Comments(0)