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Robot and robotics news and information - keep up with the latest engineering innovations.
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Robot and robotics news and information – keep up with the latest engineering breakthroughs

Botball 2009 Finals

Posted on July 8, 2009 Comments (6)

Webcast of the double elimination rounds of the Botball 2009 competition of the winning Alcott Middle School Botball team. Norman teens win robotics contest:

The challenge of building the robot and seeing it do what it’s programmed to do is very exciting, said Goree, 14. “I like figuring out what’s wrong with the robots, fixing them and then seeing them work after you fix them,” he said.

The team was shocked, excited and proud of their first-place finish, they said. “Almost all the teams we played against were high school teams, so that was pretty exciting for us, beating high schoolers,” Goree said.

Posted by curiouscat
Categories: Awards, Engineering, K-12, Robots, Students
Tags: Awards, engineering competition, Events, k-12 students, Robots, webcasts

Robert Brooks on Robots

Posted on July 2, 2009 Comments (1)

Rodney Brooks on advancing the use of robots in the world (speech from the Makir Fair).

Posted by curiouscat
Categories: Engineering, Research, Robots
Tags: Robots, webcasts

Toyota Develops Thought-controlled Wheelchair

Posted on July 1, 2009 Comments (5)

Toyota has developed a thought-controlled wheelchair (along with Japanese government research institute, RIKEN, and Genesis Research Institute). Honda has also developed a system that allows a person to control a robot through thoughts. Both companies continue to invest in innovation and science and engineering. The story of a bad economy and bad sales for a year or two is what you read in most newspapers. The story of why Toyota and Honda will be dominant companies 20 years from now is their superior management and focus on long term success instead of short term quarterly results.

The BSI-Toyota Collaboration Center, has succeeded in developing a system which utilizes one of the fastest technologies in the world, controlling a wheelchair using brain waves in as little as 125 milliseconds (one millisecond, or ms, is equal to 1/1000 seconds.

Plans are underway to utilize this technology in a wide range of applications centered on medicine and nursing care management. R&D under consideration includes increasing the number of commands given and developing more efficient dry electrodes. So far the research has centered on brain waves related to imaginary hand and foot control. However, through further measurement and analysis it is anticipated that this system may be applied to other types of brain waves generated by various mental states and emotions.

Posted by curiouscat
Categories: Engineering, Products, Research, Robots, Science, Students, Technology
Tags: cool, Engineering, human health, innovation, invention, Japan, management, Products, Robots

Surgeon-engineer advances high-tech healing

Posted on May 3, 2009 Comments (2)

Surgeon-engineer advances high-tech healing

Catherine Mohr, 40, is herself a rare creature. Part surgeon, part engineer, she designs instruments and procedures for laparoscopic, or minimally invasive, surgery as well as the surgery curriculum at Stanford University School of Medicine.
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The spider – better known as the DaVinci surgical robot – was created by the Sunnyvale company Intuitive Surgical Inc., where her husband, Paul Mohr, is an engineer and she is director of medical research. She designed the special surgical instruments that attach securely to the DaVinci’s strong, wristed arms, and has helped to design the next generation of the robot.

She also designed a procedure for using the robot for gastric-bypass surgery. Her paper on the procedure was published in 2006 in Obesity Surgery, a medical journal. “Someone who needs a gastric bypass has a thick abdominal wall,” Mohr explains. “It can take months for incisions to heal, so you want to do the operation through the smallest incision you can.”

The operation is also ergonomically challenging for the surgeon. “What you’re doing inside is very challenging, and you can’t stand terribly close because these patients are so large,” she says. “It seemed to me that this was something we should do with the robot.”

The surgeon uses controllers to drive the laparoscopic instruments held by the robot, and a screen to view the action. “You don’t cut what you can’t see,” she says.

Posted by curiouscat
Categories: Engineering, Health Care, Robots
Tags: engineers, Health Care, Robots

New Yorkers Help Robot Find Its Way in the Big City

Posted on April 17, 2009 Comments (3)

Tweenbots by Kacie Kinzer

I wondered: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it? More importantly, how could our actions be seen within a larger context of human connection that emerges from the complexity of the city itself? To answer these questions, I built robots.
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Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.
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The results were unexpected. Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, “You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”

Very cool, fun and interesting. Cute integration of technology, psychology and an inquisitive scientific mind.

Posted by curiouscat
Categories: Engineering, Research, Robots, Students
Tags: cool, experiment, fun, New York City, psychology, Research, Robots

Honda’s Robolegs Help People Walk

Posted on April 15, 2009 Comments (5)

Honda’s Robolegs Help People Walk

The devices combine sensor-driven motors and weight-bearing chassis to guide strides and support body weight. Though derived from technologies pioneered during the ASIMO’s quarter-century of development, their use could be deeply human, boosting manual laborers or assisting people unable to walk without help.
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The devices are still in the research stage, and Honda has not yet formalized plans to go commercial. If they do, the market could be large, and not only in Japan. The number of Americans aged 65 and older is expected to double by 2030. More than 17 million report difficulty climbing stairs or walking a quarter-mile.

Posted by curiouscat
Categories: Economics, Engineering, Products, Robots, Students
Tags: human health, innovation, Japan, Products, Robots

Robot Independently Applies the Scientific Method

Posted on April 3, 2009 Comments (2)

Robot achieves scientific first by Clive Cookson

A laboratory robot called Adam has been hailed as the first machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of its human creators. Adam formed a hypothesis on the genetics of bakers’ yeast and carried out experiments to test its predictions, without intervention from its makers at Aberystwyth University.

The result was a series of “simple but useful” discoveries, confirmed by human scientists, about the gene coding for yeast enzymes. The research is published in the journal Science.
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Adam is the result of a five-year collaboration between computer scientists and biologists at Aberystwyth and Cambridge universities.

The researchers endowed Adam with a huge database of yeast biology, automated hardware to carry out experiments, supplies of yeast cells and lab chemicals, and powerful artificial intelligence software. Although they did not intervene directly in Adam’s experiments, they did stand by to fix technical glitches, add chemicals and remove waste.
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“Adam is a prototype,” says Prof King. “Eve is better designed and more elegant.” In the new experiments, Adam and Eve will work together to devise and carry out tests on thousands of chemical compounds to discover antimalarial drugs.

Very cool.

Posted by curiouscat
Categories: Engineering, Robots, Science, Technology
Tags: cool, experiment, Robots, scientific inquiry, UK

Robot with Biological Brain

Posted on March 29, 2009 Comments (2)

The Living Robot by Joe Kloc

Life for Warwick’s robot began when his team at the University of Reading spread rat neurons onto an array of electrodes. After about 20 minutes, the neurons began to form connections with one another. “It’s an innate response of the neurons,” says Warwick, “they try to link up and start communicating.”

For the next week the team fed the developing brain a liquid containing nutrients and minerals. And once the neurons established a network sufficiently capable of responding to electrical inputs from the electrode array, they connected the newly formed brain to a simple robot body consisting of two wheels and a sonar sensor.
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At first, the young robot spent a lot of time crashing into things. But after a few weeks of practice, its performance began to improve as the connections between the active neurons in its brain strengthened. “This is a specific type of learning, called Hebbian learning,” says Warwick, “where, by doing something habitually, you get better at doing it.”
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“It’s fun just looking at it as a robot life form, but I think it may also contribute to a better understanding of how our brain works,” he says. Studying the ways in which his robot learns and stores memories in its brain may provide new insights into neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s disease.

Posted by curiouscat
Categories: Engineering, Life Science, Products, Research, Robots, Science, Students, Technology
Tags: brain, cool, experiment, Life Science, Research, Robots, science fiction, UK

Personal Robots Being Developed in Japan

Posted on March 26, 2009 Comments (2)

Robots Lend a Hand in Japan by Tony McNicol

The most numerous, and certainly the most high-profile, service robots in Japan are for entertainment. Ever since 2000 when Honda amazed the world with its walking humanoid Asimo, other Japanese companies have been fast on their heels. Notable examples include Mitsubishi’s lemon yellow home helper Wakamaru, Toyota’s trumpet-playing humanoid, and Murata Manufacturing’s bicycle-riding robot. Although such impressive PR robots are too expensive to sell, Japan also has popular home entertainment robots. The best known to date is Sony’s robot pooch Aibo, which was produced between 1999 and 2006.
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Another potential role for service robots is dealing with Japan’s imminent demographic crisis. A low birthrate and unrivalled longevity mean the number of elderly Japanese will increase dramatically over the coming decades. In the absence of mass immigration (which Japan has been keen to avoid) a severe shortage of caregivers seems inevitable. Some people believe robots are the answer. Takanori Shibata, a senior research scientist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, says that robot caregivers can be divided into physical service and mental service robots. The former are designed to help with tasks such as washing or carrying elderly people, although given the limitations of current technology, not to mention safety concerns, they are still quite a long way from commercialization.

Mental service robots on the other hand are already here. One of the best known is Paro, an interactive robot seal designed by Shibata himself. The sophisticated robot can remember its name and change its behavior depending on how it is treated. It has been extensively tested in homes for elderly people and in hospitals. In 2002 the Guinness Book of Records named Paro as “the world’s most therapeutic robot.” The robot reminds patients of the pets or children they once cared for, says Shibata. “Paro is a kind of trigger to provoke something in the mind of the owner,” he suggests. About 1,000 of the robots, which cost about 3,000 dollars, have been produced since 2004. Overseas sales will begin shortly.

The effective use of personal robots finally seems to be fairly close at hand. Undoubtedly the initial attempts will seem limited. See Clayton Christsen’s ideas on disruptive innovation for an understanding of how I think the adoption will play out. Robots will be poor substitutes for other alternatives but as we experiment with how to make them effective we will figure out niches for which they work well. It is hard to predict what will happen but my feeling is we may finally be a the point where real uses of personal robots stat to take hold and then the growth may surprise us.

Posted by curiouscat
Categories: Economics, Engineering, Products, quote, Robots, Students
Tags: Engineering, innovation, Japan, Products, Robots

Toyota Software Development for Partner Robots

Posted on February 15, 2009 Comments (1)

Toyota Discusses Software Development for Partner Robots

Yamada: What was unique about the software development for the partner robots exhibited at Aichi Expo was the fact that Toyota entirely disposed of its assets from the past.

Toyota owned some software assets because it had been developing partner robots for some time before developing the robots for the exposition. But those assets were all one-offs. No one but the developers themselves could comprehend their architectures.

As Toyota was developing more than one partner robot for the exposition, the number of developers involved increased. Considering that we can never complete any development if we use the past assets that rely on an individual developer’s skill, we made everything, including the platform, from scratch again.

Toyota developed the platform focusing on promoting design review by visualizing the control logic. Therefore, the company thoroughly separated control sequences and algorithms. To be more specific, it used state transition diagrams.

Each algorithm is stored in a different block in a state transition diagram. With such diagrams, developers can easily comprehend the flow of the control and review the design even if they do not understand each algorithm. The company employed this method because each algorithm such as a bipedal walking algorithm is too complicated for anyone but their developers to understand it.

Posted by curiouscat
Categories: Engineering, Products, Robots, Students, Technology
Tags: Engineering, Japan, management, Robots, software engineering

Self Re-assembling Robots

Posted on February 9, 2009 Comments (1)

Cool modular robots can self re-assemble if kicked apart. Shape-shifting robots take form:

DARPA programme manager Mitch Zakin is pursuing what he calls “programmable matter”. These are so-called “mesoscale” mini-machines, a millimetre to a centimetre in size, that can arrange themselves to form whatever shape is desired. Initially, Zakin expects the outcome to be devices the size of small Lego pieces, but as the technology improves the modules and the machines assembled from them should scale down further. Ultimately you could tell a sack of “smart sand” what to do, and the grains would assemble themselves into a hammer, a wrench or even a morphing robotic aircraft. “It’s making machines more like materials, and materials more like machines,” says Daniela Rus, a robotics researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.