Well, it’s official. Crabfu is a Modern Marvel:

Congrats!

[ Crabfu Steamworks ]

Catching fish just got a whole lot easier. Researchers at NYU-Poly’s Dynamical Systems Laboratory have found that schools of golden shiners have no problem letting robot fish take over leadership roles when it comes to schooling, as long as the bots don’t look (or act) in ways that strike the fish as, you know, fishy.

Yeah, I went there.

Professor Maurizio Porfiri and his colleagues figured out that the real fish decide whether or not to school based on visual cues as well as how the water is moving. If the conditions are right, the fish will look for a big, decisive fish to follow, and they don’t care at all if that fish is a robot. This particular robot fish uses ionic polymers that swell and shrink in response to electrical stimulation to power its tail, resulting in reliable, silent, lifelike motion.

Researchers suggest that this technology could be used to steer schools of fish away from hydroelectric turbines. And, you know, that’s nice and all, but let’s think outside the tank for a minute…We now have the capability to use robots to control schools of fish. We have come to a point, as a society, where we can choose to use these powers for good, or for evil. Will fish robots lead schools of mackerel into out nets to feed humanity, or will they lead schools of piranhas into our swimming pools to kill us all? Either way, I smell a feature film.

[ NYU-Poly ] VIA [ Futurity ]

We posted about three different telepresence robots yesterday: the Anybots QB, the Willow Garage Texai, and the Vgo. Telepresence is great in concept, but as Erico Guizzo discussed a bit, it’s a strange combination of being somewhere and not being somewhere, and interactions with people are different in ways that range from subtle to drastic. Willow Garage has been using Texai in their office for quite a while; one of their employees, Dallas Goecker, ‘commutes’ daily from Indiana to California via Texai. So, they’ve been figuring out some of these social rules as they go, to the point where some things are now a part of the Texai communication software:

Here are a few built-in bits of etiquette:

Texai Rule #1: If you see me, I see you. Explanation: It’s about two-way communication. Implications: The cameras face forward because the screen faces forward. The pilots are only allowed to drive the Texai once they’ve shared their video stream.

Texai Rule #2: Texai do not record audio or video. Explanation: It’s about face-to-face communication.

More, after the jump. Continue reading »

We go to go to Willow Garage’s PR2 graduation party last week in person, but Erico Guizzo over at IEEE Automaton was even luckier: he attended in person, in a Texai telepresence robot. Erico wrote up a great post on his blog about the whole experience, and it’s definitely worth a read.

You just use the mouse to hold and drag a little red ball and the robot moves. You can also make the head camera point in different directions, or switch to an auxiliary camera that shows the robot’s wheels, to help while navigating through furniture and feet.

Learning how to drive is easy. But safety first! Willow makes new Texai users watch a video showing all the things you should not do with the robot — drive down a stairway, let children ride on it, stick a screwdriver into its body.

Sounds like an exciting video.

Incidentally, we found out that Texai will be available for purchase later this summer (followed by PR2 in the fall). They wouldn’t specify a price, but I would expect it to be somewhere between the $6000 Vgo and the $15000 QB.

Read more over on IEEE Automaton, where you’ll find out which Mythbuster couldn’t stop laughing at the Texai.

[ IEEE Automaton ]

In what may be (but probably isn’t) just a coincidence, a third telepresence robot has made a (pre) commercial appearance in as many weeks. This robot is called Vgo, and… Well, it does telepresence. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but you get on your computer on one end, connect to the robot, and then drive it around while looking through its cameras. Sensors keep you from running into stuff or falling down stairs, and it’ll run all day on one battery charge. The biggest news, at this point, is that the Vgo is only supposed to cost $5000. Plus a mandatory support contract of $1200 a year. So, $6000.

The Boston Globe has a nice piece on Vgo… There aren’t many more technical details, but I did find this interesting:

Two analysts I spoke with differed on the potential for robotic videoconferencing. Rob Enderle, a technology analyst at the Enderle Group who has written about the slow spread of traditional videoconferencing systems, said that “the closer we get to simulating being there, the better an alternative to travel it will become.’’

But Dan Kara, president of the publishing company Robotics Trends in Framingham, said, “I’m not quite sold on mobile telepresence. How is it that much better than having someone at the remote site carry around a netbook computer with a free copy of Skype on it?’’

The whole minion+laptop+Skype thing is exactly the point we made back when Anybots’ QA was introduced at CES for $30k. Obviously, a telepresence robot is much better than minion+laptop+Skype, but the question is, is it really that much better in terms of cost effectiveness? At the $6k price point, perhaps. Or maybe that’s not the question… Maybe the question should be, how much hardware is required to simulate being somewhere else to the extent that is necessary to make paying for a robotic telepresence solution a practical idea? I don’t have the answer, but hopefully the consumer market will, now that there are (or soon will be) three different telepresence robots available for people to purchase.

[ Vgo ] VIA [ Boston Globe ] VIA [ Texasalpha ]

We first introduced you to Anybots’ QA telepresence robot back in January of 2009 at CES. QA was pretty slick looking, with features like a bendy waist and an LCD tie and a pricetag of about $30k. QB, a stripped down slimmer version of QA showed up about 9 months later, and now Anybots has announced the official launch of QB.

All QB needs to be fully functional is you plus a computer on one end, and it plus wireless internet on the other. It has a top speed of 3.5 mph and will run for a solid eight hours per charge. The Anybots QB telepresence robot will be available this fall for $15,000, which seems like a lot… But, compared to the cost of (say) hiring a new employee and paying for them to relocate, or flying people back and forth across the country all the time, a $15k telepresence robot may make sense for a lot of businesses.

[ Anybots QB ]

A couple weeks ago, we posted a new video from Lockheed Martin featuring their badass Samarai NAV. We weren’t entirely clear on the status of the project, since the continuation phase of the DARPA contract for which the SAMARAI was originally developed was awarded to AeroVironment for their hummingbird robot.

So, we asked Lockheed Martin.

Kingsley Fregene, principal investigator for the Samarai program at Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories, answered our questions.

-What’s the current status of the Samarai project?

Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories (ATL) is currently designing and prototyping a family of mono-wing vehicles as part of our Samarai program. There are currently two versions built, a 30 inch flyer and a 12 inch flyer, and both are roughly the same design. The larger version completed flight tests, flying both autonomous and human-guided flights, last year and helped collect valuable information used to design the smaller version. The smaller version took flight for the first time in late 2009 and is currently still in flight test, it is also flying both operator guided and autonomous modes.

-What made Lockheed decide to continue the project after not being awarded the DARPA contract?

Our team completed Phase 1 of DARPA’s Nano Air Vehicle (NAV) Program and we did not move on to Phase II. Our leadership and program team looked at the research completed during the NAV program as well the future research and development plans and decided to extend the program through internal research. Since then, the team has furthered their work significantly, and is building mono-wing flyers in decreasing sizes. Currently, we are testing a 12 inch flyer.

-What features set Samarai apart from other micro/nano air vehicles, and why was this particular design chosen?

The Samarai is inherently stable in hover, mechanically simple and has very few moving parts. This makes it a very robust aerodynamically clean airframe, just like nature’s samaras. It does not depend on fragile feathers, delicate wings or precision moving parts to operate. This design was chosen because of its versatility, ease of operation, multiple launch and recovery options (even in tight spaces) and its ability to hover and take-off/land vertically. The rotation of the entire aircraft offers opportunities to achieve omni-directional sensing in a much simpler, lighter-weight and cheaper package.

-What’s next for Samarai, and how is the final version of Samarai going to be different from the versions we’ve seen so far?

There will be a demonstration of outdoor-indoor flight during the same mission later this year and further technology development and airframe optimization. No decision has been made about the final vehicle design.

-What’s the coolest thing about the Samarai project?

The opportunity to develop an aircraft that flies like one of nature’s winged seeds is very cool. Whereas the maple seed only auto-rotates and has no control over where it ends up, we can precisely control where we want the Samarai to go – this is an improvement on what nature offers us!

These are some very good points, especially about the simplicity and reliability of the airframe (compared to, say, AeroVironment’s NAV) as well as the capacity for omni-directional sensing… It’s no wonder that Lockheed Martin decided to continue the project; there’s a great deal of potential here. Personally, I’m a big fan of bio-inspired robots, and I love how Samarai has taken a simple but very efficient biological design and (as they point out) improved on it.

We’ll be keeping you up to date as this project progresses.

[ Lockheed Martin ATL ]

Yeah, it’s a klunky title, but that’s pretty much what the APOBS (Anti-Personnel Obstacle Breaching System) is, as far as I can tell… A cute little rocket pulls a big long strand of explosive cord out over obstacles (like a bunch of barbed wire or a minefield), a cuter little parachute at the end of the cord keeps the cord from just taking off after the rocket without risking the robot, and then KERBLAMMO, said obstacles and mines are cleared. The whole APOBS system fits on top of an iRobot Warrior 710, which we saw delivering PackBots through windows at AUVSI last year.

[ iRobot Warrior 710 ]

Every once in a while, we get to see a video of a robot doing something that makes us think “OMG WTF THAT’S WICKED CRAZY IMPOSSIBLE!!1!!” And then, we remember that crazy stuff is entirely possible, because we’re talking about robots, and we have to stop thinking about what is and is not possible in terms of human capabilities.

This is one of those videos:

I don’t have much more info for you than what’s in the video, unfortunately, but it does look like these maneuvers (while obviously autonomous) are currently restricted to an area with a whoooole bunch of sensors that can tell the robot where it is with an accuracy (and frequency) that’s probably pretty impressive.

If you remember, we’ve seen both autonomous acrobatics and autonomous landing on slopes by UAVs, but nothing like this… The precision of these maneuvers is just totally completely nuts.

[ GRASP Lab ] VIA [ DIY Drones ]

Remember how Willow Garage decided that it would be kinda cool to give away 10 11 PR2 robots to deserving research institutions worldwide to mess around with? Last night was the official PR2 graduation, where the winning teams got to meet (and dance with) the PR2s that they’ll be taking home with them to do incredibly awesome things. We’ll be keeping you up to date on all of that, of course, but meanwhile, enjoy some pics and video straight from the party at Willow Garage, after the jump. Continue reading »