This site is made possible by member support. ❤️
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
At In Focus, Alan Taylor surveys the state-of-the-art in robotics with a varied selection of photos. For example, here are two Big Dogs frolicking in the robot dog park:
And better yet, Florian Lopes looks as though he’s enjoying his new bionic hand:
Meet RHex. He’s a robot built by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and he can do parkour.
They just have to get him jumping as high as the Sand Flea and they’ll have something. (via digg)
Starting with cubes of four simple materials (bone, tissue, 2 types of muscles) and one simple rule (faster bots have more offspring) results in a surprising amount of complexity among walking robots.
(via buzzfeed)
Someone built a robotic goalkeeper and then someone else had the bright idea to pit reigning best player in the world Lionel Messi against it:
Iker Casillas, your job is in jeopardy. But maybe not quite yet…by the final attempt, Messi seems to have figured out how to send the goalie the wrong way, at least for an instant. (via digg)
It does what it says on the tin.
My favorite part is how it shoots the airplane out at the end. “Be gone, good sir, I am quite done with you!” (thx, Alex)
I don’t want to stand in the way of all science, but I am completely on board with the banning of all research into the creation of a dancing dog robot that throws cinder blocks with ease. Oops, I am too late. And now this is happening.
This place isn’t too far from me in Boston, so if anyone wants to meet up for a little Terminator 2 style future saving, let me know.
This robot with a chainsaw for an arm makes a few cuts into a log and, voila, chairs.
More info here. What’s so terrifying about furniture making? Now imagine this robot with tiny chainsaws on its arms leading a army of BigDog-mounted noodle-slicing robots and sleep well tonight, suckers! (via @curiousoctopus)
NASA is testing something they call SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites) on the International Space Station…they are spherical robots that can fly around the station and perform simple tasks. They were inspired by the floating droid remote that Luke trains with in Star Wars. The most recent test was in December.
The Smart SPHERES, located in the Kibo laboratory module, were remotely operated from the International Space Station’s Mission Control Center at Johnson to demonstrate how a free-flying robot can perform surveys for environmental monitoring, inspection and other routine housekeeping tasks.
In the future, small robots could regularly perform routine maintenance tasks allowing astronauts to spend more time working on science experiments. In the long run, free-flying robots like Smart SPHERES also could be used to inspect the exterior of the space station or future deep-space vehicles.
They are outfitting the Smart SPHERES with Android phones for data collection:
Each SPHERE Satellite is self-contained with power, propulsion, computing and navigation equipment. When Miller’s team first designed the SPHERES, all of their potential uses couldn’t be imagined up front. So, the team built an “expansion port” into each satellite where additional sensors and appendages, such as cameras and wireless power transfer systems, could be added. This is how the Nexus S handset — the SPHERES’ first smartphone upgrade — is going to be attached.
“Because the SPHERES were originally designed for a different purpose, they need some upgrades to become remotely operated robots,” said DW Wheeler, lead engineer in the Intelligent Robotics Group at Ames. “By connecting a smartphone, we can immediately make SPHERES more intelligent. With the smartphone, the SPHERES will have a built-in camera to take pictures and video, sensors to help conduct inspections, a powerful computing unit to make calculations, and a Wi-Fi connection that we will use to transfer data in real-time to the space station and mission control.”
Here’s some video from a past test:
Many of the food robots I’ve featured on the site look like machines. Not so this Chinese noodle -making robot:
Silvery, pulsing eyes…it looks like something out of a Tom Baker-era Doctor Who serial. Fantastic. (via @leesnelgrove)
Well, this is something…an ex-jewel thief decides to unretire and rob people with help from his robot butler. I had to look this up on IMDB to make sure it wasn’t something from Funny or Die or College Humor.
Best robotic sidekick since Mr. Spock. Now reboot Lethal Weapon with Donald Glover and a robot playing the Mel Gibson role. (Yes, I meant Donald. Danny is clearly too old for that shit.)
The trick with the roshambot is that it waits until its opponent has made her choice and then chooses the winning throw in about 1 millisecond. I.e. it cheats.
I wonder what would happen if you put two of these robots against each other? (via @dens)
In the vast cheese warehouses of Europe, robots are employed to flip the cheeses as they age. Here’s a Gruyere flipper:
You’re not going to believe me, but this mushroom processing machine is pretty fascinating. There’s lots of deceptively simple engineering to mechanically manipulate the mushrooms…the auto-alignment and size-sorting bits are especially interesting.
Plus there’s a trance soundtrack. See also how crayons are made, the robotic pancake sorter, and the salami sorting robot. (via @kdern)
Dirk van der Kooij is a designer who uses a low-resoution 3D printer of sorts to print out plastic furniture with plastic recovered from recycled refrigerators.
Images of the finished product are available on his web site as are the chairs themselves, for €840. (via @curiousoctopus)
I followed a link to this video from Twitter. “Oh, a small jumping robot,” I thought, “I bet it hops over a chair or something.” Not even close. Check this out:
Boston Dynamics is at it again…they did the Big Dog and cheetah robots as well. What are the odds that they change their name to Cyberdyne Systems in the next few years? (via @jcn)
Update: I did a quick calculation…if a 6-ft-tall human could jump as high as this robot relative to its height, they could jump 315 feet into the air, high enough to land on the roof of a 30-story building. (If you ignore the scaling issues, that is.)
Amazon announced recently that they bought a company named Kiva for $775 million. In cash. Kiva makes robots for fulfillment warehouses, of which Amazon has many. When I heard this news, I was all, robots are cool, but $775 million? But this short video on how the Kiva robots work made me a believer:
Also, pro-tip, it’s pronounced ro-butt. (via ★interesting)
Flesh and blood cheetahs are the fastest land animals, capable of traveling at more than 70 mph for shorts periods of time. This robotic cheetah can only do 18 mph but could probably go forever and ever until everything on the Earth has been caught and consumed by its steely jaws.
For reference, Usain Bolt’s average speed over 100 meters is ~23 mph, so at least he’s safe…for a little while. (via ★interesting)
Update: Another team working at MIT has built a robotic cheetah that can leap over obstacles on the run.
No word on how the team working on the robotic cheetah that can rip bloody human flesh from the bone is coming along.
You remember the BigDog robotic prototype constructed by Boston Dynamics? Now they have a human robot that can run, do push-ups, and just generally acts pretty human.
Take this robot, some super-realistic human masks, and a Siri-powered iPhone 4S, and we’re in Terminator territory. (via ★interesting)
Watch until at least 45 seconds in.
I wanna see three of these riding a team sprint in a tiny velodrome.
I think I’ve featured this robot on the site before (yep, here it is), but she seems to have acquired some new skills. Throwing the mobile phone into the air and catching it is flat-out unbelievable but I liked the quiet deftness of the hand’s rice tweezing.
See also the universal gripper, the salami sorter, the robot who considers towels, and the pancake sorter. (via ★mouser)
I am unclear on exactly how this works, but it does work amazingly well.
The gripper uses the same phenomenon that makes a vacuum — packed bag of ground coffee so firm; in fact, ground coffee worked very well in the device. But the researchers found a new use for this everyday phenomenon: They placed the elastic bag against a surface and then removed the air from the bag, solidifying the ground coffee inside and forming a tight grip. When air is returned to the bag, the grip relaxes.
(thx, phil)
It’s no secret that I could watch food-sorting robots all day. This salami sorter is no exception:
The good stuff starts around 55 seconds.
Who knew that watching a towel-folding robot could be so funny and fascinating?
I found this on Mike Migurski’s site and I cannot improve upon his description of the video:
There is so much here. The “previously-unseen towel” part of the title, the slightly-femmy movements of the robot, the way the 50X speed-up makes it look like a Svankmajer film, the diligent care with which it smooths out each towel when it’s done, and the palpable shock when it returns to the towel table and there aren’t any left to fold.
This robot can sort pancakes at a rate of over 400 ppm (pancakes per minute).
The action gets going at about 1:15…don’t miss the explanation of the pancake buffer shelf about 2/3s of the way through. (via eat me daily)
Wow. I had no idea that robots could move that quickly. (via justin blanton)
Sure, it looks like Astro Boy with heartburn, but Kenji Yanobe’s Giant Torayan is not the kind of toy you leave with just any kid.
This GIANT TORATAN doll is the ultimate child’s weapon, as it sings, dances, breathes fire, and follows only those orders given by children.
Masterminded at Nagoya Institute of Technology, its Command Device uses voice-recognition technology to differentiate between instructions given by adults versus those given by younger evil geniuses.
Half-dragon, half-Mary Poppins, all awesome.
The Big Picture collects a number of photos of robots…particularly robots interacting with humans. (The third one is particularly freaky/awesome.) I’m wondering how these photos will look 50/60/70 years from now when (presumably) robots are smart & capable enough that they are thought of a new sentient life form (rather than as machines) and are entitled to the rights that humans have.
The best robots of 2008, including soccer players, humanoid bots, and a self-healing robotic chair.
The world’s robot density is highest in Europe, although Japan makes use of robots at twice the rate of any other country.
There are now 1 million industrial robots toiling around the world, and Japan is where they’re the thickest on the ground. It has 295 of these electromechanical marvels for every 10000 manufacturing workers — a robot density almost 10 times the world average and nearly twice that of Singapore (169), South Korea (164), and Germany (163).
When the war with the machines starts, Africa will be humanity’s last stronghold.
First, a fruit fly is tethered to a rod with a cylindrical LED display around it. The display shows geometric patterns that are known to make a fruit fly move left or right - a kind of virtual reality simulator for flies. Since the fly is tethered, it can’t actually move, but it tries to anyway. “The fly’s pretty dumb,” says roboticist Brad Nelson, who created the “flyborg” with colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.
The patterns on the display are triggered by images transmitted from a camera mounted on a miniature robotic car. If the car approaches an obstacle, the display shows the appropriate pattern and the fly reacts accordingly. As it does so, another camera detects minute changes in the movements of its wings. “We measure the lift force and kinematics in real time,” says Nelson.
The goal is to figure out how the fly makes decisions about movement so that those decisions can be replicated by a computer.
Stay Connected