When you think of a massage robot, you probably think of something that’s humanoid, using hands to give a human a traditional massage. Robots, however, are best at being robots and doing things in robot-y ways, and all you really need for a massage is movement and pressure. WheeMe is a cute little robot that provides both by driving around your body on knobbly rubber wheels. At only 240 grams, WheeMe isn’t heavy enough to do a painful and fulfilling job, but I can imagine that it probably feels pretty good, at the very least like having someone run their fingers along your back. The especially clever bit about WheeMe is that it somehow knows how not to plunge to its death off of your shoulders… From the sound of things, it uses tilt sensors to keep its center of gravity in a safe place, but otherwise roams around more or less randomly. https://youtu.be/sBpg8ixEbCg WheeMe will be on display at CES in January, and we’ll be there to test it out (extensively) in person. There’s no word yet on price, but I can’t imagine it’ll be very expensive, although I’ve definitely been wrong about this kind of thing before. [ Dreambots ] VIA [ IEEE ]

This video neatly demonstrates the utility of a jumping robot. EPFL’s jumper is simple, small, and cheap, but it’s able to rapidly negotiate an obstacle course that would be otherwise impassible by anything except a flying robot. The robot plus its self-righting roll cage weighs 14 grams and measures 18 centimeters in diameter. It can jump over 60 centimeters high, which at over four times its own height, is definitely respectable. To steer, the jumping part of the robot is actually able to rotate around inside its roll cage to launch in any direction. Simple but effective. I remember back in early 2008 when we first posted about this robot, and I wrote: “Yes, it’s not exactly controllable. And yes, it doesn’t exactly land right-side up. But these are minor quibbles, and they’re being worked on.” Quibbles solved. Nice job, EPFL. Now just make it fly… [ EPFL ]

We know that President Obama likes robots. We also know that President Obama is (at least little) scared of robots. On his recent trip to Japan, Barack came face to face with both Paro and HRP-4C, and it goes just about how you’d expect: I’m with ya, buddy… Just back away slowly or she’ll snap your neck. VIA [ CrunchGear ]

Artificial intelligence systems are good at tackling problems that can be solved using brute force, like chess… All the computer has to do is calculate out every possible permutation of moves and pick the best one. They’re also pretty good at games like poker, where even with incomplete information, a computer can make a move that is statistically ‘best.’ And lastly, they’re good at making decisions far more quickly than a human. When you combine all of these separate characteristics into one game, things get exponentially more complex, but also much more like real life. And this is why people are trying to teach computers how to play StarCraft, at a level where they can compete with even the best human players. UC Santa Cruz hosted the 2010 StarCraft AI Competition, which put AI programs through a series of different StarCraft testing scenarios to determine the most effective AI system at micromanagement, small scale combat, tech limited games, and of course full gameplay. The video above shows a bunch of highlights; especially notable is the absolutely brutal use of mutalisks by the eventual AI winner, UC Berkeley’s Overmind. The last clip in the highlight video shows an AI taking on a world class human player, who wins handily. It’s only a matter of two or three years before humans have no chance against programs like these, however… And the reason (I think) is quite straightforward: the computer can micromanage every single unit it owns, on every part of the map, at the same time. A human can’t. Once the AI reaches a competent level of strategy and unit use (it’s not there yet), we’re screwed, because the AI can just launch multiple simultaneous micromanaged attacks. There are lots more videos of the different AI programs competing against each other on […]