Remember how Chief Cook tried to cheat at pong at ICRA in 2008 by going “hey, look over there, a dancing robot!” Well, now we know what he was pointing at. If you want more (you want more, right?) head over to Eric Sauser’s website to watch a video of Chief Cook dancing all around Switzerland (complete with table dances) to some sweet, sweet Buffalo Springfield. [ LASA @ EPFL ] [ BeatBots ]

Well, this is pretty awesome: You’re actually watching the extent of iCub’s learning process: it took the robot all of 8 trials to figure out how to hit the center of the bullseye. iCub is using a learning algorithm called ARCHER (Augmented Reward Chained Regression), which is optimized for tasks that have an easily definable goal and measurable progression towards that goal. Basically, hitting the center of the target equates to a maximum reward, and the algorithm builds off of past experience to estimate how to alter iCub’s hand positions to improve the aim of the arrow. In this case, the distance between iCub and the target is only 3.5 meters, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be scaled up to larger distances. Or bigger arrows. Or rocket launchers. This robot experiment was conducted by Dr. Petar Kormushev, Dr. Sylvain Calinon, and Dr. Ryo Saegusa at the Italian Institute of Technology (the same guys who brought you robot pancake flipping). You can read a bit more about it at the link below. [ Robot Archer iCub ] Thanks Dr. Kormushev!

That elephant trunk robot arm thing from Festo that we spotted back in April has been fleshed out a bit, and if you ever wondered which robotic arm has the most practice handling giant eggs, well, you won’t after watching the video. I imagine that part of the reason that they chose eggs is to highlight how safe the arm is: since it’s not made of metal and uses air pressure instead of geared motors as its actuation system, you’re much less likely to get your skull fractured by a rogue movement. Unfortunately, the downside of using air pressure (besides the inevitable complexity of the valve system) is that precision movement becomes quite difficult. Festo probably leads the field when it comes to fine manipulation with air powered muscles, but still, you can see from the video that the arm isn’t that great at precise tasks. One solution (that some other groups are looking into) is to combine air muscles for macro scale movement with a wrist and gripper powered by conventional servos. That way, you’d get the best of both worlds, at the expense of, well, expense… But hey, nobody said robots are cheap. And they’re most definitely not. [ Festo Bionic Handling Assistant ]

For Discover Magazine’s 30th anniversary, they’re posting a series of predictions from eminent scientists about what’s going to happen over the next 30 years. One of these scientists is Rodney Brooks, a professor of robotics at MIT and CTO of iRobot, and he’s got some interesting things to say (besides the all too familiar “robots right now are like computers in the 80s”): One of the great things about the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, which my company iRobot designed, is that it’s too cheap not to be autonomous. Military robots right now are too expensive to be autonomous—you can’t afford to have them screw up. If the Roomba misses a spot, no big deal, it can find it later. So there will be a lot more robot autonomy, but surprisingly it will start out at the low end. It will trickle up to the high end over time. Too cheap not to be autonomous… The ‘trickle up’ idea for robotics isn’t something I’ve heard people talk about much. The conventional way of thinking is that expensive and complex robots with expensive and complex sensors will provide the origins of autonomy, and then as the hardware gets cheaper and more accessible, robots offering the same autonomous capabilities will also get cheaper and more accessible. After all, this is what happens with computers. Brooks is right, though, in that to some extent, the more expensive a robot is, the less likely we are to trust it entirely to itself. In order for true autonomy to trickle up from the bottom, however, we’re going to have to overcome the hardware limitations and start getting access to more technology like the $25 SLAM system in the Neato XV-11. Cars will certainly be more robotic. There will be many more robots in our houses, in […]