You may not have learned this in school, but Boilerplate, a robot constructed back in 1893, was an instrumental part of many famous historical happenings, as you can clearly see in the video above, which I’m sure is an actual documentary or something. From Teddy Roosevelt to Lawrence of Arabia to Pancho Villa, Boilerplate has seen it all and done even more, and now J.J. Abrams has apparently purchased the rights to make Boilerplate’s story into a feature film. There are basically no more details than just that fact, but if you want a preview, you can just buy the book. Boilerplate: History’s Mechanical Marvel is available on Amazon for $17. [ Boilerplate ]VIA [ Robot Living ] That music, btw, comes from (I think) the spectacular HBO miniseries “From the Earth to the Moon” which you should absolutely watch right now if you haven’t already.

In what probably isn’t a tribute to Spirit (which drove backwards from March of 2006 on due to a broken wheel) Curiosity took its first drive test on Friday at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where it’s undergoing assembly. Powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, the SUV-sized rover will be carrying a much larger science payload than the current Mars rovers are able to. Scheduled to arrive on Mars in August of 2012, Spirit is now officially one meter closer to its destination. One meter down, only 188,500,000,000 meters to go. [ MSL ] VIA [ Discover ]

A week or so ago, we posted about a 2008 study suggesting that humanish robots are a bad, bad idea. However, it’s definitely true that human facial features are great at communicating emotional information to humans, so there’s certainly something to be said for incorporating things like eyes and eyebrows into a robot. Flobi, a robot from Bielefeld University, is a good example of a conscious decision to make a humanoid robot head that is capable of recognizable human expressions while avoiding the Uncanny Valley. Flobi relies on expressive elements that are almost cartoonish in their simplicity: 18 actuators move the eyes, eyelids, eyebrows, and mouth, and there are LEDs in Flobi’s cheeks to let it blush… I say ‘it’ because Flobi’s hair (all of the facial elements, in fact) can be easily changed to let it appear to be male or female. For me, though,that process brings back quite a bit of the uncanny: I find it pretty amazing how much of a difference subtle little things like blinking can make when it comes to how I (personally) relate to humanoid robots. And that’s part of the tricky thing about the Uncanny Valley: there’s a very fine line between seeming human, and seeming too human. As IEEE Spectrum points out, Flobi looks a lot like iCat. Like, a lot. This makes iCat angry: And you don’t want to make iCat angry… [ CIT ] VIA [ IEEE Spectrum ]

Earlier this year we posted about how people are starting to specifically request robot-assisted surgeries as opposed to having ‘just’ a human operate on them. Now, researchers at Duke are working on an entirely autonomous robot arm that can take biopsies on humans based on ultrasound data. It works pretty well, too, at least on the dead turkeys that they tried it out on: “In the latest series of experiments, the robot guided the plunger to eight different locations on the simulated prostate tissue in 93 percent of its attempts.” I’m not entirely sure what happened in that other 7 percent… Most likely a slight miss with minimal consequences for the ex-turkey, as opposed to the robot going berserk and wildly stabbing everything within reach. More importantly, I’m curious as to what what the average “miss” rate is for a human taking a biopsy based on an ultrasound. In any case, the idea here is that robots will eventually (soon, perhaps?) be able to at the very least take care of simple, routine medical procedures which will save patients both time and money. “We’re now testing the robot on a human mannequin seated at the examining table whose breast is constrained in a stiff bra cup,” Smith said. “The breast is composed of turkey breast tissue with an embedded grape to simulate a lesion.” This is making me hungry. Vid, after the jump. Incidentally, turkeys are used because they have similar flesh to humans, and they show up about the same on an ultrasound. Also, they’re tasty. [ Duke ] VIA [ Daily Mail ] Note: the robot in the picture, a DaVinci system, was not the robot being used for this study. And as far as I know, the turkey in the picture wasn’t involved either.

A pair of robotic vehicles from Vislab (artificial vision and intelligent systems lab at the University of Parma) departed Parma, Italy on Tuesday for Shanghai, China. The 100% electric vans will travel 8,000 miles over three months, enduring (hopefully) all kinds of extremes ranging from the downtown Moscow to the Gobi desert, which I’m pretty sure is full of dinosaurs or something. Now, I’m calling these vans semi-autonomous because they’re autonomously following a vehicle that’s being driven by a human. Not that this is an easy task, of course… The vans have been kitted out with the same sort of obstacle detection and avoidance tech as the DARPA Grand and Urban challenge vehicles. At this point, this technology is targeted mostly at goods transport as opposed to letting you take a nap while your car drives you somewhere. Some people, though, don’t really get why this sort of thing is useful or important: “It begs the question why. In Australia, you have big trucks with three or four trailers attached in the desert. Why do you need an autonomous vehicle if you can connect them with a piece of steel?” said Andrew Close, an analyst at IHS Automotive. Well, there’s a reason why that type of thing works in Australia and nowhere else: in Australia, you have a bajillion miles of long, flat, empty road. Most states in the US, on the other hand, limit connected trailers to two. Giving autonomy (or optional semi-autonomy) to vehicles means that you can have as many trailers as is reasonable or convenient. And really, it’s the optional semi-autonomy that’s the most realistically valuable in the short term, as we’ve discussed before. Think about it: on the highway, you spend a LOT of time doing nothing except following the guy in front of you, […]