iCub is a robot designed to study cognition and learning, and his latest talent is dynamic ball catching. Rather than being programmed to do this, iCub gets ‘taught’ by a human, who makes catching motions while being hooked up to some motion encoding hardware. This approach allows iCub to dynamically adapt to variable ball trajectories, which is the kind of thing that happens all of the time outside of the lab, as it were. Obviously, iCub needs to speed up a bit if he wants to be useful in a baseball game, and he certainly doesn’t have anything on the speed or precision of robot hands like this or this. But, iCub also doesn’t depend on an array of high speed cameras, and he also doesn’t depend on a constant trajectory for the ball, making him far more adaptable. At this point, I’m not entirely sure if iCub needs faster hardware or software or both, but the potential is here for something pretty cool in the near future. [ RobotCub iCub ]

This video of an ornithopter from Harvard University and the University of Tokyo has been making its way around the internet, and while it’s pretty amazing to see those bio-inspired flapping wings, I thought I’d share a slightly different perspective on this ‘robotic butterfly.’ Wired magazine spoke with Robert Dudley, a professor at UC Berkeley who specializes in biomechanics. Butterfly flight is somewhat mysterious because it’s roughly the opposite of “as the crow flies.” Butterflies flit about rather than flying in a straight line. That actually costs them more energy, Dudley said, so scientists assume their looping flying serves some evolutionary purpose. “The advantage is that it’s thought to be an anti-predator behavior,” Dudley said. “The claim is that irregular flight paths are a permanent signal of prey unprofitability.” The Japanese researchers somewhat capture this oscillating type of flight with their plastic-winged flyer, but Dudley argued that the differences between the bot and a real butterfly are so great as to invalidate the biological lessons the researchers try to draw. “There is nothing fundamentally wrong with this approach but it severely limits any claims to the biology,” Dudley said. This is really interesting, from an evolutionary point of view… Basically, butterflies flit about randomly like they do because it makes them a pain in the butt to catch. The extra energy that they expend doing this is made up for by the fact that they don’t get eaten as frequently. Anyway, back to robots. It seems to me as though the scope of this particular research has been somewhat misemphasized… The researchers look to have been experimenting with the dynamics of butterfly wings, as opposed to attempting to create a robotic butterfly that flies like a real one. Specifically, they were looking at the wing veins, and as it turns […]

To be fair, some of PR2’s Poolshark programming team look to be pretty terrible at pool, but that doesn’t make it any less impressive that in only five days, PR2 learned how to hold and shoot a pool cue, recognize ball locations, select the best shot, and then sink it. If you’re wondering what this robot can’t do, the answer seems to be nothing (besides using stairs and round door knobs). Willow Garage has two more of these week long ‘hackathons’ planned this month, which will include teaching PR2 how to push a cart (meh) and fetching drinks from a fridge (yes please). A robot that can play pool and fetch me beer? Hellooooo new best friend. [ Willow Garage ]