Robot Living

At an indoor track at Cornell University, a robot named Ranger has beaten a record previously held by Big Dog from Boston Dynamics.

Ranger is a four legged biped robot and walked for 14.3 miles in under 11 hours without stopping. The previous record held by Big Dog was 12.8 miles.

A robot like Ranger is all about energy and how to maximize  it’s efficiency.  Ranger took a total of 65,185 steps, used a total of 24.5 watts of energy, at an average speed of .60 meters per second to walk for a whopping 14.3 miles and best Big Dog.

Click through to hear and see Andy Ruina, a professor at Cornell, explain how and why they built Ranger.

Link via (News Wise)

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Tags: Cornell University

ROILA is a new language being developed in the Netherlands for communicating with robots.  What is the easiest way for elderly folks and young people to communicate?  Obviously through talking.  Hence, this cool project thought the easiest way to communicate with robots would be through talking.

ROILA is a spoken language for robots. It is constructed to make it easy for humans to learn, but also easy for the robots to understand. ROILA is optimized for the robots’ automatic speech recognition and understanding. We provide open source software that allows your Lego robot to understand ROILA. We are currently also working on enabling your robots to speak ROILA.

Hopefully someday my iRobot vacuum will take verbal commands.   With my luck the robot would be surly.

“Hey iRobot, you missed a spot.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes you did.  Right there, to your left.”

“Oh, that.  Well, if you stopped leaving crap on the floor I wouldn’t have to vacuum it up.”

The folks at ROILA have received a donation of 20 NXT sets and Technic girders from Lego that they aim to give out to children who learn ROILA.

Link via (The NXT Step) via (Make)

Tags: lego, mindstorms, Netherlands, NXT

Say hello to Bina48,  an artificial intelligence living in Vermont.  Her home is in the offices of the   Terasem Movement Foundation founded by Martine Rothblatt.  Bina48 is intelligent enough to carry on a conversation.

Bina48 is modeled on a real person named Bina Rothblatt, who is one of it’s owners and was made by David Hanson of Hanson Robotics. She has over 30 motors and her skin is made of a material called Frubber developed by Hanson Robotics.

The Terasem Movement is a non profit organization interested in artificial intelligence. The Terasem website states the following:

Terasem Movement, Inc. is a 501c3 not-for-profit charity endowed for the purpose of educating the public on the practicality and necessity of greatly extending human life, consistent with diversity and unity, via geoethical nanotechnology and personal cyberconsciousness, concentrating in particular on facilitating revivals from biostasis. The Movement focuses on preserving, evoking, reviving and downloading human consciousness.

Cyberconsciousness and downloading human consciousness? Woah, that’s some pretty heady science fiction type stuff.  Makes me think of the book Neuromancer by William Gibson.

It seems these folks hope one day  technology will exist to help extend our lives.  You can join in on this by joining Lifenaut for a mere one time donation of $8,950.  You then give them some of your cells and upload photos and videos of yourself and create an avatar.

Hopefully one day you will become like Bina48 or better yet, like the artificial intelligence Neuromancer from William Gibson’s book of the same name.

Click through for a New York Times interview with Bina48.

Link via (NYT) via (WPTZ)

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Tags: artificial intelligence, Terasem Movement, vermont

The AQUA2 robot from McGill University in Montreal can move on land, dive and also swim in the water.

The robot is also able to move around in sand and snow, but think the most impressive thing  though, is how it acts in the water.

In the water AQUA2 is able to follow you using gesture based control and can actually hover, kind of like when you tread water to stay in place.

AQUA2 is able to go to a depth of about 120 feet and uses 48 lithium ion batteries for power.  AQUA2 is programmed in C++ using a library called RoboDevel.

Click through for a video.

Link via (Endgadget)
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Tags: mcgill university

Graduate students at the University of Washington have created tiny robots as big as your fingernail and thinner than a dime.

In this photo from the University of Washington, the students have put tiny paperclips onto the robot to show that it can carry up to seven times it’s own weight.

On the underside of the robot are many tiny feet.

Technically it is a centipede, with 512 feet arranged in 128 sets of four. Each foot consists of an electrical wire sandwiched between two different materials, one of which expands under heat more than the other. A current traveling through the wire heats the two materials and one side expands, making the foot curl. Rows of feet shuffle along in this way at 20 to 30 times each second.

These tiny shuffling feet allow the robot to move at a rate of three feet per hour.   Quite impressive when carrying seven times your own weight.

Link via (Science Daily)

Tags: University of Washington