(Credit:
Nippon Institute of Technology)
Classrooms in Japan may soon welcome a new 4-foot-tall educational humanoid robot unveiled by Nippon Institute of Technology and other groups.
It will be used to teach software programming and hardware engineering to students, but will also be demonstrated in elementary schools and nursing homes. It will act as a "teacher" in class along with a human teacher.
As explained in Japanese in the video below, the kid-size bot doesn't have a name yet. With its boyish voice, the robot can be heard asking people to give it a "cool name." It then does some dancing and balancing on one leg.
But some details are available. It tips the scales at 33 pounds and has 21 degrees of mechanical freedom. It's equipped with sensing devices including a camera, accelerometers, and gyroscopes, and has a small projector in its head. It can be programmed with Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio.
The price tag is about $132,000, according to Robot Watch.
Its body was engineered by Tokyo robot firm ZMP, known for its small but stylish Nuvo bot. The underlying e-nuvo Humanoid platform is intended for education and research, and is priced around $77,000. The exterior was designed by Znug Design studio.
More photos at the Robot Watch page (in Japanese).
No word yet on how the robot will punish bad students.
(Credit:
Video screenshot by Tim Hornyak/CNET)
Say salam wa aleikum to an Arabic-speaking android developed at United Arab Emirates University and billed as the first of its kind in the world. It could enter mass production to help people at shopping malls.
The Ibn Sina robot, named after an 11th century philosopher, can recognize faces, converse with people by speaking in classical Arabic, connect to the Internet, and retrieve information. As seen in the video below, it can also exchange kisses with people.
Software for Ibn Sina was developed by a team led by computer science assistant professor Nikolaos Mavridis, with the mechanics by Hanson Robotics. Mavridis says some companies have approached his lab and asked about using the turban-wearing, bearded bot in shopping malls or as a receptionist.
Doubtless Ibn Sina, known as Avicenna in English, would have been pleased.
Thomas and Janet practice a kiss, and fortunately for us, there is no tongue involved.
(Credit: Taiwan Tech)With robots now doing everything from strutting the fashion catwalk to greeting hotel guests, it was only a matter of time before our humanoid friends started engaging in public displays of affection. Exhibit A: Thomas and Janet, two performance bots who made out publicly in front of hundreds during a December 2008 robotic production of "Phantom of the Opera" in Taiwan (racy robot lip-lock video is only making the rounds now).
A team at National Taiwan University of Science and Technology spent three years developing and programming the smooching bots, which with the help of servo motors that pull at the face and mouth, can form six expressions--fewer than the highly expressive Einstein Robot, but sometimes sacrifices must be made for romance. The team used manual molding, non-contact 3D face scanning, and 3D face morphing to make the movements realistic.
Li-Chieh Cheng, a PhD student at Taiwan Tech's Intelligent Robot Lab, told IEEE Spectrum at the recent International Conference on Service and Interactive Robotics that performances like the one featuring Thomas and Janet have the potential to bring advanced robotics to a broader audience.
"Available service robots could be very expensive and are only used at certain places. However, tickets for theater performance are affordable for everyone," Cheng said.
Cheng noted that last December's performance did hit some glitches when motors malfunctioned unexpectedly and signals on walkie-talkies used by stagehands interfered with the network that controls the robots.
Thomas and Janet are clearly going to need to meet up for more kissing practice. To which we say, "Get a room!"
And the robot arms race continues.
Toyota has enhanced one of its Partner Robots to make it run at 7 km/hour, slightly faster than Honda's Asimo, which learned to run at 6 km/hour back in 2005.
Partner Robots are usually presented as mechatronic musicians, playing violins or trumpets. It seems the automaker is keen on matching Honda in the development of an all-purpose humanoid.
Japanese are keen to build next-generation service robots for their aging population amid the country's shrinking workforce.
The video shows an "experiment" in which the Toyota bot exhibits very robust balance control--it remains upright even when pushed back forcefully, recovering its balance easily while hopping from foot to foot like a boxer in the ring.
In the running experiment, the machine shows an exaggerated forward lean to compensate for forward motion. Asimo is more erect when running, as seen in this ad.
High-speed footage of the Toyota Partner Robot running shows both its feet off the ground at the same time for less than a second. Honda managed that four years ago, but it was building on 20 years of Asimo development.
Toyota's only been in the game since 2004.
May the best humanoid win.
When it's not enough to let your iPhone control your life, you can have it control a robot.
An enterprising tinkerer in Japan has turned an iPhone 3GS into a humanoid robot by wiring it to a mechanical body.
Meet "Robochan."
Check out the video. Robochan is perhaps disturbing, but undeniably cute. The anime face and leek-waving are nods to Hatsune Miku, a character created for Yamaha's Vocaloid singing synthesizer application. Hatsune is a virtual idol in Japan; one of her albums topped the Oricon music chart last month.
Robochan consists of a 3GS wired to a Kondo Kagaku KHR-2 HV kit robot through its doc connector. The 3GS serves as the controller for the humanoid body, a popular kit which retails for about $900 with much assembly required.
Robochan can speak, dance, wake you up at a preset time, learn motions taught by hand, and react when its screen is touched. Its creator has also wired the iPod touch to a robot, as seen here.
Via Pink Tentacle
Welcome to Far-flung Tech, an exploration of far-out and faraway technology!
All eyes were on the stunning solar eclipse this week, but the Japanese were mesmerized by a new star on the catwalk.
Fashion designer Yumi Katsura showed her latest wedding dresses in Osaka including a gown sported by the government's newly developed "cybernetic human," the HRP-4C, which Crave first told you about in March.
4C slowly shimmied down the 10-meter catwalk to the beat of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean." She turned to look at attendees and said, "I've put on a wedding dress for the first time. I'm very happy today to wear this dress by Yumi Katsura."
At a photo op later on, the blushing bride stood next to Katsura and blinked at photographers snapping her picture. Check it out in the video below.
Organizers were billing the event as the first of its kind in the world, and I can't recall another example of a humanoid robot showing off wedding apparel in a fashion show.
It also demonstrated how the Japanese continue to nurture a playful spirit in their approach to robotics. While other countries are building Terminator-style killing machines, Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) created 4C to work in the "entertainment industry." Perhaps a dubious use of funds by a deeply indebted state, the project was announced with the admission that "(1) robots walking on two feet only have little commercial value, (2) the unit price is very high, and (3) if it falls, it may be seriously damaged."
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Oh, what a tangled web we weave/When dextrous robots we conceive.
(Credit: Tim Ferguson/Silicon.com)The path to the eventual robot domination of humankind may begin with a simple game of rock, paper, scissors.
A robot called Berti (short for Bristol Elumotion Robotic Torso 1) showed off its skill at the game last week at London's Science Museum, randomly generating one of the three hand shapes and using sensors to tell whether the outcome was a win, loss, or draw. It's apparently quite adept at moving its fingers and thumb in a variety of ways.
Obviously, the next skill to master is thumb wrestling.
Check out photos of Berti, along with a smiling bot-head named Erwin, from our colleagues at Silicon.com.
Reem-B humanoid robot
(Credit: Pal Technology Robotics)A new humanoid robot called Reem-B was unveiled on Wednesday at an event on Reem Island in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emerites.
The Reem-B robot from Pal Technology Robotics is capable of face recognition, speech interaction, biped walking, traversing stairs, and sitting (see video below). It can also recognize and pick up objects, as well as evaluate and map out a room to better navigate it.
Reem-B stands at 4'10" (1.47 meters) tall and weighs about 132 pounds (60Kg). It can carry up to 26 pounds (12Kg) in its arms and walk at a speed of 1 mph (1.5Km/h). It can also climb stairs. Using a main CPU that consists of a Core 2 Duo (1.66GHz) and a Geode (500MHz), the robot can operate for about 120 minutes before its battery needs to be recharged.
By comparison, Honda's Asimo robot is slightly shorter and lighter, at 4 feet, 3 inches tall, and weighing 119 pounds. The Honda robot is also a bit faster, with a running capability of 4 mph, compared to Reem-B's 1 mph walking speed.
However, where Asimo claims 34 degrees of freedom, Reem-B claims to have 41 degrees of freedom, making it more flexible with movement.
Pal Technology Robotics began posting photos and some video footage of Reem-B on its site in April, but the robot was not officially unveiled to the public until Wednesday.
Pal Technology Robotics is a subsidiary of the Pal Technology Group, which produces power and desalination plants, and is part the Royal Group, an Abu Dhabi, UAE-based conglomerate.
While Pal Robotics Technology is officially headquartered in Abu Dhabi, the team responsible for developing Reem-B actually works out of an apartment located in the center of Barcelona, Spain.
The team of mostly Spanish scientists is led by Davide Faconti, 29, who is from Italy and has been chronicling the progress of both the first generation Reem-A robot and the newest Reem-B robot in his personal blog.
The Reem-B team led by Davide Faconti (right of robot in white shirt) operates out of an apartment in Barcelona, Spain.
(Credit: Pal Technology Robotics)
i-Sobot: 6.5 inches of robotic fury.
(Credit: Amazon.com)iPod or i-Sobot? For just a little bit more than an 80GB iPod Classic, you can now preorder Tomy's tiny-but-impressive bipedal robot on Amazon.com.
The 6.5-inch tall, $300 i-Sobot has already been available in Japan for a while, and it's slated to hit U.S. stores in October.
The miniature robot uses three AAA batteries to power the 17 servo motors for its joints and limbs, three separate CPUs to control its voice and movement, and two gyroscopic sensors, which give it a pretty good sense of balance. The robot can perform such nimble actions as standing on one leg and doing the wave, doing somersaults, and busting out a few push-ups.
i-Sobot has a few modes, as well: a voice-command mode, in which it responds to 10 spoken commands; a programmable mode, where you can string up to 80 movements in a row; and a remote-control mode, where you just move it with the included controller.
Words don't really do it as much justice as Tomy's demo video and various YouTube clips do. Take a look at i-Sobot in action.
[Via I4U and Robots Rule.]
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