Robotic Blogs

The FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) robot competition kicked off the 2007 season by announcing the playing field challenge and parts kits for this year's contest.

The high school teams are given six weeks to design and build their competition robots for the first round of the competition.

According to the press release, over 32,500 students from 1300 teams will be participating this year.

Excerpts:

In this year’s game, “Rack ‘N’ Roll,” students’ robots are designed to hang inflated colored tubes on pegs configured in rows and columns on a 10-foot high center “rack” structure. Extra points are scored by robots being in their home zone and lifted more than 4” off the floor by another robot before the end of the 2 minute and 15 second match.

In 1992, the FIRST Robotics Competition began with 28 teams and a single 14 x 14 foot playing field in a New Hampshire high school gym. This season, over 1,300 teams will participate. Thirty-seven regional competitions will lead up to the 2007 FIRST Championship at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, April 12-14.

USFIRST.org

Not much information about this yet but it looks really fun.

Meccano is introducing a remote controlled Erector Set robot kit that runs on treads. It has a webcam and can communicate over wifi.
Meccano is introducing it at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

I am looking forward to more details. The Erector SpeedPlay line of kits includes motors and some USB downloadable instructions and are much cheaper than the similar VEX robot kits.

If they have a smart enough processor they could really give LEGO NXT, at $250, a run for their money.

Meccano was once a competitor of Erector in the early 1900's but has owned the Erector brand since the 1990's.

There are some really cool and relatively cheap Erector sets out there these days but they seem to have fallen out of fashion. Check out some of the kits at the Erector Set page at Roboteria.

I4U News - Spyke Wi-Fi Spy Robot Debuts at CES 2007

UPDATE: spykeworld.com

The Korean Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) and a consortium of tech companies have introduced their latest entry into the growing family of home robots.
ROMI understands voice and wireless commands and can communicate back via voice or wireless.
It has video cameras and send live video to your cell phone or PC. It also has tracking and mapping so it knows where it is.

The Korean government has been working on a program to get a robot in every home by 2020. The network enable 'ubiquitous robot companion' workers will help households with care for children and elderly, keeping updated on the news and weather reports and other duties as required.

Related:
Eldercare robots
CUBO urc
Robot in every home by 2020
Koreans to work for robots

Korean research institute, companies make smart, ubiquitous robot | Korea.net News

Akihabara news

Technology Review asked members of their list of young innovators for 2006 to tell what they are hoping for in 2007.

Researcher Paris Smaragdis, a researcher at Mitsubishi's MERL in Cambridge, Massachusetts, spoke up on behalf of machine listening research.

He says that the quest for machines that can mimic people has focused on vision to the detriment of machine listening research.

But hearing is important for a lot of tasks. You can hear your baby cry from upstairs; you can hear the car you didn't see approaching you in the pedestrian crosswalk; and you can hear that not-so-friendly dog growling behind your back. Machines can do their own set of valuable hearing tasks. They can listen for survivors in a collapsed building's rubble; they can help soldiers locate who shot at them; they can listen for breathing problems in patients in intensive care; and they can try to filter out that annoying neighbor who loves to sing really loudly in the shower.
Machine learning, AI, and classical computer-science algorithms are deeply rooted in a visual way of thinking that does not extend naturally to reasoning about sound.

So keep your mind and ears open. You might not see much of hearing machines today, but you'll be hearing about them soon.

Technology Review: Hearing Machines

There have been some very significant advances in robot technology and applications this year. There is strong belief that we are witnessing the beginnings of what will become an intimate and essential part of our lives. (See Bill Gates' thoughts in Scientific American) The robot revolution has begun. We humans alive today will be both the benefactors and victims of the coming changes.

For a robot to be successful it must have the right balance of technology and utility. In selecting the Robot Of The Year for 2006 we looked for this balance.
Many of the achievements of robot science this year solved some extremely complex problems. There is no denying that the technology is advancing rapidly. However, in selecting a Robot of the Year we were looking for examples of robots that accomplished more than incremental change. We focused on robots that created a new future. We looked for robots that may have come from the future.

I guess our strict criteria is why the Robot Gossip Robot of the Year for 2006 does not come from a university research lab, government engineering project, industrial, electronics or software giant. The winner of Robot Gossip Robot of the Year for 2006 was created by an artist.

Robot Gossip Robot of the Year 2006

The Robot of the Year is Beggar (Zicar) by Slovenian artist Saso Sedlacek. It first appeared in Robot Gossip in January 2006

Beggar is described as “a robot for the materially deprived.” It is built from discarded computer parts for little or no cost. It is designed to attract and interact with people and beg for alms.


It is made from four personal computer boxes and uses CD drives for begging hands and a computer screen for its sad face.
There have been two of the robots built. The first was used in Slovenian shopping malls. The second, Beggar 2.0, practiced on the streets of Tokyo.

What makes the Beggar robot so notable is they way it combines so many of the functions for which robots are used and also brings the technology into the hands of the very common human.

Some of the functions of robots today that are fulfilled by Zicar are:

Automation- robots can replace people for boring and repetitive tasks.

Telepresence - the materially deprived owner of the beggar robot could actually operate more than one robot to leverage their efforts to more locations.

Perform hazardous and dangerous tasks - Robots are used to perform jobs where humans would be in danger. In this case the Beggar robot is stationed in an upscale mall where a human panhandler would be most certainly ejected or even arrested.

Extending human abilities - Robots are used for scaling. Generally this means geometric scaling like working on very small things inside living cells or on silicon microcircuits. Or scaling up to mine tons of ore or load cargo ships. In this case the scaling is more metaphorical. The robot extends the dignity of the beggar into the realm of the wealthy shoppers. The ‘importance’ of a homeless person is scaled up to the level of the well-to-do.


Most importantly, the robot Beggar mediates the relationship between people. Robots that form relationships with people or between people is the area where we will see the most exciting and challenging innovations for robots in the coming years. As robots move out of the factories and into our homes they will need to be able to understand and adapt to the human interface. The Beggar robot creates a more comfortable ‘user interface’ between the wealthy patrons at the shopping mall and the materially deprived person living on the fringe of society.

Congratulations to Beggar, Zicar, and to your architect Saso Sedalcek for your breakthrough creation for 2006 and your inspiration for robot designers for years to come.

Project Page
More pictures

Check back with Robot Gossip in the next few days for some honorable mention awards from 2006.