PALRO, a New Robot Pal
02.02.10 :: No comments yet, leave your own!
A new humanoid robot has been announced today, after some showboating last year, which is aimed at the aducational market to begin with – as with the wonderful Nao. Sales start on March 15th 2010 with the first thousand units and general release will follow later allowing hoobyists to get their greasy hands on PALRO’s 38.9″ body. Priced at around £2000 you actually get quite a lot of bang for your buck – PALRO boasts 20 degrees of freedom, a camera, microphones, speakers, an LED faceful of expressions, a meagre 1.5kg heaviness and an Intel Atom 1.60GHz brain. And PALRO looks awesome, with apparently many colours available if you’re into that sort of thing. Voice control is also being suggested, yet I cannot confirm at present.

Check out PALRO and his friend doing their thing:

Press release [translated] via Plastic Pals [link 1 | link 2]
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Sony Rolly – Fun but Pointless?
21.01.10 :: No comments yet, leave your own!
doing the robot since, well, 2010

Welcome to the shiny, spinny, flappy, dancey world of the Rolly, a robotic MP3 player. Cute, fun but perhaps a little pointless.

Unveiled this month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, this fit-in-your-pocket device is first looks like an egg-shaped MP3 player. However, it is not your standard egg-shaped MP3 player, if there even is one, since it is a robot and it can dance. Whut?! Yes, dance. Using the two wheels around its body it can roll about to your music. The glee doesn’t stop there though, it also has little flappy arms connected to tiny shoulders on each end that it flaps, folds and body-pops for your enjoyment. The Rolly also has the capability to keep you mesmerised by firing waves and particles of approximately 700 different colours warmly onto your retina. All whilst it spews out your rubbish music through potentially tinny speakers as you sit in your kitchen stuffing crisps into your face and clapping manically.

Rather than it having an LCD screen to control your music, or whatever it is you describe it as, you can “simply” spin the Rolly either way to make it play or skip a tune. Hold it vertically and you can adjust the volume with “simple” pirouettes. I can’t figure out how you make the thing stop, but I think you might have to “simply” hold it at a 47 degree angle to the trajectory of Venus in comparison to Mars whilst whistling the theme tune from Neighbours. Backwards.

The Rolly is a 2GB beast, so you can hold around 520 songs on it, but Sony decided it didn’t need to have a headphone jack. And this is why I think it is pointless. When the going price is $229 (only due to be released in spring in the US), I can think of plenty of other MP3 players to spend my hard-earned pennies on that I can actually use in the traditional sense of an MP3 player in that they would have headphones. Saying this, I would still enjoy owning one – after all, you can program it with your very own dance routines using included software and it will even accept music wirelessly through Bluetooth – and cry with joy as I watch it do its thing whilst sitting in my kitchen stuffing crisps into my face and clapping manically.

Sony Rolly press release
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Robot Alarm Clock
17.01.10 :: No comments yet, leave your own!
cool robot dude in space

I sleep a lot. This is fact. Another fact is I don’t get up too well and resort to a plethora of alarm clocks. Ideally I would have one more alarm clock, and this is the one I want. And you want it too, even if you didn’t know yet, because it is so grown-up and masculine and will make you look cool. Just take a look at the red robot dude, he is in freaking space! The coolest.

If you want one, grab it here and don’t forget to send one to me too.
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Shear Brilliance: The Husqvarna Automower Solar Hybrid
16.01.10 :: No comments yet, leave your own!
if Batman had a lawn mowing robot (he probably does)

Okay, so you’ve vacuumed your floors and then mopped them. I say you, but really all you had to do was push a couple of buttons and play some computer games whilst making sure the dog’s tongue doesn’t get caught up in your Roomba’s whirring bits again. What menial tasks are left to delegate to some unfortunate yet loving robot before they enslave humanity? Well, the garden looks pretty unkempt. Robo-mow time.

Let me introduce you to the Automower Solar Hybrid from Husqvarna. I wasn’t sure it was possible to think a lawnmower looked stylish, but this one does. In fact, it looks like Bruce Wayne designed it to keep the lawns impeccable at Wayne Manor, giving him the perfect alibi if anyone accused him of being a vigilante – “I was mowing the lawns again, look how nice they are”. The mower itself can handle rough terrain, be set to a timer so you never have to think about mowing again and will head back to a charging station to top up on power if, predictably, the sun isn’t out in England and it can’t make use of the big solar panel hat it wears. It also has a PIN lock and an anti-theft alarm so the kid you used to pay to cut your lawn has a hard time trying to steal it – incidentally, the mower also won’t make your lawn look like a meth addict was let loose on it with crimping shears.

Unfortunately, it looks like you would actually have to be Bruce Wayne to be able to buy one at the present price, which is around £2000. Yipes. Look’s like the kid will still get his crack money for the time being. There are cheaper mowers out there, but this is the one I like. All the others either look like giant bicycle helmets, a pointless and melted children’s toy or one of those robots you used to have back in school in which you stuck a pencil and used the LOGO programming language to try and draw penises. Remember?

One last thing to mention: is it really wise to give an autonomous robot sharp blades to zoom around with? How many toes does a human actually need anyway?

Husqvarna
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Mint Adds Breath of Fresh Air to Robo-Mopping
15.01.10 :: 4 Comments, leave your own!
makes your floor shiny, looks cute

So, the iRobot Scooba was the first mopping robot. This may well be the future. I think the Mint looks really cool and it’s technology is even cooler. For one, it is a square shape. We should all know by now that square shapes fit into square holes – this goes the same for robots that clean getting into tight corners. Two, it looks like a mac-mini roaming your house. Three, it accepts your standard Pledge floor-mop cleaner pads (though this may add cost to it’s use, you would still have to pay for liquid cleaner in a Scooba). I will stop counting now as I have a lot more things to say.

It will pick up all the dirt and even that annoying pet hair floating around your dirty, dirty rooms. It has a special mop-mode that allows for it to work on those deeper stains – tea, bolognese, blood, the usual – and, of course, it is small enough to get nearly everywhere. It is whisper quiet, apparently, which is great as it won’t interrupt those really important tv programs you are watching or make dogs whimper and children cry.

It can do the usual cliff detection so it won’t commit vertical suicide, but has the added capabilities of finding edges in rooms and figuring out where rugs and carpets lie. Best of all it uses a Northstar Beacon system for GPS-style navigation and mapping – this means it won’t be meandering around your house forgetting what it’s cleaned and where it’s going. The only downside to all this awesomeness is that it has no base station to go to when it runs out of power. You have to plug it in. Archaic I know, but something I would be able to live with.

This gem of household moppage will be availble later this year and might not cost that much. I have seen the figure $250 banded about, which is about £150 at the time of this going to press.

northstar technology allows for GPS precision

lovable and clean, two traits worthy of anything

Evolution Robotics Mint
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iRobot Scooba Makes Mopping, er, Robotic?
14.01.10 :: 1 Comment, leave your own!
robomop

Going back over to iRobot today to show you the Scooba – a robotic mopping machine that won’t ask for weekends off and probably won’t get you in trouble with the immigration police. It will, however, grab loose dirt before applying liquid cleaner, giving the place a good mop on tile, lino and hardwood before removing dirty cleaner and generally drying the place up. All whilst you go to the shops/sit on the toilet/push kids over in the park/feign sleep/secretly watch old re-runs of pop idol. The Scooba does not judge.

Pick one up from iRobot for around £300 – a price designed to attract the lazy and rich.

iRobot Scooba via Engadget
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Neato XV-11: A Roomba with a View
13.01.10 :: No comments yet, leave your own!
a Roomba killer?

Next up in the household robot department is Neato Robotics (!) Neato XV-11. I don’t know what happened to the other ten, but this one is very swish. With a super-powered vacuum it can suck up all kinds of annoying dirt and debris – including dastardly pet hair! It can do this on carpet, rugs, hard floors, tile, stone, lino and presumably your face if you wish so. It has the innovative feature of a squared-off face (in comparison to the Roomba’s roundness), which allows it to get right up to the walls/skirting and into corners, known to be last stronghold of dust and crap. It is low-profile too, allowing for getting under stuff, such as furniture, skateboards or trip-wires.

An important point to note here is that the dustbin of the Neato XV-11 lifts out of the top of the robot, making it so much easier to empty than the Roomba.

The jewel in the crown has to be the RPS laser mapping system, which creates a map of everything in it’s surroundings – furniture, walls, shoes, bowls of custard, dead children etc.. – and will even find doorways, clean the room methodologically and zoom off into the next room. It also avoids stairs like the Roomba yet has the added feature of not bumping into everything. Once it has finished, it will go back to it’s charging base and chill out whilst catching a few electrons. It will even snuggle up to the charging base if you accidentally nudge it with your foot or something.

You can currently pre-order one of these beauts for $399.99. I think it might only be applicable to US residents though – for shame.

Neato Robotics via BotJunkie
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This Robot Sucks – iRobot Roomba
12.01.10 :: 1 Comment, leave your own!
the dust-busting Roomba 560, form and function unite

Now, robots don’t have to be humanoid. Srsly. Over the next few days I will bring to you those robots that can make your life easier by way of cleaning your dirty floors. First up is the iRobot Roomba.

The Roomba has been around since 2002, with many versions produced over the years giving us today’s models, the 5xx series. The Roomba itself can autonomously navigate through rooms, over carpet and hard floor, under furniture (when it isn’t getting wedged there..), dodging ‘cliffs’ and hopefully avoiding your pets whilst detecting and sucking up all the dirt it finds/encounters. When it gets low on battery it even returns to a docking station to get its charge on.

The fun (?) doesn’t stop with the cleaning, you can hack Roomba, modify them and even get your pets to ride them:

You can buy the Roomba 560 vacuum cleaning robot here, for £300 – about the same price as a Dyson! I would like one, but the cost is a bit prohibitive since I am a student – plus there are now competitors in this marketplace with exciting features that could sway things for me..! More to come this week..

As a little side-note, iRobot make quite a few robots, not least they make tactical robots. Expect to see some on I LIKE ROBOTS in the future.

iRobot
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Robovie-nano: A Mini Humanoid Robot that can Cartwheel
11.01.10 :: No comments yet, leave your own!
a small robot with big balls

This little dude stands at just 12cm tall and weighs only 575g! Robovie-nano also has a pretty speedy walk, can grasp things such as his lovely red ball and best of all can do a cartwheel, as seen in the video below. And you can actually buy this one NOW! For about £330 , you can grab a basic Robovie-nano, for £360 you get a wireless remote control and for £425 an internal gyroscope/accelerometer is built in too. Just contact Vstone for details on non-Japanese ordering.

Vstone [translated] via Crunch Gear
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MIT’s AIDA – Digital Driving Assistant, Better than Kitt
10.01.10 :: No comments yet, leave your own!
Affective Intelligent Driving Agent

I am in your car, sensing all your stuff

Meet AIDA, the Affective Intelligent Driving Agent – a new personal robot to live in your car (probably an Audi as AIDA has very effective taste circuits). The project is a collaboration between the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab, MIT’s SENSEable City Lab and the Volkswagen Group of America’s Electronics Research Lab.

Embedded in the dashboard, this robot will not only be an in-car navigation aid but a sociable robot, getting to know the driver and pretty much be like your best mate helping you avoid traffic and watch out since you’re looking a bit tired. Hopefully AIDA won’t be like my mates who moan about my driving and leave rubbish everywhere, though.

AIDA will be fed tonnes of data from sensors all around the car – such as GPS, speed, car ahead proximity, tyre pressure, microphones and even galvanic skin response – then will convey them to you by offering time-saving routes, warnings that you look sleepy (or attempt to calm you down if you look like you’re stuck behind an idiot going 50mph in the fast lane yet again) and general companionship on long journeys. This will all happen through the high-resolution display showing a variety of facial expressions and warning signs whilst also being capable of speech synthesis.

Overall, I think this robot is brilliant and would love one in my car. And, unlike with Kitt, there are no requirements to have a dodgy perm and tight leather trousers to use it. Unfortunately, I figure that means buying a rather expensive car that may or may not exist yet. Maybe I could loan one to test this out.. fingers crossed!

Affective Intelligent Driving Agent

*fume*

aww, AIDA be sadded

AIDA warning

MIT via Gizmodo via Plastic Pals
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I LIKE ROBOTS

I LIKE ROBOTS

2010: A YEAR IN ROBOTS

About

Blimey, it’s 2010 already, the most futuristic year to have ever happened. And what else exists in the future? Robots of course. So, in homage to our new masters (pending imminent takeover) here you will find a new robot each and every day of 2010, whether they be in pictures, art, videos or other forms.