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So many areas of business, entertainment, and sports have a Hall of Fame. Did you know there’s even a Robot Hall of Fame? There has been since 2003. It’s the brainchild of those prodigious crania over at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. The  2006 Inductees have just been announced. 

They are (the envelope please): Maria , the art deco fembot from Fritz Lang’s landmark 1927 film “Metropolis,”  Gort, the big-boned bot from 1951’s “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” David, the droid that sees dead people from Spielberg’s/Kubrick’s “Artificial Intelligence: AI,” the Sony AIBO, and SCARA (Selective Compliance Assembly Robot  Arm), the increasingly ubiquitous industrial robot. Previous Hall of Famers include Mars Pathfinder, ASIMO, R2-D2, and C-3PO. The RHF has the two categories of robots “Robots from Science Fiction” and “Robots from Science” to celebrate the robots that inspire us and the robots we create as a result of that inspiration. The new bots will officially be welcomed into the Hall of Fame during a ceremony this June. No word yet on what Maria Metropolis will be wearing, but we think she’d look stunning in anything from the DigiKey catalog.

You can read more about the Robot Hall of Fame on their website. – [Gareth Branwyn]

Helen Greiner, co-founder (along with Rodney Brooks and Colin Angle) of the successful robot company iRobot was recently a guest of the Wharton School’s entrepreneurship and technology clubs. An interview with her is up on their website, and there’s a podcast as well.

In the interview, she talks about the mission of iRobot and how it might differ from other robot developers:

We are not there to do demonstrations of technology. We are not there to talk about stuff that’s going to happen 50 years from now in robots — although that’s going to be extremely exciting. We really concentrate on practical and affordable systems for today.

She also talks about how iRobot decided to open Roomba up for user-hacking, via their serial control interface, and what users have been able to do in modifying their Roombas:

One [involved] making a webcam on wheels so you can control your robot through the Internet and see what the robot sees and hear what the robot hears as you drive it around. Somebody made a robotic plant-moving system, so plants can always be in the sun. Someone was talking about making a swimming pool-skimming robot. And most recently, just this past week, some hackers did a physical instantiation of the video game Frogger. Now we don’t condone this type of activity [laughs], but it shows you just where creativity can go when you make a system open.

- [Gareth Branwyn]

Pointers to the Leaf Project have been floating around cyberspace for a while now, but if it’s not on your radar, it should be. It’s fascinating work in open source AI and robot development being done at the Robotics Society of Southern California. It began as an Artificial Life program for Bruce Weimer. Robotics Society members saw the AI on the screen and thought it deserved a pair a of legs (or at least wheels). A robotic platform was developed, then Leaf was given sight via a webcam and vision software. Then more Leaf bots were built. The hardware and software is fully documented on the project’s and there’s a discussion group to encourage the creation of more Leaf bots and further refine the platform.

When I posted something about Leaf on my website Street Tech, robot builder J. Wolfgang Goerlich suggested substituting the on-screen animated head of Leaf with the WowWee animatronic chimp head. With a little engineering, it’s probably doable. We couldn’t decide whether the results would be way cool or way creepy (or a heady combination of both). – [Gareth Branwyn]

How can you look at this collection of robot booty and not salivate all over your keyboard? Robot Magazine  has a first look at Bioloid, a series of “edutainment” robotics kits from Korean company Robotis. The kits were shown off at the recent Consumer Electronics Show and apparently caused a bit of a stir. Like the Hitec ROBONOVA-I  and the popular Robo-One humanoids, this kit is very servo-intensive, apparently never meeting a joint that it didn’t want to actuate with a dedicated servomotor. One of the coolest things in these kits is the servos themselves. The “Comprehensive Kit” ships with twenty of them. The gorgeous servos, encased in a sturdy-looking package, are called the AX-12 Dynamixel and have built-in feedback sensors and servo-to-servo networking functions. The servos use daisy-chain wiring to cut down on wire clutter and to enable digital data traffic between them. Nifty! Each servo has its own Serial ID number. They can operate in typical servo mode (back and forth motion) or with continuous rotation (without needing to be mechanically hacked). You can control torque, position, speed, and even monitor each servo’s temperature and voltage! The servo cases have plenty of lugs along the sides for numerous attachment points. Even if you don’t want to invest in any of their kits or the Bioloid system, these servos are worth looking into.

The Bioloid system also uses a servo/sensor module (the AX-S1) that has networked sensors built in, including a three-direction distance sensor (IR), a three-direction light sensor, and sound detection. The servo/sensor controller and power pack  holds a 9.6V 2500 mAh rechargeable NiMH battery pack and has 126Kb of on-board Flash memory. It can control the servos, the sensors, an LCD module, and talk to an optional wireless module at 9,600-115,200 bps. The “Expert Kit” will include a C development environment, a wireless PC link, a camera and an image recognition library.

No word yet on U.S. pricing, but converting Korean Won to dollars on the parts they are already selling in Korea, the Comprehensive Kit would retail for about $800, the AX-12 servos for about $40, and the Sensor module for about $50. If you poke around the Robotis website,  you can find PDF manuals for the servos, a photo gallery of bots, videos of various Robotis kits and robots in development, and other goodies. The article on Robot magazine’s site has many more pictures and links to several videos. – [Gareth Branwyn]

MIT’s Rodney Brooks has an adage (to paraphrase): A bunch of working “dumb” bots (i.e. robots w/little computing power that sense and react directly to their environment) is better than one broken “smart” bot (i.e. a robot that maps its world, plans optimal routes through it, etc).

I propose a corollary: A robot that is actually on the market is better than a bunch of bots that are endlessly demo’d at trade shows. Look at the Hondo P3 and the Sony SDR-4/Qrio vs. the Wow Wee Robosapien and the iRobot Roomba. While Hondo and Sony keep parading around these perpetual demobots but never bring them to market (and Sony just turned the development lights out on Qrio), the Robosapien and the Roomba are proven market successes and are now several product generations in pedigree.

NEC’s answer to the Honda and Sony demobots is the PaPeRo (“Partner-Type Personal Robot”). While it’s an undisputedly cute little rug-rover, and has enjoyed plenty of ink and electrons since it was first rolled out in 2001, it remains in the prototype stage and there is still no release date. If you ask me, I think there should be a “put-up or shut-up” statute for such prototypes. If you show off a prototype and it garners a bunch of media attention, and then you don’t bring it to market in, let’s say three years, you gotta retire it; show us a NEW concept robot. Hey, maybe that’s what Sony did on their own. The SDR-4 cum Qrio couldn’t cut the mustard, so they did the only honorable thing, they took it off the world stage and stopped teasing us with it. So, what’s it going to be NEC? The shelves of my local Target or the wayside on the road to Robotopia?

And, in case you didn’t notice, the robots above that are actually on the market are of the “dumb bot” variety while the ones in perpetual prototypical stage are “smart bots.” Coincidence? We think not. Discuss. – [Gareth Branwyn] 

If you need any convincing about the utility of using biology as inspiration in robotic engineering, check out this amazing video of a robotic snake (and the real snake motion studies on which it was based). Dubbed the ACM-R5, and being developed at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, it sports a sophisticated attitude/torque sensing system, a camera with lighting in its head, and a 32-bit microcontroller. It runs on a Lithium-Ion battery and gets up to 30-minutes of slither and swim on a charge. It was developed as a rescue robot, able to find victims among debris in an earthquake or other disaster situation. I don’t know about you, but I think I’d be kinda freaked out if I saw this mechanical sea monster swimming or slithering amongst the rubble.  [Gareth Branwyn] 

Thanks to Jeff James, LEGO, and everyone here at Nxtbot for inviting me to guestblog. I’m looking forward to the opportunity to talk about one of my favorite subjects: robots.

Fancying myself something of a generalist/whole systems guy, I always like to look for patterns that connect my interests, so in talking about robots, I’ll likely be touching on some other, related subjects. These include computers and the Internet (natch), the open source movement, the “do-it-yourself” ethic/hardware hacking, distributed/ubiquitous computing, biomimicry (i.e. taking design inspirations from nature), industrial design, and “appropriate technology.”

One of the things I like about robotics is that it sort of forces you to have to know at least a little about a lot of things. A good bot builder needs to know about everything from mechanical/electrical engineering and computer programming to the nature of intelligence and how bio-brains and nervous systems work. You know you’ve become something of a little Leonardo when you find yourself playing with the half-gnawed chicken bones on your plate and thinking to yourself: “Ah, so that’s how they ‘actuate’.” And when you start thinking about how you could reverse engineer the neighbor’s cat, you know you’ve been spending too much time deconstructing the world with an eye towards constructing your own artificial one. But then, that’s one of the many cool things about robots, they actually make you look more deeply at the natural world to gain a deeper appreciation for how it works. At least, that’s been the case for me.

I’d love to see a discussion about what real/natural-world designs have served as inspiration in your bot building. [Gareth Branwyn]