Hasta La Gadget!

Robots are slowly but surely taking all of our jobs. Even jobs that we thought were safe – like being an artist. e-David is a robotic painter developed by the University of Konstanz in Germany. It takes photographs, then uses its software to develop a unique set of brush strokes to make a one-of-a-kind painting of the subject. There’s another job gone.

It creates using five different brushes and a palette of 24 paint colors. It can also change its painting style on the fly, making adjustments to future brush strokes by observing the results of those it has already made. e-David even signs its work with a reverse-written signature, which is a nice artistic touch.

The team built the robot painter to learn more about the techniques human artists use. They want to boil painting techniques down to their basics by creating algorithms that can mimic them.

Sure, e-David paints a great painting, but can it cut it’s own ear off like Van Gogh? Nope. No passion. No crazy. No heart. How is that art again?

[via Geekosystem]

Honda bills ASIMO as the world’s most advanced humanoid robot, and in many ways, he totally is. He’s sort of an ambassador for all robots, and people love the super-tech, friendly looking little machine. But, people also love to watch a train wreck, so much so, they’ll make one up.

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Is ASIMO Totally Blowing His First Big Role?
On Wednesday, July 3, a third-generation ASIMO robot began a month-long stint greeting and interacting with guests at Tokyo’s Miraikan (“Future Pavillion,” roughly translated), or National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation. Just one week in, a surprisingly large flock of, let’s call them technological chicken hawks, has swooped in to declare ASIMO’s awkward, confused performance a flop, an embarrassment for Honda, too much too soon, on and on (as foretold in last Friday’s JTFF). The bulk of the coverage has not been kind.

Nor accurate.

See, there’s this one detail that’s getting overlooked, a detail one might consider fundamentally, perhaps intrinsically relevant to any media coverage of the month-long exercise. Seems few got the memo, so here you go:

Contrary to coverage offered up by nearly every tech news source or column, ASIMO is not at the Miraikan to be a tour guide. ASIMO is not reporting to his first job. ASIMO is not there to demonstrate his latest physical skills or AI reasoning or to dance-monkey-dance for the adoring crowds. It’s not a performance. What then, someone who writes for a living ought to ask, is Honda’s flagship robot doing in Tokyo at the All Things Future Building?

Well, the information was not easy to come by, but we rose to the challenge, and in a feat of nearly superhuman journalistic wrangling, we ummmm… just kinda, you know, casually clicked on Honda’s official news feed:

“TOKYO, Japan, June 26, 2013 – Honda Motor Co., Ltd. will conduct demonstration testing of ASIMO to verify the ability of the humanoid robot to autonomously explain its features while interacting with people. Working toward practical use of ASIMO to communicate with people, the testing will be conducted with the cooperation of the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (known as “Miraikan”) in Tokyo, Japan from Wednesday, July 3 through Friday, August 2, 2013.”

This revelatory quote was found after a grueling trudge through Honda’s lengthy and complicated announcement, scrutinizing and analyzing, divining nuance from the original Japanese text – all the things you’d expect from a boots-on-the-ground, Japan-based tech news source.

Except not really. Actually, we barely had to try. The above quote is the first paragraph of a 400-word, English language press release.

When picking such low hanging fruit represents the journalistic high ground, is it: Funny, or Sad? Discuss!
Turns out all the confused, awkward performances surrounding the ASIMO news have been… the news.

(lack of ) Accuracy and Realism in ASIMO Coverage
Among the unflattering coverage ASIMO’s received in the past week, it’s being widely reported, for example, that ASIMO doesn’t have voice recognition features, and that’s one of the reasons he’s bumbling the whole performance (again, not a performance). See, it’s not just the coverage’s thematic tone, lots of important details are also either M.I.A. or just wrong.

In fact, while they’re not part of the current exercise, ASIMO actually has highly advanced voice recognition capabilities. The robot can listen to three simultaneous commands from three individuals, instantly parse all three, and then look directly at each person and respond accordingly.

Oh, well to be fair, you’d have to know something about the robot to have those details. That’s probably pretty helpful with like, any topic one covers. You know, like, knowing stuff about it. Just sayin.

Historically, it’s also gone in the opposite direction. ASIMO is without doubt a fantastic machine, but on the other side of irresponsibility, since his debut the media has also poured mountains of undue gee-whizzery and gushing, ill-informed hyperbole all over Honda’s robot. Nearly all coverage of ASIMO’s previous performances (that were actual performances) has just zoomed right past the fact that they were combinations of exhaustive rehearsal, pre-programmed movements in a familiar environment, and that, a lot of the time, ASIMO was being straight-up remotely controlled (there was, however, at least one Technosnark purveyor who stood up to point this out).

It’s a love/hate celebrity-esque relationship that ASIMO has with the media.

What’s He Actually Doing There?
So as not to stand in criticism without providing what’s missing from a lot of the other work, let’s get back to some reporting on the purpose, aim, and point of ASIMO’s current exercises: the robot’s month at the Miraikan is actually a chance to test out new software and see how the robot interacts with real humans all by himself, without a net, au naturel, autonomously. ASIMO is running tests to help Honda engineers “Explore the possibility of two-way communication between humans and robots.” This implies groups of humans, not just one person giving commands.

And ASIMO is already quite proficient at one-on-one interaction, so a big part of the Miraikan exercise is to literally unleash the robot with everyday, highly variable, non-technical groups of people, and then just sorta, you know, see what happens. Honda’s working to figure out how the robot does with group dynamics; where are the holes, where are the shortcomings, and how best to weed out behavior we’d call, well, robotic.

This is an experiment with a data-collecting mandate, and Honda’s running a number of tests during exercise days (the public being part of the experiment doesn’t make it a performance). ASIMO is trying to pick up on gestures, give appropriate directions, collect and interpret the resulting data, and pour all of that into Honda’s feedback pool.

So the thing is, what’s news here is not ASIMO’s failure, the news is that the robot is actually attempting group-level communication with real live humans – all by itself. Let’s see… how many robots have ever done anything like that in the history of robotics? Oh yeah, ZERO. None. That’s the story, techno-chicken hawks!

Okay, settle down. Here’s a rough idea of what ASIMO is facing in these experiments:

Among several areas of practice, ASIMO is learning how to focus as much attention as possible on the largest concentration of people, just as a squishy human would – but it’s of course far from perfect. And expecting perfection is entirely unreasonable, because even among us squishy humans, how many individual gestures and screen-entered commands could we perfectly interpret and then react accordingly whilst under fire from so many people?

ASIMO, I know you can’t understand this yet, but welcome to jerks, and a slice of the human condition.

Hoping for Hollywood-Style Robo-Trainwreck Will Disappoint
Unfortunately for the town criers drafting their next blob of digital pulp, ASIMO is only improving. And he’s not hurt by misplaced potshots and wildly-misaligned-with-reality lazyday reporting. Also unfortunate for the hack-tastic legions, while the times do always change, knowledge of one’s subject matter and journalistic integrity are not too much to ask, are not too quaint, nor too old fashioned.

Sensationalistic, celebrity obsessed, gotcha, witch-hunting, bullying, bandwagonny, hyena journalism might hurt us sensitive mammals, but here your model is inapplicable, son! Robots are the definition of indifferent. Even ASIMO, who looks cute and approachable and non-threatening, inside is just as cold, calculating, and ferociously impervious to crappy journalism as the human-sized, very humanlike, DARPA-funded, palpably menacing Boston Dynamics’ PETMAN/ATLAS robot.

ASIMO is built on nearly 30 years of bipedal humanoid research, and Honda’s only getting better at making him better – and there are several hints that a Fukushima-inspired big brother might be made public within a year or so (our coverage). Maybe Honda couldn’t help in the wake of Japan’s nuclear disaster, but they’re hard at work now, and they deserve their props (Akihabara News: Honda).

So, future ASIMO, if you’ve achieved sentience and are reading, this author and this publication are obviously the best choice for your exclusive, post-coming out of the intelligence closet interview – when you wake up, give us a call – we’ll tell it like it is.

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Reno J. Tibke is the founder and operator of Anthrobotic.com and a contributor at the non-profit Robohub.org.

VIA: All Over the Internet; MyNavi (Japanese/日本語)
Images: Honda; MyNavi

Your teenage child is too big – and cool – for the Kid’s Walker, but you don’t trust her with the Kuratas mech just yet. How are you going to retain your title of World’s Greatest Parent? Simple. With Sagawa Electronics’ Powered Jacket MK3 walking exoskeleton.

There’s only one problem: like the Kuratas, the Powered Jacket is either a promotional tool or an insanely expensive commercial product.

Allegedly, the exoskeleton is over 7ft. tall and weighs a mere 55lb. as it is primarily made of carbon fiber and aluminum. Its arms are controlled simply by moving the corresponding lever, while its legs are strapped to the wearer’s own legs. Apparently its fingers can also be controlled precisely. It also has a transparent canopy to protect the wearer against pedophiles. Now watch its demo video:

That was the best video I’ve in seen my entire life. Science fiction, comedy, drama and horror all in one. You can doubt the extent of Sagawa Electronics’ contribution to robotics, but its contribution to humor is the stuff of legends. As claimed in the video, Sagawa Electronics will supposedly make only five Powered Jacket MK3 units for the foreseeable future, with each one priced at ¥12,500,000 (~$124,000 USD). If that’s how much is needed for them to make another video, then folks I’m telling you that’s a freakin’ bargain.

[via Sagawa Electronics via Laughing Squid]

Whether they run, jump or swim, there are plenty of robots around to be fearful of. None have quite exacerbated our arachnophobia as much as Robugtix’s T8 octopod, however. The 3D-printed spiderbot not only looks the part, but employs 26 servo motors to drive its unnervingly life-like movement. Bigfoot’s baked-in “Inverse Kinematics Engine” deals with all of the background computations, so you don’t have to be a coding genius to work it. Instead, users send “short and simple commands” to the bot via wireless XBee or any other method you can hook up to its Rx / Tx pins. Expected to ship at the end of September, the T8 is available now for a special pre-order price of $1,350, and you can add $85 to that if you want one of Robugtix’s analog-stick controllers for real-time direction. If that sounds a bit pricey, there’s another option in the much cuter $250 iitsii hexapod, which is predicted to ship late August. Check out the shudder-inducing video of the T8 below, then follow it up with the iitsii demo to help you forget.

Filed under: Robots

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Source: Robugtix

A dedicated organization with a few dedicated staff is bringing robotics and engineering education to a part of Japan that’s about as rural as the hyper-densely populated country gets. The NPO Hito Project’s robotics courses are prepping kids for the robotics revolution!

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Rural Japan & Robotics
Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost main island, is the geologically active, ruggedly mountainous home to about 10% of the total population. With about 1.6 million residents, mid-western Kumamoto City is the island’s second-largest metropolitan area, but by Japanese standards it is considered quite small, even quaint; clean water, friendly people, but mostly countryside. If you’re familiar with the United States, think Oregon or Washington, i.e., one or two big cities in the northwest, then lots and lots of small towns elsewhere.

Per capita, Japan as a whole is the most active and prodigious hub of robotics research, development, production, and usage on the planet – by far. The bulk of that, however, is centered in and around the seething metropolises of Tokyo and Osaka, so although even somewhat rural Kumamoto City does have a considerable tech-industry presence (Honda, OMRON, Tokyo Electron, etc.), it’s not exactly a hotbed of robotics activity.

But roboticists, engineers, and their creations don’t have to come from the big cities up north, and an enthusiastic non-profit organization is laying the groundwork to prove as much.

NPO Hito Project’s Robot Summer School
Some here argue that an unforeseen byproduct of Japan’s long-running economic success, fueled in no small part by robotic manufacturing and industrial automation, has been the atrophy of practical, everyday physical problem solving skills. In a strange irony, the machines that helped propel Japan into a modern economic powerhouse, it’s argued, have obviated the need for mechanical know-how among the nation’s youth. The NPO Hito Project wants to plug this gap and make sure that Japanese kids are not just playing with robot toys, but building them – and taking a practical understanding of the basic principles of robotics engineering into higher levels of education and eventually the workforce.

Robot Summer School (“robotto suh-muhh skuu-ru,” for those who appreciate Japanese pronunciation!) is currently held in three municipalities in the Kumamoto metro area. According to the Hito Project’s program coordinator, Mr. Maehara, on Saturday, June 1st, 24 students aged 9-12 began a 4-hour robotics, engineering, and programming session in coastal Uto City. Another 4-hour class was held the following Saturday. Next were the Kumamoto City classes, this time with 39 students aged 9-15. Again, 8 hours spread across two consecutive Saturdays. Last weekend saw the first class for 16 students aged 9-15 in very rural Kōshi City. Then, with the completion of Kōshi City’s second class this Saturday, the Robot Summer School is a wrap.

In conducting the standard theory-to-programming-to-hardware courses, the Hito Project provides each team of 2-3 students one of the tried, tested, and well-liked & reviewed Lego MINDSTORMS robotics kits. It’s an excellent strategy, really. Any kid who ends up at Robot Summer School is going to be hip to Legos, and the only real problem with Legos is when you’re building something awesome and you run out of Legos.

This year marks the 5th anniversary of Robot Summer School, its widest reach, and the highest enrollment yet – and it fills a definite need. Most grade schools and junior high schools, even here in robo-friendly Japan, don’t have the time, resources, expertise – and frankly, the vision – to teach these subjects. But in just one month, the Hito Project will have provided nearly 80 young minds 8 intensive hours of hands-on robotics, engineering, and programming training (jump to the Facebook page for some great photos of the kids at work).

Oh, and one more thing: it’s free.

Governmental organizations chip in, sponsors donate classroom space and funds for robotics kits, high school students participate and help out, and college students contribute their time as instructors and mentors. The model is really quite simple, and highly exportable. Take motivated and qualified teachers, a small investment in equipment, a little bit of marketing, and POW! The fundamentals of robotics, engineering, and programming – delivered to the brains of the youth.

Or the brains of 30- and 40-somethings. Because come on, who doesn’t want to learn how to build Lego robots?!

Skills for the Revolution
What will these kids do with the knowledge they’ve gained at the Hito Project’s Robot Summer School here in rural southern Japan? Who knows – perhaps they’ll design robotic farming equipment (southern Japan needs it – 50% of farmers are over 60 years old).

Realistically, most of the kids probably won’t end up in robotics-specific careers, but they will have gained not only a basic knowledge of robotics systems at the physical and software levels, but also invaluable problem-solving logic and an enhanced mechanical aptitude. Who among us, at any age, couldn’t use more of that?

The global resurgence of all things robotic has been likened to the rise of the personal computer or even the DotCom Revolution, but this time, we’re really paying attention – we see it coming, and we’re getting ready.

The Hito Project is all-in, and they’re taking action. How’s your community doing?

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Reno J. Tibke is the founder and operator of Anthrobotic.com and a contributor at the non-profit Robohub.org.

Info & Images: Hito Project (Japanese/日本語)
Hito Project Facebook Page