Hasta La Gadget!

If you feel that you are an absentee father, and would like to make up for all the lost time with your kid, there is only one way to go around it – to be there, present not only physically but mentally as well. After all, before you know it, your kid would have grown up to be an adult, never really knowing what it meant to have spent quality time with his father. Well, Disney has come up with a cheap substitute that is interesting – it is not going to replace a father, far from it, but at least it might help dads and their children bond better. After all, having a robot around the home is always cool, no?

This unique robot will rely on external cameras which will work in tandem with a Kinect-like sensor, where it is capable of track the motion of a toss, and the pre-loaded algorithms will get to work right away, making a prediction on where your toss will land. It does seem as though the robot is tracking the ball with its eyes, reaching out and making quite the catch. Should it miss, the animatronic will look down at where the ball eventually landed, where it will shrug or shake its head in disappointment.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Toshiba Robot Relishes In Nuclear Emergencies, Human Rights Watch hopes to ban the creation of autonomous weapons,

Toshiba has revealed a new robot intended to explore the radioactive mess of Japan’s Fukushima No.1 reactor in Tokyo, a four-legged beast that can birth a second, separate robot to squeeze through narrow spaces. The tetrapod ‘bot – which resembles a Toshiba-branded coolbox on spindly legs, and carries both a camera and a dosimeter – is remotely controlled by a wireless operator, and has clever onboard intelligence that allows it to totter across uneven terrain without tumbling.

In fact, the artificial smarts are so good, the robot can automatically avoid obstacles as it wanders through the Tokyo Electric power plant, in addition to climbing stairs. A maximum speed of 1km/h (0.6mph) means it’s hardly going to worry the 18mph DARPA cheetah robot which broke records back in March, but should be enough a fair amount of exploration given its 2hr battery life.

Toshiba developed the robot because there are still plenty of areas at the Fukushima plant where wheeled or tracked alternatives simply can’t get through. However, it’s not small – standing more than a meter high, and over half a meter wide – and so there’s a second camera robot that can be deployed via a robotic arm, for narrower gaps.

That companion ‘bot – a little taller than a 1U rack unit – is tethered back to the main tetrapod via a cable, but carries its own battery good for an hour of use. It’s even slower than its parent, with a top speed of 0.12mph, but means the safety team can navigate through pipes and around toppled equipment.

Toshiba says the next stage is to give the robot the ability to install shielding, end leaks, and remove obstacles, helping make the power plant safer for human involvement. There’s no word on when it might first go exploring.

Toshiba reveals four-legged Fukushima robot explorer is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

While more and more devices are beginning to be able to understand what we’re saying, one problem that we face is that not everything that we communicate is in the form of a verbal cue. With that in mind, the roboticists at the Honda Research Institute have been working on a robot that can not only understand words, but other sounds.

HEARBO (the HEAR-ing roBOt) uses a technology called Computational Auditory Scene Analysis to distinguish various sounds from its environment. This allows it to not just pick out verbal communication, but everything from the beep of an alarm clock to the mailman knocking on your front door. It can then use this information to make decisions about what to do.

The specific version of the technology being used for HEARBO is called HARK, an open source library that breaks down the understanding of sounds into three steps: localization, separation and recognition. This allows it to not only distinguish sounds in a noisy location, but exactly where they are coming from. In fact, the technology can nail down the direction that sound is coming from down to 1 degree of accuracy. Currently, the system can distinguish up to four different sounds going on at once, but in theory more microphones could allow it to handle even more sources.

Here’s a short demonstration video showing how the robot can understand what’s going on despite the world’s most annoying alarm clock going off the whole time:

And here’s an example of HEARBO easily distinguishing music from human commands, identifying song attributes, and even dancing a little bit:

So why develop such a robot? The technology could be used for things like robot butlers that could automatically answer the doorbell, or do things like turn off the TV if the kids have been using it for too long.

[via iEEE Spectrum]

Been keeping up to date with the quirky robotic ball named Sphero? We’ve been wondering when its Augmented Reality Engine would finalize into a full-fledged app since we first witnessed it as E3 as a simple 2D tech demo. Well, Today is the day that this Android and iOS-controlled ball makes it first official-release steps into the world of AR — the engine has grown up, powering Orbotix’s latest free app, Sharky the Beaver. While the game itself is still admittedly silly and demo-like since we saw an early adaptation in August, there’s no question that the AGR is now is a polished state.

As a refresher, unlike other implementations that require a stationary marker, Sphero serves as one that can move around your area, while also relaying information about its position. The 3D character on screen rotates its directions as you spin Sphero, and, as you can see above, it even allows you to pick the ball up while it’s being tracked. The frame-rate of tracking in the app itself looked very smooth, and it does an admirable job keeping track of the ball, even if it ends up off-screen. At the point, gameplay is limited to flicking cupcakes on the ground that Sharky goes to automatically, and there’s no word on if and when we’ll see the features shown off in the early version (namely, the part where the Sharky part of the name was actually a key element, as you chased people on-screen to get their cupcakes). All in all, we’re more curious than anything to see what else the folks at Orbotix will come up with in the realm of AR — for more in the meantime, check out the our video hands-on after the break.

Continue reading Sphero’s Augmented Reality Engine gets fully realized in Sharky the Beaver (video)

Filed under: Misc, Robots, Software

Sphero’s Augmented Reality Engine gets fully realized in Sharky the Beaver (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Nov 2012 11:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Space exploration. We like to pretend it is about all kinds of noble things having to do with mankind’s place in the universe, blah blah blah. We all know it is really about all the cool things that you can do while in space, right? You know, like control a robot on Earth. From Space.

Astronaut Sunita Williams used a specially developed laptop on the International Space Station to control an Internet-connected LEGO robot in Germany. That’s pretty awesome. The technology is called Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN). It works like this: traditional Internet protocol standards assume that there will always be a route of connections available from node A to node B. However, DTN accepts that there will be disruptions in connectivity from where the signal is being sent to where it is supposed to be received.

Aside from having a great time playing with a LEGO robot from space, there was a point to this. NASA sees an opportunity to one day use this technology to control robots on the surface of Mars or some other planet. That sure opens up many possibilities when it comes to exploring (and someday colonizing) other worlds. DTN has been tested for years, but not for robotics applications – for which it now looks promising.

[via Geek]