Hasta La Gadget!

Would you believe that friendly-looking robot giving that guy a hug is an industrial robot? You probably thought they were all just arms that weld and move heavy objects. Well, most are. Baxter obviously is different.

Baxter is the work of roboticist Rodney A. Brooks of Rethink Robotics, and he was obviously designed to be human-friendly. The robot is made to be easily trainable by an assembly line worker, and if you grab Baxter’s hand, it will turn its head and its cartoon eyes on it’s tablet-sized face will look at you as if to say “Hey there, human.” And that’s the point.

The company is betting that in the future robots will work side-by-side with humans. Naturally, they want to be at the forefront here and are working hard to make normally dangerous bots more friendly. It sounds good, until a hug from this guy tears someones head off.

[via NYT via Neatorama]

Telepresence robots seem to be something that some people are starting to look at, and that’s one of the reasons why two Princeton students, Tianlong Wang and Xinyi Chen created the Helios robot. It turns your smartphone into a mobile telepresence rig for far less than other solutions.

Helios looks pretty interesting, as it’s an extremely low-cost solution. I’m all for telepresence, but spending thousands of dollars for a remote avatar doesn’t interest me at all. The Helios will retail for just $99(USD). The small, wheeled robot will allow you to have video chats with friends, family and co-workers around the globe, while you can steer the tiny ‘bot to follow them around or change camera position remotely. Thanks to a clever system that reads symbols off the bottom edge of the smartphone’s screen, it should work readily with a variety of phones. The prototypes work only with iPhones, but after launch, the plan is to release Android and Windows Phone apps as well.

Hello Labs is currently accepting pre-orders for the device, which is supposed to ship for this year’s holiday season. They also plan on launching Helios as a Kickstarter campaign.

[via Make:]

iRobot celebrated Roomba’s 10th birthday quietly teeing up a $74 million acquisition of rival Evolution Robotics Inc. The Pasadena-based company produces the Mint, a hard-floor ‘bot that uses ordinary Swiffer pads to wet-wipe your wooden decks clean — and comes with the more sophisticated “Northstar” GPS-style positioning tech. As part of the deal, Evolution CEO Paolo Pirjanian will become iRobot’s new CTO and the Mint and Mint Plus will be folded into the company’s stable of Roomba cleaners — with the deal expected to be fully approved by the fourth quarter of the year.

Continue reading iRobot buys rival Evolution Robotics for $74 million to expand hard-floor cleaning tech

Filed under: Robots

iRobot buys rival Evolution Robotics for $74 million to expand hard-floor cleaning tech originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Sep 2012 16:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Have you ever wondered just when did the world of mobile phones make the jump to that of a full touchscreen display? Well, I guess the Palm Treo (did you remember that particular smartphone? I had a Treo 600, and was in love with it for a long time) was one of the first few commercially successful models, but none of them really caught the imagination of the masses until the iPhone from Apple came out. Fantastic marketing, a decent product, with a ripe market, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for success. The iPhone has not looked back since, and has gone on to break new records with each successive release. This also introduced an era of touchscreen displays for smartphones, leading up till today when T-Mobile talked about their Tappy device testing robot.

According to Grant Castle, vice president of engineering services and quality assurance for T-Mobile USA, Tappy is a custom built software testing robot, and T-Mobile is proud to announce that they are the only carrier in the US to offer such a robot at their disposal.

Tappy will play the role of the consumer, where he has been specially programmed to simulate just what kind of real world scenarios that users or customers will face when using a touchscreen display on their smartphones, and since this is a robot that needs not rest, eat or sleep, the robot is able to test an entire week’s worth of use over the course of 24 hours, ranging from the keyboard to user interface speeds which is the responsiveness of the software is to the user’s commands, battery life, music, voice calls, gaming, text messaging, e-mail, web browsing, and app downloads amongst others.

It is not that easy to pass Tappy’s test, as the device being tested will need to run non-stop for 24 hours, while executing hundreds of tasks without running into a single hiccup, stall, freeze or glitch.

Tappy’s debut half a decade ago, coupled with numerous quality improvement programs, has effectively allowed T-Mobile to reduce device return costs by 75%, now how about that?

As a T-Mobile customer, are you happy with what T-Mobile has done?

Press Release

[ T-Mobile’s Tappy is a device testing robot copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

Anyone who runs a farm or tends to some plot of land somewhere would realize that just as the land produces the good stuff like fruits and vegetables (if you have planted the right seeds, that is), so to, will the land churn out weeds. Getting rid of weeds are a whole lot harder than your crop, which is why this prototype weed-seeking automaton could revolutionize the way we eat as well as assist in lowering our reliance on highly toxic herbicides. Known as the Lettuce Bot, this four-wheeled weeding machine was specially designed and built by Indiana-based startup Blue River Technology.

It will use an integrated camera as well as an advanced visual algorithm suite in order to tell the difference between two breeds of lettuce and common field weeds. Once that is done, it will inject the weeds with a toxic cocktail of plant fertilizer, where the right amount will make short work of the weeds’ roots, with the byproduct being additional fertilizer that will further enhance the produce, resulting in a win-win. No idea on whether the Lettuce Bot can work in the middle of the night though, but if it could, the positive ramifications would be enormous to the entire agriculture industry.

Right now, the Lettuce Bot has a 98% accuracy rate, so it would be interesting to see if the Lettuce Bot’s concept can be translated over to other kinds of crops which also suffer from the scourge of weeds.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Intelligent robot bins require ID to dispose of rubbish in the Netherlands, Shimi the personal robotic DJ,