Wondering what would become of the plucky Mint ‘bot after iRobot swept up its creator, Evolution Robotics? The company clearly thought it was time for a name change — it’s the iRobot Braava from here on out. The cleaner has inherited its older sibling’s good looks, from the square build to the little diamond up top. Like the Mint, the Braava line pushes a cloth around your floor to pick up dirt instead of relying upon suction. It’s got two modes: dry or damp, and in both cases is designed for a light cleaning in one go, rather than the Roomba or Scooba’s multi-pass technique. There are two models, the 320 and the higher end 380t, which features some nice amenities like a faster charging battery and liquid dispensing. The Braavas are available now, starting at $199 at the source link below.
Not content on landingseveralrovers on the surface of Mars, NASA’s JPL team’s been working on more earthly projects. RoboSimian is an ape-like robot designed for search-and-rescue missions that’s expected to compete in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. It features four multi-jointed limbs with unique hands and no defined front or back — allowing it to always face the right way. Thanks to its primate-like movement and posture, the robot will be able to navigate over difficult terrain, climb ladders and even drive vehicles (one of the DRC’s requirements). While the project itself isn’t new, JPL recently published an interesting video that shows RoboSimian gripping tools, lifting its own weight and balancing delicate objects. This means, of course, that robot monkeys will soon join spiders, cats and dogs in your dystopian nightmares. Video after the break.
A robotic ball you control with your phone? What’s not to like? Well, we managed to find a few things when we took a look at the first generation back in 2011 — that’s what we do. Most of the criticisms of the original Sphero came down to pricing and the admittedly short list of things it could actually do at the time. Sure it was pretty great at driving feline friends completely nuts — but that alone wasn’t enough to justify the $130 price tag. Orbotix has made some improvements since then, and more importantly, the open API has given users a much fuller experience, with around 20 or so compatible titles currently available on the iPhone.
This month, the company is refreshing the device itself, with the simply titled Sphero 2.0. The particularly astute among you will no doubt notice that nothing has really changed here from an aesthetic standpoint. Nope, it’s the same white plastic ball with the cartoony Sphero mascot on one side and all of the fine print (FCC info, “Made in China,” etc.) on the other, with a series of interlinking, barely visible lines across its surface. There have been some hardware changes to the toy, but everything’s on the inside, namely brighter lights and faster speeds — as the company insists in its press material, it’s “only slightly slower than a Lamborghini.” Of course, scale’s important here.
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
In Insert Coin, we look at an exciting new tech project that requires funding before it can hit production. If you’d like to pitch a project, please send us a tip with “Insert Coin” as the subject line.
Isn’t a baby monitor effectively a waste of technology? With a bit more thought and an operating system, couldn’t it do much more with its components than just scope your infant? That’s the premise behind Y Combinator-backed ixi-play, an Android-powered robot that just launched on the Crowdhoster crowdfunding platform. On top of Android 4.2, a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU, 1GB RAM and a 720p camera, the owlish ‘bot has face, card and object detection, voice recognition, a touch-sensor on the head, eye displays for animations, a tweeter/woofer speaker combo and child-proof “high robustness.” For motion, the team adopted a design used in flight simulators, giving ixi-play “agile and silent” 3-axis translation and rotation moves.
All that tech is in the service of one thing, of course: your precious snowflake. There are currently three apps for ixi-play: a baby monitor, language learning and animal-themed emotion cards. As the video shows (after the break), the latter app lets your toddler flash cards to the bot to make it move or emote via the eye displays, matching the anger or happiness shown on the card. In baby monitor mode, on top of sending a live (encoded) video stream to your tablet, it’ll also play soothing music and sing or talk your toddler to sleep. The device will also include an SDK that includes low-level motion control and vision programming, providing a way for developers to create more apps. As for pricing, you can snap one up starting at $299 for delivery around July 24th, 2014, provided the company meets its $957,000 funding goal (pledges are backed by Crowdtilt). That’s exactly the same price we saw recently for far less amusing-sounding baby monitor, so if you’re interested, hit the source.
For YouTube’s Geek Week, Tested interviewed robotics enthusiast Mike McMaster about his remote-controlled and life-size Wall-E replica. McMaster is part of the Wall-E Builder’s Club, a group of hobbyists who started planning on building a replica of the lovable robot even before his movie came out.
Image by Mike McMaster
Watch Tested’s video to find out the effort and ingenuity that Mike and his friends put in to make the robot:
As Mike said, you should join the Wall-E Builder’s Club if you want to make your own Wall-E. I wonder if they can make a flying EVE.
Robots are everywhere. From making noodles in the background to serving diners and waiting tables, they’re no strangers to the restaurant scene. And now they might be making their way into hospitals.
This isn’t the first time a robot was built for the healthcare industry, but Veebot has built one that will draw blood from your arm. They’ve combined robotics with image-analysis software so that nurses and medical technologists can be on call elsewhere.
First of all, the machine inflates the cuff and tightens it around your arm. It shines an infrared on your arm to locate a vein and uses an ultrasound to check if blood’s ripe for the taking.
Before it goes to clinical trials, Veebot wants the robot to be right 90% of the time when it decides to plunge the needle into the vein. As of now, that value is at 83%.
Japan: Not Always as Tech as it Seems Often discussed, but difficult to appreciate if one’s never been here, is the notion of Japanese technological duality, or contradictionism, if you will. Among the favorite targets are the fax machine and its death grip on relevance, banking stuck in 1997, and very late-to-the-game smartphone adoption. These exist side-by-side with some of the world’s most advanced robotics research, a plurality of global industrial automation, the world-standard high-speed shinkansen trains, nationwide 4G wireless coverage, etc.
A lot of Japan has remained unchanged for, ohhhhh… a few thousand years, and one of the technological hangers-on is the humble broom. While one can find a standard plastic broom with plastic bristles anywhere, there are just as many, if not more, shiny new cleaning tools with bamboo handles and some kind of dried grass or an entire plant just stuck on the end.
One might argue that if it’s not broke, blah blah blah, but try effectively sweeping anything other than a lawn with a tumbleweed wired onto the end of a stick. Granted, they’re used primarily for outdoor cleaning – but still, that they exist alone is a curiosity.
(Editor’s Note: Though we’re making light of the issue here, it’s also quite nice to be spared the noise and air pollution of leaf blowers and lawn mowers here in Japan. Mid-sized weed eaters, small engine rotary grass cutters, are pretty much the only motorized outdoor landscaping tools in use.)
So, arguably, in a country where all public school students spend at least 10-15 minutes a day cleaning their own classrooms and buildings by hand, where the verb「掃除」(“sō-ji;” cleaning) is often pronounced with an honorific prefix, and a generalized reverence for things being clean & tidy pervades much of everyday life, the leap to robot cleaners is an interesting one, but one that’s gradually being taken. Japanese buyers’ most common leap is this:
Yep, according to a new survey report from Tokyo-based Seed Planning Market Research and Consulting (市場調査とコンサルティングのシード・プランニング), Boston, Massachusetts-based iRobot’s Roomba, available here since 2004 (and first to market), holds a 75%+ share of Japan’s robo-cleaning market.
Seemingly unrelated, the luxury of home cleaning robots and the practical utility of disaster response robots have one thing in common here in Japan: iRobot. The American company makes both Japan’s #1 selling cleaning robot and the first robots able to enter and inspect the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster zone. This again, is a matter of timing; iRobot’s PackBot and Warrior models have been tested and deployed in active war zones for more than a decade, and Roomba’s 2004 introduction in Japan was far ahead of any viable domestic models.
In second and third place, respectively, are domestic models from Tsukamoto Aim (below left) and Sharp’s Kokorobo series (below right):
(Another Editor’s Note: It’s not being, and would be unfair to imply here that all models sold by Tsukamoto Aim license and take design cues from Hello Kitty, but the existence of this product is, well, it’s just… Japan!)
To Buy or Not to Buy and Why: Reasons & Numbers As elsewhere, cleaning robots got a slow start here in Japan. Shiny new gee-whiz product purchasing patterns from early adopters gave the market an initial bump, but average consumers were hesitant – rightfully so – early Roomba and domestic models just didn’t, you know, work very well, and reviews and word of mouth weren’t kind to the inspired, yet uninspiring machines.
The tech has caught up, however, and sales in Japan are booming. According to Seed Planning, since 2008 the home cleaning robot market has seen a 6-fold increase in yearly sales (approx. 380,000 units sold in 2012), and they project sales of 9o0,000 units in 2018. In a nation of about 128 million people, if realized that’s some serious market penetration. Given that homes in Japan generally aren’t all that big and don’t have a lot of carpeting, it’s all the more impressive. Among Japan’s massive, dominant middle-class, such expenditures are a luxury but not quite as economically extravagant as one might think – but still, 900,000!
In addition to evaluating brand preference and sales figures, Seed Planning’s survey among 400 cleaning robot owners and 300 non-owners also gauged reasons for consumers’ purchasing and not purchasing. Current owners included simple convenience and easing the cleaning burden as the most common reasons for buying, and, true to form in the Japanese consumer tech market, a lot of people just wanted to try a “cute” new product (in that vein, see video below for some of the best viral marketing cleaning robot makers didn’t but could have ever asked for). Non-owners cited cost and concerns over the robots’ ability to properly clean as the most common barriers to purchasing (best seller iRobot’s prices range from $650 – $800, Sharp’s Kokorobo models are comparable, and Tsukumoto Aim’s, at $100-$150 for the disc-shaped models, up to $400 for the unfortunately named “Hobot” glass cleaning model, are vastly more affordable).
Why Care? Because Live-In Social Robots Begin, Labor Shortages Pend, and $¥$¥$¥$¥$¥$! Okay, to be fair, it’s understandable if you’re yawning at the ferociously unsexy topic of cleaning robots. But here’s the kicker: one has to fully grasp and appreciate that these unassuming little pucks of technology are the vanguard of personal service robot deployment and use. The quest toward a friendly, conversational, perhaps dressed-like-a-French-maid home and/or industrial service robot has to start somewhere – and clearly, it’s on. For now these simple machines operate within a very narrow spectrum of ability, but they are, nonetheless, primarily autonomous robots existing side-by-side with human beings, doing a job, becoming part of our conceptual landscape; these are the babysteps of human/robot integrative socialization, and while still novel to us, for future generations they might be simply obligatory and obvious.
Japanese society, as per usual, presents a unique market observation opportunity. Women do most of the cleaning and housework here, and if, as predicted and arguably very necessary, more women begin entering more of the workforce, in addition to the impending and unavoidable large-scale human labor crisis facing the country, then the seemingly over optimistic sales projection of 900,000 units in 2018 makes a lot more sense.
It’s often claimed, but seldom detailed how, the robotics industry is going to have any practical impact on the Japanese economy. (which it’s going to desperately need in 50 years when – and this is inevitable – 30% of what might be the world’s most advanced capitalist economy’s consumers have passed away, and due to extremely low birth rates, go unreplaced). Well, let’s see: how about 900,000 units times even the low-end cost of a cleaning robot plus maintenance, accessories, upgrades, etc.? Not a bad economic push, that.
For now, iRobot’s running away with the Japanese sales cake, but there’s no shortage of competitors on their way up. One review site, LesNumeriques, found 24 (!) viable models from around the world worthy of consideration:
So, there you have it. But, if even now the subject of cleaning robots does absolutely nothing for you, if you remain unmoved by the practical genesis of in-home, someday social robotics, if the intriguing demographic factors are just meh, and if you care little about potentially lots and lots of big-time money changing hands here in Asia, then we’ll simply leave you with these words:
Cat Riding a Roomba In a Shark Costume Chasing a Duckling (and if that doesn’t strike a nerve, someone should take your pulse)
• • •
Reno J. Tibke is the founder and operator of Anthrobotic.com and a contributor at the non-profit Robohub.org.
Originally teased five years ago, Toyota’s Segway-killing Winglet is finally taking to the streets of Japan for public testing. While the original device was designed to be steered by users’ knees, the revamped edition now contains a familiar steering pillar-and-wheels combination. The trials are due to run through March 2016 with the aim of proving that the Winglet is safe, functional and will save shoe leather on your commute to work. Those curious to see what the Japanese version of infamous Segway fanGeorge Oscar Bluth Jr. (or, you know, Justin Bieber) looks like, head past the break for the video.
“Anything you can do, I can do cheaper,” says the Tokyo Institute of Technology while jabbing a rude elbow in the ribs of Intuitive Surgical. The Japanese institute is showing off IBIS, a surgical robot that is expected to cost between a third and a tenth of the $2 million it takes to buy one of Intuitive’s da Vinci droids. Unlike its electrically powered American rival, IBIS is pneumatic, making it significantly cheaper and able to provide force feedback to surgeons when the arms touch something. The engineers behind the ‘bot are hoping to produce a practical version within the next five years, and we’re already thinking about inviting both machines along for a fight at Expand 2020. In the meantime, you can catch IBIS in action in the video after the break.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
