As one might imagine, there’s plenty of shiny things to get excited about in BeatBots’ San Francisco office, one of which is suspended on a wall in between paintings of Keepon and his power-promoting British cousin, Zingy. Marek Michalowski gave us a look at the still-unnamed wall drawing robot he’s been fiddling around with. Still in its early stages, the ‘bot is supported by wires that also power it, using an Arduino brain to drag a dry erase marker across the white surface of the wall. Check out a quick video explanation after the break.
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.
You’ll likely miss 3D Robotics on first pass. The company’s San Diego R&D facility is headquartered in an unassuming building amongst similarly nondescript offices in a maze of a business park. Enter through the back and you’ll find yourself in the middle of a small manufacturing assembly, where industrial Pick and Place machines buzz loudly and a handful of women are QAing finished product. Until earlier this month, the site was mostly off the radar, save for a devoted group of online enthusiasts. Then, Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson announced he was leaving the magazine in order to head up the company.
Anderson’s off grabbing lunch as we arrive — like us, just off a flight from the East Coast for a brief visit before jumping on yet another plane. He’s in transition at the moment, as the head of both Wired and 3D Robotics, trying out his keycard for the first time as we set up our film equipment to interview the newly minted executive for an upcoming Engadget Show segment. Anderson’s ties to the company go back to its inception, however, co-founding 3D Robotics with Jordi Muñoz, a 19-year-old living in Tijuana when the two first met through Anderson’s DIY Drones online community.
When we visited BeatBots’ San Francisco headquarters a few days back, the company’s co-founder Marek Michalowski was a bit hush-hush when it came to discussing the future of Keepon, not saying much beyond alluding to upcoming updates for the move-busting little ‘bot. He was, however, more than happy to talk about hacking the beat-monitoring toy, something the company had in mind when it first designed the consumer-friendly toy. “We felt it was important to allow people to hack it and be able to do more things with the toy than it can do out of the box,” Michalowski told us.
The company left the toy’s I2C bus open, so interested parties can easily manipulate My Keepon by way of microcontrollers like Arduino and its ilk. We’ve already seen some crafty individuals get the robot to do their bidding, something that’s only likely to increase when Michalowski releases a guide for hacking My Keepon in the very near future. In the meantime, click through after the break to see the robotics PhD discuss Keepon hacks. A YouTube full of choreographed “Thriller” Keepon videos surely can’t be that far off.
Scarecrows are a tried and true piece of human technology, but nowadays birds harass more than just crops; they also bother planes. That’s why South Korea has developed a new kind of overkill scarecrow for airports: an unmanned tank with laser and acoustic weapons. More »
More fun out of MIT’s AI lab. Grad student Peng Yu happily showed off a couple of flying demos on our visit, controlling an Ar.Drone with a number of methods, including keyboard, tablet (touch), voice and gesture, each naturally presenting their own positives and negatives, in terms of ease of use and specificity. The latter was certainly the most intriguing of the bunch, executed via a Kinect hack that allowed Yu to direct the flying robot over a small model town in the middle of the lab.
Voice, meanwhile, played an important role in a computer demo that keeps in line with a vision from Boeing of a future (some 20 or 30 years out, according to its estimates) in which citizens utilize personal aircrafts capable of carrying two to four people to, say, commute to work. Speaking into the system, the user essentially negotiates with the aircraft, giving a destination, hoped for flight duration and any pitstops to be made along the way. The system in the demo adjusted for storms and let Yu know how quickly it thought it would be able to make the run.
Demos of all of the above can be found after the break.
Oh, the many faces of Keepon — well, one face, really, in a variety of different shades and textures. Various iterations of the beloved dancing robot smiled (or whatever the closest approximation is for their mouthless sort) for the camera on our recent visit to BeatBots in San Francisco. Pictured above are the original Keepon Pro, the retail My Keepon, a special blue Keepon commissioned for a German facility, a stuffed doll created by a friend of the company, a moveable wooden model designed by Keepon co-creator Hideki Kozima as a gift and two 3D printed models made by Shapeways (large) and MakerBot (small). And check out Keepon posed next to Zingy below, a sibling created by BeatBots for a UK-based power company. The family resemblance is uncanny.
If’ you’re a really fast reader, you can finish off a book in a day, maybe tackle a short one in as little as an hour or two. Good for you but that’s nothing compared to the BFS-Auto book-scanning robot. It can handle 250 pages in a minute. That’s fast even for a machine. More »
It’s a mouthful, we know, but the gist of the below video is this: a few months back, iRobot unveiled RP-VITA, a teleconferencing robot with a rolling base. The company’s got all sorts of plans for the ‘bot, but is starting things off with medical applications. It’s co-branded the device with InTouch Health, positioning it as a method for allowing doctors to tend to patients remotely. An iRobot employee took RP-VITA for a spin around InTouch’s Southern California mock hospital location, courtesy of an iPad at the robotics company’s Bedford, MA location.
The interface appears to be quite user-friendly — just touch a location and RP-VITA starts driving, using its sensors to avoid obstacles along the way as a video feed show you where you’re going. Once you reach a patient, you can tap on their image to interact with them (in the case of the dummies in the demo, however, that was easier said than done, of course). Along the bottom, the app offers the doctor large, easy-to-read vitals.
Check out a full video of the demo after the break.
Most companies might think twice about inflicting blunt force trauma upon their carefully crafted prototypes, but most companies just don’t love baseball the way iRobot does. While developing a mechanical hand for DARPA’s Autonomous Robotic Manipulation program, iRobot took a metal baseball bat to its three-fingered prototype. No need to cringe, though — the artificial appendage came away virtually unscathed. The hand’s durability comes from its flexible feelers, fingers molded from soft polymers with embedded tactile sensors. Rather than bending at metallic joints, these digits are pulled tight by inexpensive cables made from fishing line — not only can they take a beating, but should one snap, they’re easy to replace. The soft fingers can pick up small objects, such as keys or credit cards and can hold about 50 pounds before slipping up. The hand’s current iteration is in use on a DARPA test robot, but you can see the prototype take its licks 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.
