Hasta La Gadget!

Are all robots created equal? The answer is obviously in the negative, since some robots are capable of doing more than others. While most of us would see robots take over mundane human jobs at the factory, especially when it comes to packaging or performing a repetitive action over and over again for long periods of time, how about a little artistic license applied to the robot’s artificial intelligence? This is where the e-David welding robot comes in handy, where it is currently learning how to churn out perfect copies of paintings.

The creators of the e-David robot wants it to “grow” into a flawless mechanical forger. Instead of imbuing it with an artist’s soul (or rather, artificial intelligence), the easier and more efficient way of doing things would be to give it a “painter’s eye”. Now this is not going to be easy by any means, but it does translate to the e-David robot not having enough creativity deep within. Boasting a number of different brushes and a palette of two dozen colors, the e-David will always attempt to copy whatever painting it is given, regardless of whether it is a portrait, landscape, or an abstract piece of art.

e-David Welding Robot Paints As Well original content from Ubergizmo.

Just how far do you think robotic technology will bring us eventually? Well, researchers have managed to come up with a “blind” robot of sorts, where it is known as the Shrewbot. The battery-powered Shrewbot is roughly the size of a small dog, and is capable of moving its head around while sporting omnidirectional wheels without any eyes. Just how then is it going to learn to communicate with its surroundings? It is nice to know that it has a sense of touch thanks to its plastic whiskers, with 18 of them located on its snout that are capable of moving back and forth five times per second. Interestingly enough, actual living, breathing shrews will whisk at double the speed. Each time the “whisker” touches something, it will bend over backward, pushing a magnet at its base which will detect the displacement while sending such information to the Shrewbot’s computer processor.

These touch signals will in turn be used to create a picture of its environment, all the while helping it distinguish shapes and textures. Since the Shrewbot is wholly autonomous, it is not remote controlled in any way, and has the ability to investigate approximately three feet of a wall in half a minute.

Blind Shrewbot Navigates Through Touch original content from Ubergizmo.

Check out this video from grad students at Michigan State University — it starts off a bit slowly, but it quickly picks up steam. It’s a testament to the power of the robotic tail (not the first we’ve seen of that variety, incidentally), showing a 7.5-centimeter tall ‘bot that can move, jump and maneuver in the air. Inspired by an article published in Nature last year, Tailbot’s titular appendage lets it land on the correct side, stand up and lie down. Check out a video of the tiny adventurer after the break.

Filed under: Robots, Alt

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Source: Tailbot

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.

Filed under: Robots

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Source: Ixi-Play

Another day, and yet another robot comes to save the day. This time around, we have the help of the GuideIN Tube, which so happens to be a self-guided intubation robot that you can see in action in the video above. It would be interesting to see just how much easier life would get for those in the medical line and are in the business of saving lives. Just about any anesthesiologist is able to tell you this – intubation does have a failure rate at times, and when it actually does fail, especially during moments when the patient is not spontaneously breathing and cannot be ventilated, this is when you press the panic button. With the GuideIN Tube robot, algorithms have been put in place in order to deal with the difficult airway.

The GuideIN Tube is the result of work courtesy of researchers over at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where they have managed to cobble together this robotic intubation device which will make use of infrared light in order to identify the airway, while guiding the tube toward it. Since it relies on infrared technology, the GuidIN Tube is capable of working in situations where the normal human eye might find it difficult to see, and that is always a good thing.

GuideIN Tube Is A Self-Guided Intubation Robot original content from Ubergizmo.