Hasta La Gadget!

Meet HERB, a robot from Intel’s research labs that can fetch drinks, get a pack of chips and sort dishes. HERB or the Home Exploring Robotic Butler is a project from Intel’s personal robotics group.

The robot sits on a tricked-out Segway base and has arms that are driven by cables to allow it to be extremely dexterous. A spinning laser on the top of the robot help generates 3-D data so robot can identify objects. There’s also a camera to help it “see.”

“It (the robot) looks big but it will fit through most doorways,” says Siddhartha Srinivasa, an Intel researcher who is working on the project. “It’s about a foot longer than the human wingspan.”

Users can tell HERB what they need using an iPhone interface that the team built. There’s also a voice recognition program in the works so you can just tell the robot loud what you want it to do.

The HERB project has been in the works for nearly four years. Intel showed the robot’s latest features at its annual research day fest on Wednesday.

HERB is just one of the many robotics project that is trying to teach machines how to do everyday tasks.  Willow Garage, a Palo Alto, California based startup has a robot called PR2 that is being trained to sort laundry and fold towels.

The idea is to teach robots to go beyond carefully structured and repetitive tasks so they can move beyond factories.

Check out the video of HERB at work. HERB doesn’t move fast but if you could just sit on the couch and have it bring a bottle of beer every time, a few seconds delay shouldn’t bother you that much.

See Also:

• Willow Garage Holds a ‘Graduation Party’ for Its Robots
• Gallery: Battle Bots Reign Triumphant at Robogames
• Anybots Robot Will Go to the Office for You
• DIY Robotics: The Rise of Open Source Hardware
• Towel-Folding Robot Could Fix Laundry Woes
• Robo-Ethicists Want to Revamp Asimov’s 3 Laws

Photo: HERB/ Priya Ganapati

Over in Britain, a nation of binge-drinking alcoholics, there’s now yet another way to get a booze-fix. Marks and Spencer, the kindly uncle of national department stores, is selling a single-serve glass of wine.

The glasses, actually recyclable plastic, come pre-filled with 187ml (6.3-ounces) of Shiraz, Chardonnay or rose and have a peel-off foil lid. They cost £2.25 each ($3.37), which makes them more expensive than buying the same wine by the bottle (four glasses add up to £9, whereas the bottle is £4.50).

The product was invented by an Englishman named James Nash, and ironically his idea, before being picked up by M&S, was laughed off UK reality business show Dragon’s Den by its foolish, short-sighted panel.

The idea of single-serve wine could really take off. In-flight beverage service is the obvious market, doing away with the wastefully separate bottle and cup, but picnics for one could also work well. Sitting in the park with a sandwich, a bottle of wine and a glass will draw in some stares, even if you aren’t dressed like a wino. But with a cold glass (plastic) glass of Chardonnay to accompany your smoked salmon bagel, you’ll be the most sophisticated bum in Union Square. Chin-chin!

Wine Innovations product page [Wine Innovations]

Wine-in-a-glass entrepreneur ridiculed in Dragons’ Den toasts M&S success [Daily Mail via Crave]

What if you could travel back in time to the 1970s? What would you do? That is the question asked by Alex Varanese in his wonderful ALT/1977 project. His answer?

[G]rab all the modern technology I could find, take it to the late 70’s, superficially redesign it all to blend in, start a consumer electronics company to unleash it upon the world, then sit back as I rake in billions, trillions, or even millions of dollars

This fantasy is realized in the form of four period-accurate promotional posters. Above you see an MP3 player clad in wood-effect plastic with a twiddly metal knob, an LED spectrum-analyser and some mysterious “mode” and “set” buttons, all paired up with some giant retro headphones and that trademark of 1970s audio, the quarter-inch jack.

Alex’ gallery also contains a notebook computer (the LapTron 64), a clamshell cellphone (the MobileVoxx) and a handheld gaming console (the Microcade 3000). If that’s not enough for you, there are an assortment of semi-abstract artworks based on the products. Anyone who grew up at this time will recognize these parodies as being absolutely dead-on.

I love these pictures, not just as clever re-imaginings but as actual products. With the exception of the Sega Game Gear-alike console, which I’m not so hot on, I’d buy any one of these products to use today. Especially that amazing Pocket Hi-Fi (tagline: “Like a party in your pocket. But not in a weird way.”)

ALT/1977: WE ARE NOT TIME TRAVELERS [Behance via ★]

In an event that made many robot enthusiasts and tech nerds tear up, 11 robots carried flags and waved their arms as they rolled down an aisle as part of their “graduation.”

The 11 model PR2 robots are from Menlo Park, California, robotics company Willow Garage. Over the last few months, the robots have been trained for their new life in research labs worldwide where they will be used to create applications and solve problems.

The robots, each of which cost $400,000, will be working with 11 research teams whose proposals were chosen in a contest that Willow Garage organized in January.

“Robots can do great things for our economy,” Scott Hassan, founder of Willow Garage, told attendees at the event. “They can change our lives in a big way and these robots are capable of doing it in my lifetime.”

Among the tasks that the robots will be put to are folding towels and doing laundry, learning how drawers and refrigerators open, picking up items scattered on a floor, and developing 3-D perception to perform tasks such as setting a table and emptying a dishwasher.

“Robotics will have a big impact on our products in the future,” says Jan Becker, principal engineer at Bosch Research and Technology Center in Palo Alto. Bosch, which makes automotive parts and home appliances, is one of the places where a newly graduated PR2 robot will go to work. Additional sensors will be added to the PR2 robot, testing its ability to feel the environment it is in.

“Many of our products are going to have autonomy, and PR2 will help us test some of our ideas,” says Becker.

Willow Garage was founded in 2006 with the idea of creating an open-source robotics software platform. The hardware isn’t open but the company has created open source programming to drive the machine. Willow Garage’s Robot Operating System (ROS) originated at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ROS is based on Linux and can work with both Windows and Mac PCs.

Each PR2 robot has two stereo camera pairs in its head. The four 5-megapixel cameras also include a tilting laser range finder. Each of the robot’s forearms has an ethernet-based wide-angle camera, while the grippers at the tip have three-axis accelerometers and pressure-sensor arrays on the fingertips. At the base of the robot is another laser range finder.

The PR2 is powered by two eight-core i7 Xeon system servers on-board, 48 GB of memory and a battery system equivalent to 16 laptop batteries. Yet, that translates into just about two hours of battery life.

“The robot is dumb as a rock by human standards,” says Keenan Wyrobek, co-director of the personal robotics program at Willow Garage. “But it is very advanced and capable for the tasks it can perform.”

Researchers will get to keep their PR2 robot for two years in order to develop its capabilities. For example, for the last few months, researchers from the University of California Berkeley have been working with a PR2 robot, teaching it to pick up a towel from a pile of laundry, fold it and stack it. The idea is to demonstrate the machine’s ability to perceive and manipulate “deformable objects.”

Other robotics researchers from institutions such as the University of Southern California hope to expand the PR2’s motor skills so it can learn how to pour different kinds of liquid into a cup.

Another plan for one of the robots includes teaching it to work in a collaborative environment with people and other robots. (Let’s hope the robots don’t get into fights.)

It looks like much of the PR2’s training can be done by parents rather than researchers. Now that they’ve graduated from the factory, maybe it’s time to send these robots to daycare?

Check out more photos of the PR2 below.

PR2 says hello to the world. Eric Berger, co-director of the personal robotics program at Willow Garage introduced the robot at a media event.

One of the 11 PR2 robots moves down the aisle as part of its graduation ceremony.

Each arm of the PR2 has seven degrees of freedom, giving it almost-human like flexibility. The arms can carry up to 3.9 pounds (1.8 Kg). The flexibility with the wrists lets the PR2 wave, grip objects and rotate its arm at the elbow.

Photos: Priya Ganapati / Wired.com

See Also:

• Company Offers Free Robots for Open Source Developers
• Gallery: Battle Bots Reign Triumphant at Robogames
• DIY Robotics: The Rise of Open Source Hardware
• Towel-Folding Robot Could Fix Laundry Woes
• Robo-Ethicists Want to Revamp Asimov’s 3 Laws
• Jan. 25, 1921: The Robot Cometh

Interacting with your computer by waving your hands may require just a pair of multicolored gloves and a webcam, say two researchers at MIT who have made a breakthrough in gesture-based computing that’s inexpensive and easy to use.

A pair of lycra gloves — with 20 irregularly shaped patches in 10 different colors — held in front of a webcam can generate a unique pattern with every wave of the hand or flex of the finger. That can be matched against a database of gestures and translated into commands for the computer. The gloves can cost just about a dollar to manufacture, say the researchers.

“This gets the 3-D configuration of your hand and your fingers,” says Robert Wang, a graduate student in the computer science and artificial intelligence lab at MIT. “We get how your fingers are flexing.” Wang developed the system with Jovan Popović, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.

The technology could be used in videogames where gamers could pick up and move objects using hand gestures and by engineers and artists to manipulate 3-D models.

“The concept is very strong,” Francis MacDougall, chief technology officer and co-founder of gesture-recognition company GestureTek, told Wired.com. “If you look at the actual analysis technique they are using it is same as what Microsoft has done with Project Natal for detecting human body position.” MacDougall isn’t involved with MIT’s research project.

MIT has become a hotbed for researchers working in the area of gestural computing. Last year, an MIT researcher showed a wearable gesture interface called the “SixthSense” that recognizes basic hand movements. Another recent breakthrough showed how to turn a LCD screen into a low-cost, 3-D gestural computing system.

The latest idea is surprisingly easy in its premise. The system hinges on the ability to use a differentiated enough pattern so each gesture can be looked up quickly in a database.

For the design of their multicolored gloves, Wang and Popović tried to restrict the number of colors used so the system could reliably distinguish one color from another in different lighting conditions and reduce errors. The arrangement and shapes of the patches were chosen such that the front and back of the hand would be distinct.

Once the webcam captures an image of the glove, a software program crops out the background, so the glove alone is superimposed on a white background.

The program then reduces the resolution of the cropped image to 40 pixels by 40 pixels. It searches through a database that contains 40 x 40 digital models of a hand, clad in the distinctive glove showing different positions. Once match is found, it simply looks up the corresponding hand position.

Since the system doesn’t have to calculate the relative positions of the fingers, palm and back of the hand on the fly, it can be extremely quick, claim the researchers.

And if the video is to be believed, the precision with which the system can gauge gestures including the flexing of individual fingers is impressive.

A challenge, though, is having enough processing power and memory so gestures made by a user can be looked up in a database quickly, says MacDougall.

“It takes hundreds of megabytes of pre-recorded posed images for this to work.,” he says, “though that’s not so heavy in the computing world anymore.”

Another problem could be getting people to wear the gloves. Let’s face it: No one wants to look like Kramer in a fur coat from a episode of Seinfeld or an extra in the musical Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat.

MacDougall says the pattern on the gloves can be tweaked to make them less obvious.

“If you want to make it more attractive, you could hide the patterns in a glove using retro-reflective material,” he says. “That way you could [create] differentiable patterns that wouldn’t be visible to the naked eye but a camera’s eye could see it.”

Wang and Popović aren’t letting issues like fashion dictate their research. They say they are working on a design of similarly patterned shirts.

Photo: Jason Dorfman/CSAIL
Video: Robert Y. Wang/Jovan Popović

See Also:

• Gestural Computing Breakthrough Turns LCD Into a Big Sensor
• Laptop Makers Shy Away From Multitouch Technology
• Gesture Cube Responds To Waving Your Hand
• Google Adds Gesture Search to Android Phones
• Gesture Controlled Mouse Makes Its Retail Debut