Hasta La Gadget!

It may not be the first go-round for the Karmetik Machine Orchestra, but the automated musicians, fashioned by a group of students at the California Institute of the Arts, took the stage last night to prove that robots can rock. Among the mechanized musicians scheduled to perform at the Walt Disney Modular Theater were MahaDevibot, Glockenbot, BreakBot, and NotomotoN, described as a “duel-head drum with twelve beaters and a mallet orchestra.” Each of the robots was built from salvaged parts and programmed by CalArts students, who control the machines from laptops during performances. A description of the show posted to the CalArts website touts music-producing robots suspended from the ceiling that trigger sound activated light shows and animation — now that sounds like a way to spend a Thursday night. Check out a video of the players and their masters after the break.

Continue reading Robot orchestra marries music and machines (video)

Robot orchestra marries music and machines (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 14 May 2011 08:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Is a robot really a robot if it refuses to act like a robot? That’s the question we were asking ourselves after stumbling upon this DIY machine, which may have just seized the crown for World’s Bitchiest Bot. Every time you flip the on switch, this little gremlin will partially emerge from its box to turn itself off with a vicious, whip-like gesture normally reserved for snooze buttons. Continue to rub it the wrong way and the petulant ingrate will eventually scurry away from you and start spinning around frantically, before completely withdrawing the switch and shutting itself off. After that, it’ll probably spend a few hours sulking and listening to Elliott Smith in its room, but don’t worry — it’s just a phase. Video after the break.

Continue reading DIY robot is the brooding teenager you’ve always wanted to slap (video)

DIY robot is the brooding teenager you’ve always wanted to slap (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 12 May 2011 00:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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At the International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Shanghai, industrial robot company Yasakawa equipped a couple of its manufacturing machines with lightsabers and choreographed a violent ballet for them to perform. The resulting battle is more exhilarating than the duel at the end of Phantom Menace and the performances are less lifeless than those in Attack of the Clones. Best of all — Lucas can’t add 30 minutes of new CGI scenes and re-release the video below in 3D.

Continue reading Industrial robots do Star Wars better than Lucas

Industrial robots do Star Wars better than Lucas originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 11 May 2011 16:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Although we usually prefer our computers to be perfect, logical, and psychologically fit, sometimes there’s more to be learned from a schizophrenic one. A University of Texas experiment has doomed a computer with dementia praecox, saddling the silicon soul with symptoms that normally only afflict humans. By telling the machine’s neural network to treat everything it learned as extremely important, the team hopes to aid clinical research in understanding the schizophrenic brain — following a popular theory that suggests afflicted patients lose the ability to forget or ignore frivolous information, causing them to make illogical connections and paranoid jumps in reason. Sure enough, the machine lost it, and started spinning wild, delusional stories, eventually claiming responsibility for a terrorist attack. Yikes. We aren’t hastening the robot apocalypse if we’re programming machines to go mad intentionally, right?

Schizophrenic computer may help us understand similarly afflicted humans originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 11 May 2011 09:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Are you ready to welcome our experimental toy robot overlords? They’re adorable, and they’re taking no prisoners here at Google I/O. Hasbro and Google are collaborating to bring these little critters to life by docking a Nexus S brain to an exoskeleton-like body containing a battery, a Bluetooth radio and a bunch servomotors (the kind you find in RC models). The battery powers the dock and provides additional juice to the phone which in turn controls the servos via Bluetooth. Where things get interesting is that these toy robots don’t just act based on a set of rules programmed into the Nexus S, but actually react to their environment (using the handset’s sensors, front-facing camera, and touchscreen) and communicate with Google’s cloud services over WiFi (for facial and object recognition) in order to enhance their behavior. Shake them and they get dizzy, rub their display and they get happy / angry, show them a Decepticon card and they cower away. They will also take a picture of you, decide if you are friend or foe, and respond accordingly. Predictably, Hasbro is sticking with gender stereotypes by providing basic male and female “personalities,” complete with accessorized docks. Check out these experimental creatures in our gallery and hit the break for our hands-on video. Just don’t go in expecting a price and release — it’s prototype cuteness only for now.

Continue reading Hasbro’s experimental Nexus-powered robot toy hands-on at Google I/O (video)

Hasbro’s experimental Nexus-powered robot toy hands-on at Google I/O (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 11 May 2011 05:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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