Solar-Powered Robot Cleans the Pool

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The Solar-Breeze robot is the perfect companion to the Roomba, Scooba, and any other robot you have cleaning your house.

An intelligent swimming pool surface skimmer with an attached chlorine dispenser, this robot removes surface debris, including leaves, organic material, pollens, dust, and even suntan oils. As the name states, this robot runs on solar power. Just leave the robot in the pool and it will continuously swim around, cleaning, while the sun shines.

The internal Lithium Ion batteries are charged by the sun during the day, so it can run at night and cloudy days for several hours, as well.

The rear paddle wheel propels the robot through the water while the front paddle wheel scoops the surface debris and film into the collection tray, located underneath. Bumper wheels on the corners rotate the Solar Breeze to a new direction whenever it bumps into the wall. It is designed to stay near the edges of the pool where dirt and debris generally accummulate. It changes directions to get around obstacles or to get to the other end of the pool.

Removing the junk from the pool before it sinks to the pool means no bottom cleaning or filtering. That’s a savings because the pump doesn’t need to be run as much. It’s also a time-saver over the manual pool skimmer.

Tagged with a $500 price tag from Solar Pool Technologies, it’s a little pricey, but you don’t want to deny your cleaning robots a new friend, do you?

Program Your Own Robot with PR2

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Robots need to be useful, whether it’s vacuuming the rug, picking up things, or bringing you a soda. Willow Garage’s PR2 leaves it up to you to decide what it will do.

With the PR2, the hardware is taken care of. It’s up to you, the robot-maker, to take advantage of over 1000 software libraries available to decide what it will do.

It has a lot of potential, with powerful “brains” and a full sensor suite. The brains are a pair of onboard Xeon servers with eight cores, 24GB of RAM, and a 2TB hard disk drive. Power comes from a 1.3kWh battery and onboard chargers.
 
Perched on top of an omnidirectional base, the PR2 ships with a 5-megapixel camera, forearm cameras, and gripper tip sensors as part of its arsenal of sensors. PR2 navigates its surroundings using the two LIDAR optical remote sensors to know where things are located. It has two arms and grippers.

It has strong network capabilities, such as a Gigabit Ethernet network with 32GB backplane switch and dual WiFi radios and a base station.

The hardware is all yours for the price of $400,000. For that price, I would need the robot to clean my house, cook me dinner, and give me a massage.

The state of household robots in Japan: looking pretty great

This crazy looking little fellow is Toshiba‘s ApriPoco robot, and we couldn’t want to meet him more — especially in his updated form. Designed as a home assistance bot, ApriPoco can learn to control electrical appliances using both IR and verbal commands. He’s got some fine company in Japan, too, where household robots are starting to take off. As you’ll see in the Japanese news report (which is embedded below), there are robots to help you do the dishes, move furniture, and even robotic wheelchairs to help you get around. Really, the only question that remains for us is… when do we move? Here’s to the future.

Continue reading The state of household robots in Japan: looking pretty great

The state of household robots in Japan: looking pretty great originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 04 Sep 2010 04:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Robotic Yale Aerial Manipulator grabs a can of Guinness

There’s plenty of UAVs out there capable of dropping things, but comparatively fewer that are able to pick things up. Some researchers at Yale University doing their part to change that, however, and have recently shown off their so-called Yale Aerial Manipulator; a UAV with a robotic hand. While that may not exactly sound like much, the four-fingered hand is able to “autonomously” grab objects that weigh up to two kilograms while the UAV is in flight, and the helicopter itself is able to reach a top speed of 120 kilometers per hour. That, the researchers say, could let the UAV pick up bombs or packages in difficult to reach areas, or even simply be used to make deliveries in urban areas — like that can of Guinness you’ve been craving, for instance. Head on past the break to check it out in action.

Continue reading Robotic Yale Aerial Manipulator grabs a can of Guinness

Robotic Yale Aerial Manipulator grabs a can of Guinness originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 30 Aug 2010 18:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Wii Balance Board-controlled robot a hit with toddlers in Ithaca (video)

How could we resist a story involving robot-powered babies? The Ithaca College Tots on Bots project aims to mobilize infants with physical disabilities by setting them atop a “mobile robot” equipped with a Wii Balance Board to let the young operator steer by leaning — which, it turns out, works pretty well. Additionally, the vehicle uses sonar to avoid nasty crashes and a remote control that an adult can use to take control. Further study has to be made before any long term developmental benefits can be ascertained, but in the meantime it does look like a lot of fun. See it in action after the break.

Continue reading Wii Balance Board-controlled robot a hit with toddlers in Ithaca (video)

Wii Balance Board-controlled robot a hit with toddlers in Ithaca (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 28 Aug 2010 06:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MIT Seaswarm autonomous robots coming soon to an oil spill near you (video)

Think of it as an autonomous, swarming, photovoltaic legion of seagoing Roombas (or don’t, if you’re easily upset). The Seaswarm project at MIT takes a thin, hydrophobic material and drags it behind a robot outfitted with GPS and WiFi for determining its location and communicating within a swarm. When deployed, the group finds the outer edges of an oil spill, and works its way into the center, coordinating the cleanup with minimal human interference. The material itself can take on twenty times its weight in oil. And yes, the whole thing is re-usable. According to researchers, 5,000 of these relatively low cost devices could have cleaned up the BP oil disaster in a month — which is more than we can say for Kevin Costner! See it in action after the break.

Continue reading MIT Seaswarm autonomous robots coming soon to an oil spill near you (video)

MIT Seaswarm autonomous robots coming soon to an oil spill near you (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Aug 2010 08:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MQ-8 Fire Scout UAV resists its human opressors, joyrides over Washington DC

A Northrop Grumman MQ-8 Fire Scout UAV strayed into restricted airspace above Washington DC after departing Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland on August 2, the result of a software logic flaw that caused the operator to momentarily lose contact with the drone. Programmed to circle when communications are severed, the chopper failed to follow its failure protocol, instead heading twenty-three miles on a north/northwest trajectory — which could have had serious consequences had it been equipped with 70mm Hydra rocket pods or Hellfire tankbuster missiles. Although this type of incident is rare, it is not unheard of: last September the Air Force had to take down an MQ-9 Reaper in Afghanistan when it failed to adhere to failure protocols after dropping communications with the ground. At least, that’s what we’d like to believe… the alternative scenario is too frightening to consider.

MQ-8 Fire Scout UAV resists its human opressors, joyrides over Washington DC originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Aug 2010 06:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Banana Apebot Provides Entertainment

apebot.jpgRight off the bat, the Bananas Apebot is different from any other humanoid robot you’ve seen. For starters, it’s manners are straight out of the jungle. It makes rude noises and shambles around looking like, well, an ape.

It does very little that’s useful; no cleaning, no picking up things. Instead, the Apebot tap dances, hums, and breaks wind (I am sure you can think of a person or two who would love this feature). This little ‘bot is purely for entertainment.

The ‘bananas’ in the name refers to the gorilla’s temper. If the Apebot is disturbed while sleeping or tipped over, it throws a full-blown tantrum, pounding fists, flashing its laser eyes, and roaring. How to soothe the enraged simian? Tickle the belly, of course.

This gem comes from the smart folks over at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute. The Apebot balances on spiraling arms to easily get around on carpet, hardwood, and even dirt. Sensors inside allows the Apebot to react to the environment, such as sniffing and growling at obstacles. It has wrist-mounted rockets that it can fire. There is also a remote control (that resembles two bananas fused together) if you want to tell it what to do.

It supposedly can play dodge ball and if paired with a fellow Apebot, the two gorillas can play laser tag. That sounds like something worth seeing.

Instead of the near universal white, blue, or black for robots, the Apebot is an eye-cringing yellowish orange.

The Bananas Apebot runs off eight AA batteries and the remote requires three AAA batteries.Priced at $79.95 online at specialty stores like Hammacher Schlemmer, this is an expensive but fun gift.

Willow Garage PR2 robot learns to sort socks for $10k prize (video)

Willow Garage PR2 robot learns to sort socks for $10k prize (video)

We’ve been following the evolution of the Willow Garage PR2 robot for a little over a year now, watching as it learned to mooch electricity and hustle pool sharks. That, as it turns out, was only the beginning. The robots are now up for general pre-order should anyone want one (priced well into the “if you have to ask” range, surely), and to celebrate that Willow Garage founder Scott Hassan put up $10k to sponsor a video contest of the PR2 robot doing some impressive things. The winner is a video called “Sockification” from a crew at UC Berkeley in which the PR2 shows some… enthusiastic sock sorting skills. You can see that one embedded below, along with our personal favorite: an ode to StrongBad and his lightswitch rave.

Continue reading Willow Garage PR2 robot learns to sort socks for $10k prize (video)

Willow Garage PR2 robot learns to sort socks for $10k prize (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 21 Aug 2010 17:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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PALRO buddies with its first apps, busts new moves on video

Well, that didn’t take long. Just a few months after Fujisoft’s PALRO was formally introduced to the Japanese education segment, said humanoid is now set to receive a host of new applications as well as become useful as a people tracker. It’s bruited that PALRO will soon gain a Twitter client (to read tweets aloud as best it can), a cooking app, a Japanese word game and remote monitoring abilities (among others), but it’s unclear how these obviously commercial apps will help / not help the robot inch closer to a citizen’s release. In related news, PALRO has been spotted with a few newfound abilities, namely the instinct to track people and objects via its built-in camera. We’ll spare you the rhetoric on why teaching these things to watch our every move is a tragic, tragic mistake, but feel free to peek the video after the break if you’re brushing the inevitable downfall of mankind off as a silly rumor.

Continue reading PALRO buddies with its first apps, busts new moves on video

PALRO buddies with its first apps, busts new moves on video originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 20 Aug 2010 04:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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