Hasta La Gadget!

Pop open the champagne and pour your hardworking robot vacuum a glass–it’s now a Robot Hall of Fame Inductee.

iRobot’s seven-year-old Roomba is one of five in the class of 2010 inductees into the Robot Hall of Fame, along with NASA’s Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity, the DaVinci Medical Robot System, Huey, Dewey and Louie from the 1971 Bruce Dern film “Silent Running and the T-800 Terminator from James Cameron’s 1984 film “The Terminator”. A brainchild of the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, the Hall of Fame, according to a university spokesman, “recognizes excellence in robotics technology worldwide and honors the fictional and real robots that have inspired and embodied breakthrough accomplishments in robotics.”

It’s every child’s dream to one day walk through a trio of space robot legs as entering Silicon Valley, and if a proposed art project goes through, said dream will become a reality for budding tech superstars who land in Mineta San Jose International Airport. The $300,000 initiative would see a so-called Space Observer built and showcased prominently in the venue, allowing patrons to walk underneath its two-story-tall body and emit all sorts of “oohs” and “ahhs.” The monolithic space robot would sport three legs and propeller-tipped kinetic camera arms, the latter of which would collect live video to be displayed on embedded monitors within its body. San Jose Public Art Director Barbara Goldstein has already stated that “it won’t follow you anywhere,” but it’s not like she really has the power to control what this obviously sentient creature does / doesn’t do.

Filed under: Robots

Space Observer to innocently watch you at San Jose’s airport originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A quick glance can say a lot, but sometimes its meaning can get lost in translation. For example, there’s not a lot of difference between a dirty look and a, uh, dirty look, but Yoichi Yamazaki and cohorts at the Tokyo Institute of Technology hope to quantify that (and many more) by creating a so-called Eye Robot. It’s a pair of disembodied eyeballs that create expressions in concert with pink eyelids; a user views each expression and then indicates how it makes him or her feel. At this point it seems like something of a scatter-shot affair, throwing out expressions at random and seeing which elicit a reaction, but hopefully in the near future Yamazaki’s metrics will help make the vacant gaze of other bots a little less disconcerting.

[Via Engadget Poland]

Filed under: Robots

Yoichi Yamazaki’s latest bot has hungry eyes, nothing else originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 17 Apr 2009 09:34:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While it’s certainly not all that uncommon to see giant robots wandering the streets of Japan, it looks like even the jaded folks on the Japanese TV show “Nanikore Chin Hakkei” were impressed by this massive beetle robot built by an Ibaraki man, who apparently spent a full 11 years toiling away at it. Of course, it’s not a fully autonomous robot (thankfully), but it is able to be controlled from afar with a truly impressive remote control, or from the inside, which is fully kitted out with a spaceship-style cockpit and plenty of seating for passengers. It also isn’t quite able to fully stand up on all those legs, which are instead used to pull it along the ground as some wheels provide a bit of extra assistance. Still, it’s quite a sight to behold, and we can’t think of a single reason why you wouldn’t want to check out the video after the break — unless, of course, you hate things that are awesome.

[Via NerdwithSwag.com]

Continue reading Giant mechanized rhinoceros beetle makes its Japanese TV debut

Filed under: Robots, Transportation

Giant mechanized rhinoceros beetle makes its Japanese TV debut originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve already seen a fair bit of evidence suggesting that humans can quickly form bonds with robots, and it looks like ITP‘s Kacie Kinzer has now thrown some additional, adorable fodder into the mix. Apparently, she’s spent the past few months sending a robot, or “Tweenbot,” aimlessly wandering through New York’s Washington Square Park in the hope that passers-by would take time from their busy day to help guide it from one corner of the park to the other — or at least point it in the right direction. As you may be pleased to know, it turns out that plenty of folks were more than happy to help out the little bot, and it was even able to complete its journey in as little as little as 42 minutes with the help of 29 people. Of course, no one sends a smiling cardboard robot out into the wild without capturing a bit of video, so head on past the break for it, and hit up the link below for glimpse at some future Tweenbots.

[Via MAKE]

Continue reading Tweenbots project finds people really do care about robots, for now

Filed under: Robots

Tweenbots project finds people really do care about robots, for now originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Apr 2009 13:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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