NEDO’s Advanced Robotics project enters second phase, boasts totally sweet bots

NEDO, an administrative institute in Japan, has been working on what it calls the “Project for Strategic Development of Advanced Robotics Elemental Technologies” since 2006. The project has now entered its second phase, and boasts some pretty impressive looking bots. Murata Machinery’s robotic delivery system (pictured above) which is designed to help in places like hospitals, delivering medications late at night so that nurses and aids don’t have to spend a lot of time on such tasks. The company plans to test it and monitor the bot in use at hospitals in order to verify its effectiveness. We don’t know about you, but the idea of this guy visiting us late at night when we’re feeling low in a hospital is either really awesome or terrifically creepy. Either way, we fully expect this guy to have a starring role in The Phantom of the Opera any day now. Hit the read link to check out the other participants in the project.

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NEDO’s Advanced Robotics project enters second phase, boasts totally sweet bots originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Anthropomorphic robot shows off its Rock, Paper, Scissors-playing skills

BERTI (built by a partnership of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory and Elumotion Ltd.) is a fully automated robotic torso designed to perform “credible conversational gestures.” The robot is capable of quite complex hand movements, and, in the demonstration video above, plays a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors with a fine gentleman wearing a Goldfinger t-shirt, becoming another addition to the long line of gaming bots. Hit the read link to find out more info about BERTI and the project.

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Anthropomorphic robot shows off its Rock, Paper, Scissors-playing skills originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 22 Feb 2009 10:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Movie Gadget Friday: Brazil

Ariel Waldman contributes Movie Gadget Friday, where she highlights the lovable and lame gadgets from the world of cinema.

We last left off Movie Gadget Friday on board the Icarus II in the near-futuristic film of Sunshine. This week we transition from space travel to a totalitarian, 20th century, terrorist-ridden society in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. A hybrid between the sexy saxophone solos and gender role reversals of the 1980’s with the “Keep Calm and Carry On” culture of the 1940’s and 50’s, this film dabbles between reality and a dream-like state.


Cyborg Typewriter

This “handhold” device clamps around your hand and five fingers for allowing typing speeds upwards of 150 wpm. Wired between stereo headphones and a flat touch-sensor keyboard, the brace around the hand augments the user’s typing accuracy and pace. The exposed wires act as inputs from any user-received audio and mechanically command via electric impulses exact transcripts to be typed out. The system is spoken-language friendly and can determine onomatopoeias, thus eliminating Google-like “did you mean…?” behavior. While it may make a secretary job more efficient, we have to wonder if the inevitable constant hand cramps are worth it. More after the break.

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Movie Gadget Friday: Brazil originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 20 Feb 2009 23:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Navy report warns of robot uprising, suggests a strong moral compass

You know, when armchair futurists (and jive talkin’ bloggists) make note of some of the scary new tech making the rounds in defense circles these days it’s one thing, but when the Doomsday Scenarios come from official channels, that’s when we start to get nervous. According to a report published by the California State Polytechnic University (with data made available by the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research) the sheer scope of the military’s various AI projects is so vast that it is impossible for anyone to fully understand exactly what’s going on. “With hundreds of programmers working on millions of lines of code for a single war robot,” says Patrick Lin, the chief compiler of the report, “no one has a clear understanding of what’s going on, at a small scale, across the entire code base.” And what we don’t understand can eventually hunt us down and kill us. This isn’t idle talk, either — a software malfunction just last year caused US. Army robots to aim at friendly targets (fortunately, no shots were fired). The solution, Dr. Lin continues, is to teach robots “battlefield ethics… a warrior code.” Of course, the government has had absolutely no problems with ethics over the years — so programming its killer robots with some rudimentary values should prove relatively simple.

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Navy report warns of robot uprising, suggests a strong moral compass originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Toy Fair 2009: Erectors Spykee Vox iPod Robot

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Erector was on hand at this year’s Toy Fair, showing off its iPod-friendly robots, including the Spykee Vox (shown above), a voice-activated bot that plays music from your iPod and dances along to your commands (we saw him last year, too). Apparently he’s bipolar as well, and he’ll karate-chop you if you cross him. Fortunately, Spykee played it pretty cool during the demo we received on the showroom floor.

Check out video of Spykee dancing, talking, and otherwise responding to the disembodied voice of a man with a French accent, after the jump.

Toy Fair 2009: RCRC Transforming RC Car

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Radio-controlled cars are cool and all, but you know what’s even cooler? Radio-controlled cars that turn into Robots. B2X’s RCRC switches from a sports car to a truck to an upright robot.

The RCRC has fairly basic controls, moving forward, up, down, left, right, and spinning in place. Users can control it up 1o 100 feet away. Check out a full video of the RCRC transforming, after the jump.

Little Island promises to craft you in creepy robot form

Looking for a surefire conversation piece or guaranteed nightmares for weeks on end? Then you may want to take up Little Island’s offer to create a tiny, custom robot version of you, which can apparently even be used as a VoIP phone of sorts to freak out family members when you’re away. Unfortunately, the “robot” doesn’t appear to actually have many true robot abilities, although it does have a built-in camera to let you check out its surroundings via a connected computer, and it’s apparently able to do a few basic tasks like read your RSS feeds or check the weather. The bot is also essentially just a plush PC itself (complete with a 500MHz Geode processor), so there’s certainly plenty of opportunity to expand its capabilities for those so inclined. At over $2,000, however, it doesn’t exactly come cheap, and you’ll have to wait upwards of six weeks after sending in your picture to receive it.

[Via The Raw Feed]

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Little Island promises to craft you in creepy robot form originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 Feb 2009 14:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Pleo and Ugobe Struggle to Survive

Ugobe Pleo Robotic Dinosaur Pleo, the adorable robotic dinosaur from Ugobe and the mind of Caleb Chung, is struggling to avoid Jurassic-like extinction.

As we noted late last year, Ugobe’s CEO Bob Christopher stepped down and the company moved its operation to Idaho (Pleo was on my “Maybe Buy” list for these and other reasons). Now Wired’s Gadget Lab reports that the company’s situation may have gone from bad to worse. Liz Gasper, who took over for Christopher and spent most of her time cutting costs, left the company in January.

Meanwhile, fund-raising efforts stalled and the entire Ugobe board resigned. Co-founder Caleb Chung is now back in charge, but he didn’t speak to Wired. Company President and COO Dough Swanson painted a rosy picture for Gadget Lab, telling the blog that, while the company has just 20 employees left, it still plans on delivering a Pleo update sometime in 2009. It’s unclear if that’s another one of the company’s semi-frequent Pleo software updates or new hardware.

GigaPan Epic imager released, your party photos will never be the same

You may have heard about that absolutely giant (1,474 megapixel) photo taken of the Inauguration using a Canon G10 and a GigaPan Imager. Well, today the company’s launched the GigaPan Epic for commercial sale. It works with most point-and-shoots, and composes a single photograph from many (the inaugural photo was 220) shots. A robotic mount attached to the camera automates the process of taking all of those images, so you don’t need to worry about missing any of the details. The GigaPan Epic is available now for $379, and a GigaPan Epic 100 for larger point-and-shoot models is expected “soon.” Full PR after the break.

[Via Photography Blog]

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GigaPan Epic imager released, your party photos will never be the same originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Jan 2009 09:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Cyborg beetles commandeered for test flight, laser beams not (yet) included

Remember that DARPA initiative from a few years back to create cyborg insects? With funding from the agency, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have managed to control a rhinoceros beetle via radio signals, demonstrated in a flight test shown on video at this week’s IEEE MEMS 2009 conference. A module placed on the arthropod uses six electrodes affixed to the brain and muscles to commandeer its free will. The device weighs 1.3g — much less than the 3g payload these guys can handle, and with enough wiggle room to attach sensors for surveillance. Ultimately, scientists say they want to use the beetle’s own sensors — namely, its eyes — to capture intel and its own body energy to power the apparatus. Keep an eye on this one, we expect it to play a major role in the impending robots vs. humans war.

[Thanks, Mimosa]

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Cyborg beetles commandeered for test flight, laser beams not (yet) included originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Jan 2009 03:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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