Hasta La Gadget!

When they’re not too busy building creepy little humanoids or lizard-like sand swimmers, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology like to concern themselves with helping make healthcare easier. To that end, they’ve constructed the Cody robot you see above, which has recently been demonstrated successfully wiping away “debris” from a human subject. The goal is simple enough to understand — aiding the elderly and infirm in keeping up their personal hygiene — but we’d still struggle to hand over responsibility for granny’s care to an autonomous machine equipped with a camera and laser in the place where a head might, or ought to, be. See Cody cleaning up its designer’s extremities after the break.

Continue reading Robo-nurse gives gentle bed baths, keeps its laser eye on you (video)

Robo-nurse gives gentle bed baths, keeps its laser eye on you (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Nov 2010 10:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink MIT Technology Review  |  Georgia Tech  | Email this | Comments

She called it a date, but as far as we can tell, the meeting between MSNBC reporter Stephanie Pappas and soon-to-be the first humanoid robot in space Robonaut 2 was a bit of a one-sided affair.

A joint project between General Motors and NASA, Robonaut 2 is expected to help astronauts perform repairs and other maintenance on the International Space Station. This model, Robonaut 2B will travel on the very last Space Shuttle mission; Originally scheduled a November 1 launch, fuel leaks have delayed the Shuttle Discovery blast-off until Tuesday of next week.

Pappas, who met the robot at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, reports that the 330 pound automaton was a little intimidating and looked as if it might be “ready to throw a punch.” It does look a tiny bit like a giant version of one of those punching puppets (our favorites were always the nun and ET) . Though only a torso, Robonaut 2 can replicate human hand and arm movement and perform tasks such as drilling and painting. During Pappas’ date, however, Robonaut didn’t paint, throw a punch, speak or even move. To be fair, Pappas’s date is not the robot heading into space. The final model, Robonaut 2B, has new fire-proof skin and a few space-ready parts. Plus, as Pappas notes, it doesn’t have any smell. (Now you know the answer to the age-old-question, “Do things still smell in space?”).

As Pappas’ date neared its conclusion, the reporter did manage to make brief contact with the humanoid robot’s arm. She reports that it felt like a “cross between a memory-foam pillow and a well-muscled human arm.”

We’re taking bets on whether or not Robonaut will call Pappas, or at least text her.

Pleo, the adorable robotic camosaur has pulled off a feat that’s eluded even the mighty, prehistory dinosaurs: rising from the dead. Say hello to Pleo II: The Revenge! (Okay, I added “The Revenge” part.)

After nearly going down with the bankrupt Ugobe Corp., Pleo was purchased by Innvo Labs late last year. During CES 2010, company COO Derek Dotson promised a new “plush” Pleo, but offered no timeline for delivery.

Now, he’s opened up to Pleo fan site BobthePleo and spilled all the details about Pleo II. No, it’s not plush. Instead the rubber-skinned Pleo II will arrive in two gender-specific colors (pink for the girl and blue for the boy). That rather unimaginative innovation aside, Pleo’s guts are getting a significant upgrade, too. Dotson promises additional four touch sensors and an RFID reader in its mouth to identify some of its new toys.

Face it, some day you, me and everybody else will be working along-side robots. They’re already in our factories and starting to arrive in our homes. Despite everyone’s irrational fear of “our robot overlords,” this is as it should be. The only problem is that robots today are not nearly as smart as we think they are and a powerful manufacturing bot could, without meaning to, take your head off if you get in its way.

No, robots are not trying to harm us, but programming them to understand our emotions, needs and reactions to, say, pain is pretty darn difficult. Over in Slovenia, scientists are seeking to overcome this android deficit by teaching robots how humans react to varying degrees of human-robot collisions. To do so, researchers took a standard Epson manufacturing robot arm and programmed it to “punch” someone’s arm as many as 18 times with dull and then increasingly sharp instruments. Punchees were asked to record the severity of their pain. This ranged from “painless” to “unbearable”.

If our future is literally filled with robots, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to work alongside them without occasionally bumping into each other. As a report in New Scientist explains, the data will be used to program future robots and ensure that they slow down when sensors indicate they’re in the proximity of a human. No word on if the scientist will also program robots that do bump into humans to say, “My bad.”

What is Marvel’s Ironman comic book hero but an average guy with a failing heart wearing a really awesome exoskeleton? It’s not as implausible as, say, a “man who can fly” or a dude who turns into a giant green body builder when he’s angry. So why should be surprised when we hear that a real-world “ironman” exoskeleton may be coming to a shipping yard or military operation near you?

According to a report on the Salt Lake Tribune, Massachusetts-based defense contractor Raytheon-Sarcos has developed a 195-lb, full-body suit, the XOS-2 that can make a 200 pound weight feel like 12 pounds and give the wearer the ability to punch through a roughly 6-inch-thick wood wall.

Despite the millions already spent developing the suit, Ratheon’s body suit looks nowhere near as impressive as the armor worn by Robert Downey Jr. in the Ironman movies; nor can it travel great distances without an external hydraulic power pack. That will all change, eventually, According to Raytheon executives, tethered industrial use could come as early as three years from now. Fully mobile, combat-ready use is at least five years away.

Even so, who doesn’t want to try one of these on today?