Hasta La Gadget!

Tucked away in a quiet residential neighborhood of San Francisco is a little workshop that opens its doors rather infrequently to the outside world. But when it does, it is an electro-mechanical wonderland.

Called Area 2881, after its address, it is a 400-square-foot installation of kinetic and light art housed in an hardware store from the early 1900s.

The Willy Wonka behind it, Carl Pisaturo is an applications engineer by day at Stanford University. When he’s not at work, Pisaturo spends his time fashioning the most elaborate objects — an upper body robot with humanoid range of movements, a 3-D photograph viewer and a strobe illusion device that he calls a transmutoscope.

"I wanted to create a living environment of kinetic sculptures," he says.

The transmutoscope, for instance, has a series of slightly different but similar looking cylindrical objects arranged in a circle on a a rotating disk. When strobe lamps fire in sync with the object positions, the transmutoscope pulsates. The cylinders appears stationary
yet contracting and expanding.

Other Pisaturo creations include two electro-mechanical robots he calls "slave robots" that can be handled using an external controller, and a three-motor Tilt-a-Whirl-type carousel based on an amusement park ride.

Pisaturo has posted detailed material, design and electrical notes for his creations on his website.

Each sculpture can take months to finish, with all parts custom-made by him."Fully custom mechanical objects with lighting can take a long time," says Pisaturo who does the machining for the metal himself, "from three months to two years in case of the slave robots."

The Area 2881 studio isn’t for walk-in tourists. Every few months, Pisaturo has an open house in the evening to let those interested come see his objects. Most of them are self-explantory, he says. Pisaturo rarely gives personal guided tours but made an exception for Wired.com when we visited last week.

The art is not a way for him to make money. "Rather it’s a money sink," he says. And it doesn’t come cheap. It takes more than a few thousand dollars to buy one of his mechanical beauties.

In this video, Pisaturo shows us his best creation, the slave robot that has an almost humanoid upper-body motion.

Credits: Producer – Annaliza Savage, Editor – Fernando Cardoso

Just about a year ago, the green, scaly, rubbery Pleo dinosaur became a robotic sensation. More life-like than the Furby and more fun than the Roomba, Pleo was seen as the first consumer robot that could evoke those warm, fuzzy feelings usually reserved for Fido or Fluffy.

But now Ugobe, the company behind the Pleo, is struggling to save itself from extinction as it tries to raise fresh funding and keep its pipeline of products alive.

Over the last six months, the company has seen a host of top management departures, run through two CEOs, closed down its office in California and pared down its marketing and PR staff in an attempt to weather the current economic storm. Emails to the company’s media contact info on the its website bounce back. And good luck trying to get someone to pick up the phone when you call its corporate office.

So is Ugobe still alive? Yes, says company President and COO Doug Swanson. "Believe me, we are still in business," he says.

It’s a been a mighty fall for the company that changed how people viewed robotic toys. Ugobe first showed off the Pleo to a rapturous audience at the DEMO conference in 2006. The dinosaur came with a graceful motion and a wicked ability to respond to human interaction that made it seem almost real. The Pleo responds to being petted, makes feeding sounds, play when engaged and walk around the house almost like a pet.

"Pleo is the first robot that, if you allowed yourself to suspend disbelief, you could fool yourself into thinking it was a baby pet," says Robert Oschler, who runs Robots Rule, a site that covers the consumer robots business.

But as consumer spending has slowed down and competition from other consumer robotic companies has intensified, Ugobe has found itself in a tough spot. The Pleo, which cost $350 when it was introduced and now goes for $280 on Amazon, looks increasingly pricey for a toy that does little more than make you go "Awwwww."

In July, Ugobe CEO Bob Christopher stepped down and former CFO Liz Gasper took the reins. Christopher says he left the company to move on to other ventures he was interested in. Gasper focused on cutting down the company’s burn rate and finding fresh funding. 

With the collapse of the credit environment, though, fund raising came to a halt. Meanwhile, the company’s entire board of directors resigned before Christmas to give control of Ugobe back to the co-founders, says Swanson.

Ugobe also closed down its Emeryville, California office and moved all operations to its other outpost in Boise, Idaho. The company has only about 20 employees now.

Last month, Gasper left the company and original co-founder Caleb Chung found himself back in the hot seat. Chung did not respond to requests for an interview.

Despite the turmoil, Ugobe’s Pleo dinosaur has a loyal fan base. Ugobe has sold 100,000 Pleos since its launch in January 2007, says Swanson. About 60 percent of sales have come from Europe, 30 percent from Asia and the rest from North America.

Ugobe still has a few robotic rabbits that it can pull out of its hat, says Swanson. The company is working on a pipeline of new products, including an update to the Pleo later this year. And the company has begun "very definite engineering moves" for a product that will come out in 2009, Swanson says.

"Not only are we alive but we are busy," says Swanson.

There’s no doubt though that the past few months have taken its toll on the company, says Christopher, the former CEO and still one of the company’s largest shareholders. "I am sure the challenges of the last six months have had some effect on Pleo orders," he says. The Pleo remains in stock at Amazon.com and Toys "R" Us among other retailers.

Nevertheless, Christopher is hopeful of the company’s future. "Caleb and the team at Ugobe are brilliant inventors," he says, "and there’s no lack of creativity at the company."

Ugobe is expecting flat growth this year but the company has to work hard to beat the odds if it doesn’t want to have the same fate as the dinosaurs it imitates.

See also:
Say Hello to the Pleo

Photo: Pleo/(Travis Isaacs/Flickr)

Surgical procedures could soon be aided by tiny, rotating robots, according to BBC News. The report said that while the miniaturization of motors hasn’t kept up with other electronics like LCD displays and memory chips, new research reported in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering has detailed a motor about twice the size of a human hair.

Up until now, there has been no way to power such a small device, meaning that it couldn’t get around inside the human body. “Conventional electric motors do not perform as well as they are scaled down in size; as they approach millimeter dimensions, they barely have the power to overcome the resistance in their bearings,” the report said.

With the rise of so-called piezoelectric materials—crystals that expand and contract when a voltage is applied—tiny linear motors became easier to manufacture, according to the report. Now research indicates that these tiny motors could be “coupled to a structure with a helix-shaped cut in it,” allowing the motors to rotate when pushed at one end—similar to how the tail-like flagella on bacteria work. Next stop: testing the new motors in fluids, as opposed to inside a pristine lab environment. Cool stuff, as long as you don’t think about it too hard; then it gets gross. (Check out the short, non-gross video for an animation of how they work.)

It should come as no surprise to those who read Gearlog with any regularity when I say that we’re all big fans of robots here. Among the many opportunites that CES affords us every year is the chance to check out the latest and greatest consumer robots on the market.

After the jump, check out a few of our favorite ‘bots from the showroom floor.

Amazon.com is selling a large number of Blu-ray movies at 50% off in an extended deal that lasts until January 4th. The internet retailer is clearly hoping to entice the growing number of people who’ve bought players in the new format.

According to figures released by the Blu-ray association, Blu-ray players are seeing a huge purchasing growth in the U.S. during the holiday season.

But the best value among the available titles is the one that stars the little champion of truth, ingenuity, and true American humor. I’m talking about the Nova Robotics Robot Johnny Five, in his original starring vehicle Short Circuit, of course.

If you scoff at the notion that this movie is one of the great new classics of the cinema, well, Sir or Madam, I will say without reservation that you have no heart. You probably share the sentiments of a former co-worker, who fastidiously dismissed the movie as the ‘ultimate in painted 1980s cheese.’ But said man is a duplicitous snob raised on the dry, colorless Scandinavian cinema of Ingmar Berg-man and is obviously cursed with ice-cold blood and little feeling.

But I’m talking about robots here.

Johnny Five is not just a robot with a penchant for reading novels every two seconds, or one easily duped by moronic henchman preying on the sweetness of his disposition. Yes, he’s a sensitive soul that can barely crush a grass hopper. But he is also one who, along with R2, T2, and various other animatronic creatures, set a standard for entertaining usefulness that will always have a place in the cultural history of robot-human relations and has inspired many a boy or girl to get into robotics in the real world.

In case you were wondering, I have no personal financial incentive from the selling of this movie, even if Steve Guttenberg and I share the closed chin cleavage that sadly attracts little specks of dirt.

So forget about the nasty cackling of the film cognoscenti and check it out. The Blu-ray version is supposed to come with extra features showing the full process behind the robot, as designer Syd Mead and his team of puppeteers and robot operators put the soul into Johnny.

And if you’re disappointed by the movie, well, you know where you stand with me.

Source: Amazon.com 50% Off Sale