A robot that looks like a little green Martian in a snowsuit has learned to recognize itself in the mirror — and is pleased with what it sees.

Mirror-self recognition is a hallmark of intelligence in animals, something found in primates, dolphins and elephants, for example, but not dogs.

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On the robot's blog, the Thecorpora engineers said they wondered what would happen if Qbo sees itself in the mirror, noting that the robot is programmed with face and object recognition capabilities.

As seen in the video, Qbo is trained to recognize itself and, when it does, give the programmed response: "Oh, this is me. Nice." 

"This quite simple experiment touches interesting psychological aspects of self-consciousness," the blog reads. 

The researchers are working on programming the robot so it can recognize itself autonomously when found in front of the mirror, one step closer to true self awareness.

While robots don't yet rule the world, they are getting smarter.

More on robots and intelligence:

• The 10 smartest animals
• Dog vs. robot: Which is the better soldier?
• Robot learns from experience
• Can robots look all too human?

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

 

A robot designed to look and swim like a jellyfish has gotten even more realistic, according to a researcher working on the motion component of the machine. 

The robot, known as Robojelly, was developed for the Office of Naval Research in 2009 to spy on ships and submarines, detect chemical spills, and monitor the whereabouts of migrating fish.

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They did this by putting little wires, called bio-inspired shape memory alloy composites, that, when heated, contract just as a muscle does.  

The original Robojelly, however, didn't swim as gracefully as the jellyfish it was built to mimic, according to Alex Villanueva, a graduate student at Virginia Tech.

"It was just pulsing and staying in place, it wasn't really going anywhere," he told me. 

He improved the robot's swimming prowess by studying how jellyfish swim and then re-engineered the robotic propulsion mechanism to more realistically mimic the jellies.

Natural jellyfish generate thrust by deforming and contracting the bell section of their bodies. The lower, or lagging section of the bell, deforms slightly later than the rest of the bell.

Villanueva added this so-called flexible margin to the Robojelly.

"As soon as we put it on, the robot started swimming really well, so well that the biologists were like, 'man, this looks really close to the natural fish,'" he said.

Villanueva presented the results at the 2011 meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics Nov. 22 in Boston, Mass.

He is now working on improving the hydrodynamics of the robot so that it swims as proficiently and energy efficiently as the natural fish.

In addition, he is working on a 5-foot diameter jellyfish modeled after the lion's mane jellyfish. Results on that robot are forthcoming, but he says it has passed preliminary swimming tests. 

Great. As if real giant jellyfish weren't scary enough, it now appears we have to contend with look-like giant robotic jellyfish.

More on underwater robots:

• Underwater robots at work in Japan
• Electronic fish could be model for underwater robots
• Underwater robots attack spill like Superman
• Robotic clam could detonate underwater mines

 

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

 

Swarms of robots modeled on the behavior of social insects such as ants are set to invade the research and education marketplace, the university engineers who designed the technology announced Thursday.

The deal between Harvard University and K-Team Corporation, a Swiss manufacturer of mobile robots, will allow educators and researchers to develop and test sophisticated algorithms that control thousands of robots in a physically-grounded setting.

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The relatively simple algorithms currently developed in research labs are mostly validated by computer simulations and a few dozen robots at a time due to the limitations of time and cost, the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard noted in a news release.

The quarter-wide robots, called Kilobots, stand on three toothpick–like legs and are powered by a lithium-ion battery. Vibration motors on either side allow left, right, and forward mobility. Transceivers on their undersides allow them to communicate and coordinate movements.

The video above, for example, shows small groups of robots programmed to leave their "nest," find "food" and return to the nest, mimicking the behavior of ants. Other experiments in the video show how the robots can follow a leader, disperse, and synchronize their movements.

The hope is that such robots will eventually be able dig through piles of rubble to look for earthquake survivors, remove contaminants from the environment, and even self-assemble to form support structures in a collapsed building.

More on biologically-inspired robots:

• One signal herds microbot swarms
• New biological robots build themselves
• Inchworm-like robot smallest ever
• Robotic insects take flight on wings made using printers
• Future robots will run like cockroaches

 

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

 

A scalable, ball-tossing robot that's reminiscent of a Segway with an independent streak could become your pet dog's new best friend.

In its current version, the robot, called iFling, rolls over ping-pong balls, traps them between its wheel and body, and rotates them into its carriage. To toss, the ball rolls out onto the arm and the iFling uses its inertia to go from a lying down to upright mode, "resulting in an effective toss," the video narrator explains.

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While definitely a cool demonstration of what the robotics researchers at the University of California, San Diego, are up to, what's the point of ball-tossing robots? According UCSD, the technology could be automated so that multiple bots could play catch with each other, perhaps giving us another sport to watch on weekend afternoons.

Other potential uses include replacements for ball boys at tennis matches or outfielders in MLB, or even "a safe way to quickly pick up a live grenade and toss it back at an enemy in the heat of battle," notes Gizmodo.

One might even find use picking up errant balls smacked by these ping-pong playing robots in China.

Alternatively, iFling, which can be scaled up to toss different sized balls including tennis balls, could play catch with your dog. Whether Jerry, the YouTube star dachshund who plays ball with this machine, would find iFling an improvement is unknown.

[Via Gizmodo]

More on robots:

• Duke grad builds beer-tossing fridge
• Robot to throw first pitch at Phillies game
• Ping pong playing robots debut
• Robot plays catch, brews coffee

 

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

 

 

Researchers have built a tank-like robot that can climb smooth walls with the ease of a gecko scurrying about in the middle of the night. In fact, the robot was inspired by a scientific explanation for what makes gecko feet so sticky.

The robot could find use in applications ranging from inspections of pipes, buildings, and nuclear power plants to search and rescue missions.

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Its tank-like feet are inspired from the millions of tiny, hair-like toe pads on gecko feet that allow the lizards to scurry up trees, walls, and across ceilings without falling down. 

Previous research explained that tiny toe pads accomplish this thanks to what are known as van der Waals forces, very weak attractive forces between molecules.

The robot team, led by Jeff Krahn at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, recreated these dry but sticky toe pads in the lab using the material polydimethysiloxane (PDMS). The end of each hair-like pad contains a mushroom cap shape that is 17 micrometers wide and 10 micrometers high.

"While van der Waals forces are considered to be relatively weak, the thin, flexible overhang provided by the mushroom cap ensures that the area of contact between the robot and the surface is maximized," Krahn explained in a news release. 

By using the gecko-like pads on the robot, the researchers are able to climb even smooth surfaces such as glass or plastic, materials that are a consistent challenge for robots that use magnets, suction cups, spines and claws to climb.

The tank-like robot weighs in at 240 grams and can transfer from a flat surface to a wall over inside and outside corners. It has a top speed of 3.4 centimeters per second.

The robot goes by the name Timeless Belt Climbing Platform (TBCP-II). It is outfitted with sensors that allow it to detect its surroundings and alter its course to navigate obstacles, though Krahn and his team are still improving the control strategy to make it fully autonomous.

To see the robot climb the wall, be sure to check out the video at the top of this post. Krahn and colleagues describe the robot today in the journal Smart Materials and Structures.

More on geckoes and robots:

• Gecko's sticky secrets inspire new bandages
• Geckos inspire new breed of glue
• How geckos land on their feet
• Look out, Spider Man! Gecko inspires new glue
• Robot base jumps from wall
• No obstacle too high for climbing snakebots

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

 

Researchers in Japan have built an aluminum robot powered purely by forward momentum that can walk downhill seemingly forever.

In a test last year, for example, it walked on a slightly inclined treadmill for 13 hours, long enough to set a Guinness World Record. The human-sized pair of legs took 100,000 steps and covered 15 kilometers (9.3 miles).

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The robot contains only mechanical components that have been adjusted so that it has the same thigh and leg lengths as a person, and weighs the same, the developers at the Nagoya Institute of Technology's Sano Lab told video news site DigInfo.

The feet look kind of like golf clubs. In fact, the developers said that they plan to apply the principle of the technology to sports equipment. 

Perhaps they should consider building caddies for the Extreme 19th hole at the Legend Golf and Safari Resort in South Africa. After all, walking downhill is hard on the joints, especially when loaded down with a bag of clubs and balls.

Another potential use is as a type of prosthetic device. In this case, demonstrated at the end of the video, the legs are strapped onto a human, helping him take steps.

Robots that walk forever aren't entirely new. Earlier this summer, for example, we featured this robot that walked 40.5 miles non-stop around a track. Only, that robot had a small battery. The downhill walker, by contrast, is a slave to gravity.

More on walking robots:

• Robot walks 40.5 miles non-stop
• First robot marathon begins next week
• Robot suit for rent in Japan helps people walk
• Rolling robot inspired by caterpillar

 

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

Willow Garage's PR2 personal robots are cool, but it's easy to understand — in this economy — why everyone hasn't plunked down $400,000 for one to make sausages, bake cookies, fold laundry and fetch beer, as the robots have been programmed to do.

After all, those chores are fairly simple for most of us to perform and sometimes even enjoyable.

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But here's a use for a PR2 that could reel in buyers: robotics researchers at the University of Pennsylvania programmed their PR2 named Graspy to scoop poop. Really. It identifies items that look like feces (based on color), scoots over to them and picks them up with a scooper. There's video proof! (See above.)

And just to make sure there's no confusion on what the robot was programmed to do, the researchers named their project "Perception Of Offensive Products and Sensorized Control Of Object Pickup" so they could use the acronym POOP SCOOP.

"The purpose of this research is for the PR2 to clear poop out of an open field," GRASP lab member Ben Cohen, explains in the video.

Graspy achieved a 95 percent success rate, scooping more than one poop per minute. More work needs to be done to get the robot scooping like a pro, notes IEEE Spectrum. For example, it is currently able to handle only high-fiber poop.

If you'd like to turn your PR2 into a scooper of poop — and perhaps improve on its performance — you can check out instructions on the lab's wiki page.

More stories on PR2 robots:

• Mmm! Robot makes cookies
• Funny science sparks serious spat
• Robot makes sausages for breakfast

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The research on POOP SCOOP was presented at IROS 2011. Hap tip to IEEE Spectrum and Pop Sci.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

Robots are already taking away jobs at factories. Now, it appears, they're ready to rule the table tennis court, too. 

Two pingpong-playing humanoid robots named Wu and Kong debuted earlier this month at Zhejiang University in China where they showed off their skills in front of engineers and journalists.

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The twin 5 foot, 3 inch, 121 pound robots have 30 individually-powered joints, giving them an impressive range of motion. Each arm, for example, can move seven directions, according to the university's description.

Key to their ability to serve and return balls with forehands, backhands, and stoic focus are eye-mounted cameras that predict the path of the ball so the robot get can ready for the next shot.

Each camera captures 120 images per second, which are transferred to the robots' processors that calculate the balls' position, speed, angle, landing position and path, the Xinhuanet news agency reports.

It takes 50 to 100 milliseconds for the robots to respond and their ability to predict the balls' landing position has a margin of error of just less than an inch.

As shown in this video, the robots can play with each other as well as humans. However, the robots lack the ability to curve, shank, or slice the ball, noted Zhang Yfeng, one of the designers.

The team hopes to improve the table tennis ability of the robots, though the game isn't the ultimate goal. Instead, they hope to transfer the technology next-gen helper robots, such as those envisioned for elder care.

But plop one of these pingpong-playing robots in the basement of a fraternity house along with the beer tossing fridge created a few years ago at Duke and some stressed out college students would likely find reason to smile.

More on robot technology:

• Robot shopping carts follow you around
• Duke grad builds beer tossing fridge
• Honda hopes robot will help the needy
• Sneaky robots taught the art of deception
• Nine jobs that humans may lose to robots
• Meet FRIDA, your robot co-worker
• Your new co-worker may be a robot
• Non-human DJ gets radio gig
• Robot plays catch, brews coffee
• More work for robots in China

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John Roachis a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

 

For the past 10,000 years or so, farmers have been waking at the crack of dawn to tend their fields. Such a bleary-eyed chore could become a thing of the past thanks to robots geared up for the farm. 

Among the tools getting a robotic makeover is the tractor. In recent days, a pair of research projects aimed at automating the mechanical workhorses have worked their way into the news.

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The Wall Street Journal reported on a partnership between Kinze Manufacturing and Jaybridge Robotics that has produced an autonomous planter that allows a driverless tractor to sow seeds without hitting any unexpected obstacles. At harvest time, a flesh-and-bone farmer would drive the combine, but a robotic cart next to it receives the grain and, when full, heads off to a waiting truck to drop its load.

These robots would cut down on labor costs and allow farmers to get their plants sowed and harvested in a timely fashion, but some farmers are likely to keep an eye on the machines.

For example, instead of catching a few extra Z's, a farmer could program multiple machines to work at once and then keep an eye on the mechanical workforce, hands firmly grasping a cup of coffee.

"It's expensive equipment, it's big equipment and I would expect farmers would want to be nearby," Jeremy Brown, president of Jaybridge Robotics, told the Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, Flemish engineers announced a fully automated, self-steering robotic tractor that adapts itself to terrain conditions and adjusts its speed and turning radius automatically. 

The ability to adjust to differing terrain conditions such as a wet or dry field is a particular breakthrough, according to Gregory Pinte of Flanders' Mechatronics Technology Center, who developed the tractor with researchers at Catholic University Leuven. 

In previous systems, a different setting had to be calibrated for each terrain type. "We developed a steering system that intuits terrain conditions and estimates the expected wheel slippage," he said in a statement.

"Based on a model of the tractor, the optimal speed and turning radius is calculated, in real time, for the current terrain type. This 'smart steering' allows for precision down to the centimeter."

While such systems could be a boon to farmers facing labor shortages when they need help the most, road trippers will have to get used to the eerie sight of driverless tractors working the land as they whiz by at 70 miles per hour.

[Via Popular Science]

More on farming technology:

• GPS goes down on the farm
• Could vertical farming be the future?
• Disk drive tech may aid farming
• In the near future, robots will work on farms

 

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

 

 

Extreme-sports junkies, meet Paraswift, the robot that wants to be as cool as you. It is able to climb the walls of tall buildings, jump off and deploy a parachute to soften the landing.

The base-jumping robot was built with entertainment value in mind, though the point-of-view footage captured by its onboard video cameras could find practical use in creating 3D models of the environment.

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"For example, with Google Street View, at street level, trees and pedestrians could obscure the view," Lukas Geisssmann, a doctoral student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, told New Scientist.

 

The robot, he noted, could scurry up the sides of nearby buildings and get aerial views that could be used to complete the picture.

ETH built the Paraswift in collaboration with Disney Research. Geissmann presented the robot earlier this month at the Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots and the Support Technologies for Mobile Machines in Paris. 

To stick to the wall as it climbs, Paraswift uses an impeller, a rotor spinning in a tube that creates a mini-tornado-like vortex that's essentially a partial vacuum.

Other robots climb using snake-like articulations to wrap themselves around scaffolding, or magnetic adhesion to climb metallic surfaces, or even mimic the stickiness of a gecko's foot to climb walls.

One of the advantages of Paraswift's impeller vacuum-like suction is its ability to cling to a variety of surfaces and then, when it's ready, deploy a parachute and jump.

Unlike some thrill-seeking base jumpers, the robot deploys its parachute before turning off its impeller and leaping from the building.

Despite the extra caution before leaping, its landing, at least from the video above, doesn't look entirely soft. That's Ok, says ETH, since Paraswift is encased in a shell of fiber-reinforced plastic to protect the robot against impact.

More stories on robots:

• Climbing no obstacle for snakebots
• Robot finds hidden hieroglyphs inside pyramid
• Meet Treebot, the tree-climbing forest sentinel
• Rescue robots made just for mine disasters

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

 

Deleted blog posts by a lead robot controller at the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant have been resurfaced by a professional technology association.

The posts, by a worker known only by the initials S.H., are a window on the work environment at the plant and raise questions about whether Tokyo Electric Power, the plant's owner, is providing its workers with enough robots and resources to do their work efficiently.

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The robot diaries, as the posts are known, also provide candid details on what it's like to be working with disaster response robots. They were considered "must read material for companies and researchers developing robots for emergency situations," notes IEEE Spectrum, which resurfaced the diaries.

The candid information on the day to day dealings of the robots will prove crucial for making the next generation of robots better than those currently working at the plant, two PackBot and two Warrior robots provided by U.S. company iRobot.

For example, the posts show the difficulty of controlling the robots while wearing five pairs of gloves and bulky goggles, which means the controls and interface need to be made easier to operate than they already are, according to IEEE Spectrum.

As S.H.'s blog attracted more and more attention, however, the posts related to the robots were taken down in early July, IEEE noted, and not much later the entire blog was gone.

"It's unclear whether TEPCO or S.H.'s supervisors demanded that the material be removed. Efforts to reach S.H. were unsuccessful," writes Erico Guizzo, the author of the IEEE report.

Guizzo, however, took the time before the posts were gone to copy the blog as well as a series of YouTube videos showing training exercises with the robots at the plant. He translated the blogs to English and posted them on IEEE Spectrum website as well as snippets from the training videos.

"The material offers important lessons about the Fukushima disaster — lessons that roboticists and others should heed if we want to be better prepared for tomorrow’s calamities. TEPCO has also been criticized for not being transparent, and these posts provide more information for Japanese citizens to decide whether the company and their government are doing a proper job," he writes.

Portions of the posts are also available via Google cache and from another Japanese researcher here.

To learn more, read the diaries and see pictures, please check out IEEE's reporting.You can also check out our Wilson Rothman's video below where he discusses the deployment of robots to Japan with iRobot vice president Tim Trainer.

More stories about robots and disaster response:

• Robots en route to Japan
• Underwater robots at work in Japan
• A robot cut out for mine rescue work
• Robot may monitor nuke plants
• Snake robot could disable explosives

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John Roachis a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

A non-human DJ will take to the airwaves next week in San Antonio, Texas, in what may mark another step on the path that puts flesh-and-blood radio personalities out of a job.

The DJ is an artificial intelligence program called Denise, who was built by Guile 3D Studio to serve as a virtual assistant to answer phone calls, check email, conduct Web searches and make appointments, among other tasks.

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Dominique Garcia, a radio personality in San Antonio, purchased Denise for $200 and programmed the AI to serve as a DJ. Denise will hit the airwaves on Aug. 24 from 1 to 4 p.m. CST on KROV.

"A lot of radio DJs are pretty upset with me because it does work," Garcia told me.

For now, Denise requires human assistance to write the script for Denise's talk breaks and slot the voice track into the playlist.

For the most part, the script writer tells Denise exactly what to say, though "she" has the capability to tell jokes when asked, provide the weather forecast and look up things on the Internet. She can't, however, fill airspace by herself.

"That technology does not yet exist in the AI world," Garcia said. "It is not as sophisticated as that; that's the ideal situation."

In other words, Denise needs an operator who's talented enough to write a compelling script, teach her new jokes, prompt Web searches and, at least for now, type up a traffic report for her to give.

This operator work, according to Garcia, should be much cheaper labor than hiring a full-time human DJ and thus ultimately save radio stations millions of dollars.

"If you have a staff of five that is paid $100,000 a year each, that's half-a-million dollars," he said. "The entire (AI) program is $200, a one-time fee. You never have to pay an annual fee. It never has to go to the bathroom. It never goes on an egomaniac spree. It is always there."

A part-time laborer could be hired as Denise's human assistant, Garcia reckons, for about $10 an hour.

The program, Garcia notes, sounds "a tad robotic" and is far from possessing the quick-wit and ability to drone on unscripted for hours that allows some human DJs to command high salaries in today's market.

Nevertheless, for an off-the-shelf piece of software not even designed to be a DJ, the technology could be disruptive to the industry already facing threats from companies such as Pandora, the Internet radio station that hit 100 million users this July.

"This is something that can be done today if stations decide to run with it," Garcia said.

Station managers and other listeners might want to tune in to KROV on Aug. 24.

More on AI and robots taking human jobs:

• More work for robots in China
• Meet FRIDA, your robot co-worker
• Beyond 'Jeopardy': Watson wins
• Scientists work on artificial cat brain

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.