There is an interesting article in the Seattle Times about former Microsoft robotics evangelist, Tandy Trower, launching a new startup named Hoaloha Robotics.  His goal is to create a $5k-10k personal robot (aka mobile manipulator) in the next five-to-ten years that can address the needs of older adults, such as telepresence activities and other healthcare tasks.  Hoping to leverage cheap 3D sensing (like depth cameras a la Microsoft’s Kinect) and inexpensive computing, this one-man (so far) company is another entrant in a new, budding market.  Having been personally involved with the design, construction, programming, and brief home-deployment of a mobile manipulator (EL-E), I can confidently say that Tandy & co. have a lot of work cut out for themselves — I wish them luck and success.

I would like to point out two news items involving telepresence robots that are definitely worth reading.  First, a "manifesto" reprinted from the June 1980 issue of Omni magazine where artificial intelligence pioneer, Marvin Minsky, shares his views on telepresence (a term he originally coined).  His essay includes a prediction of remote avatars (ie. Surrogates), operation in hazardous / remote environments, and even a discussion of how little development has occurred since the 1950′s (remember, his essay is from 1980; did you know that full-body exoskeletons were produced back in the 1950s?!).  Second, a NYTimes article by John Markoff that discusses five top American contenders in the space: Vgo (Vgo Communications), Tilr (RoboDynamics), Texai (Willow Garage), RP-7i (InTouch Health), and QB (Anybots).  The article captures the society aspect and high-level overview but lacks meaty technology details (though the side-by-side photo montage is useful for direct comparison).

Dr. Motilal Agrawal from the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International just sent an email to the robotics worldwide mailing list seeking qualified PhD or Masters job candidates (or interns) with experience in ROS, C++ / Python, and grasping / manipulation.   In the email, Dr. Agrawal points to a movie that shows off a new humanoid robot  being used at SRI that sports dual Barrett WAM arms, each with a Barrett three-fingered hand — see the movie embedded below.  I can’t wait to see what SRI plans to do with its new robot; they always seem to do such thorough work.  You’ll notice that this design is becoming increasingly common, from Intel / CMU’s HERB robot to Alexander Stoytchev’s robot at Iowa State.  Updated Aug. 31st, 2010:  My hunch was correct; we just received confirmation that this robot is indeed the "standard" hardware platform for the DARPA ARM-S program and was developed / integrated by RE².

By now, you’re probably familiar with the Nao humanoid robot from Aldebaran Robotics — the robot that supplanted the Sony Aibo as the robot du jour for Robocup’s Standard Platform League (international robot soccer competition) back in 2007 and retains that prestigious title yet.  Recently, Aldebaran announced a new Educational Partnership Program that aims to expose students of higher education to the joys of programming advanced robots.  Contemporaneously, Aldebaran announced a set of four product derivatives to match varied academic budgets, ranging from full humanoids, to upper-body manipulation rigs, and 2-DoF robot heads for audio-visual experimentation (see details below).  Crucially, this new initiative provides a stable hardware platform with a comprehensive software suite (alternatively, extensive open-source ROS drivers) to match your educational, research, or just whimsical robot needs.

Apparently my hunch about the recent SRI humanoid being the standard platform for the DARPA Autonomous Robot Manipulation Software (ARM-S) program was spot-on!  A new blog post on ROS.org confirms that this is the DARPA "ARM Robot" and that there is a public contest to name the robot.  The blog post gives a few hardware details: "The ‘ARM Robot’ has two Barrett WAM arms, BarrettHands, 6-axis force
torque sensors at the wrist, and pan-tilt head. For sensors, it has a
color camera, SwissRanger depth camera, stereo camera, and microphone."  The program winners are also enumerated: Carnegie Mellon University, HRL Laboratories, iRobot, NASA-Jet
Propulsion Laboratory, SRI International and University of Southern
California.  Be sure to check out the video of the (now confirmed) unnamed DARPA ARM-S robot platform embedded below.