I just received word from Berthold Bäuml, a lead scientist in realtime dynamic motion planning at DLR, that they’ve developed a new humanoid robot named “Agile Justin.”  Agile Justin is very similar to Rollin’ Justin (the ball-catching, Pulp Fiction-dancing robot), except that it has improved dynamic performance.   To test the new hardware, DLR researchers have programmed Agile Justin to throw a baseball.  Naturally, since Rollin’ Justin is able to catch a baseball (see the DLR project page), researchers set up an impromptu game of “catch” between the two robots — shown in a sneak peek video below.   It sounds like this new system is just ramping up and will be used to push the envelope in terms of full-body control: real-time coordination of hands, arms, torso, and mobile base for dynamic tasks.  I’m told that technical details should be forthcoming in academic publications later this year along with demonstrations at Automatica 2012.

I’m a huge fan of TED Talks — high production quality talks given by the world’s thought leaders, recorded and distributed for all after the annual TED conference.  I’ve noticed that robotics is a perennial hot topic, so naturally I thought: “I should build a compendium of TED talks about robotics (all on one page).”  And so here it is… all 21 of the TED talks that have graced the TED.com frontpage to date.  But alas, TED has expanded beyond the confines of the annual (expensive!) conference.  There are now dozens of TEDx events (independently organized TED meetups) around the world, and robots are equally popular at these satellite events.  So… I guess this will just have to be turned into a series.  These videos should get you started.  Enjoy!

There are many cool tech toys on the market… But Cubelets make building robots quick and fun.  Cubelets are a new robot construction kit from Modular Robotics.  Snap these small magnetic blocks together, and without further ado your robot starts to sense, plan, and act.  Your robot’s behavior depends entirely on how you’ve assembled the Cubelets; behaviors emerge from the local interactions between  Sense, Think, and Action Blocks — no single “brain” block and no single
“program” controls the robot.  For example, a Light Sense Block atop a Drive Action Block makes a light-fearing robot.  Turn the Drive Action Block around and it’s a light-lover.  The KT06 kit, launching next week at CES in Las Vegas, gets you started with six blocks; meanwhile, the KT01 kit includes a full gamut of Sense, Think, and Action Blocks.  Cubelets are great for little kids; they can build their first robot in seconds, but big kids (adults) find Cubelets just as much fun too. This Cubelets video (below) shows how it works.

iRobot has received ample attention for their particle jamming innovations (ie, the "Jamming Blob Robot" and "Jamming Gripper"), created under the now-expired DARPA Chembot program.  However, if you’re like me, their particle jamming actuators and hexapod "JamBot" probably alluded your attention — and they’re stinkin’ cool!   That said, I’d like to introduce you to the "Hexapod JamBot" and the "Jamming Modulated Unimorph (JMU) actuator" created by researchers at iRobot and the Jaeger Group at the University of Chicago.

I’m really excited about inflatable robots… they have the potential to be low-cost,
lightweight, extremely powerful, and yet "human safe" — ie. perfect for many robotics applications.  With that in mind, I would like to introduce you to two new (breakout) inflatable robots: a 15-foot-long walking robot (a Pneubot named Ant-Roach) and a complete, inflatable robot
arm (plus hand).  Both of these robots were developed by Otherlab as part of their "pneubotics" project (in collaboration with Meka Robotics and Manu Prakash at Stanford University), with some funding from DARPA’s Maximum Mobility and Manipulation (M3) program.    These robots use textile-based, inflatable actuators that contract upon inflation into specially-designed shapes to effect motion.   Since these robots are built out of lightweight fabric-and-air structural members and powered via pneumatics or hydraulics, they exhibit large strength-to-weight ratios.  For example, Ant-Roach is less than 70 lbs and can probably support up to 1000 lbs; the inflatable robot arm is less than 2 lbs and can lift a few hundred pounds at 50-60 psi.  Be sure to read on for details and lots of videos!

This article is specifically for folks in academia… When writing a journal paper, targeting the right venue is an important consideration.  There are lots of factors that go into this decision: audience, prestige, historical topics of interest, turn-around time, open access, etc. Discussing all the considerations in detail is too taxing and is probably not actionable (it’s too dependent on your research and goals). But I thought I’d share… I’m tracking the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) impact factors for various robotics journals.  In very general terms, the impact factors can give you a rough approximation of journal quality and help you target your publications.  You can find a historical plot of robotics journals’ impact factors (along with the latest values) below.  I’ll try to keep these up to date.

I would like to introduce you to a new "elastomeric rolling robot" — a soft robot made of inflatable, silicone actuators that pressurize in sequence to make the robot move.  This new robot hails from MIT’s Distributed Robotics Laboratory and has a major distinguishing feature compared to other soft robots: it is entirely self-contained
– no more off-board electronics or pneumatics; everything is on-board.
Two technologies facilitated this new robot:  (1) A "pneumatic battery"
that uses mechanical feedback to self-regulate
a chemical (hydrogen peroxide) reaction and maintain a
stable pressure
inside the robot’s on-board pressure vessel.  (2) An energy-efficient
pneumatic valve design based on electropermanent magnets (one of my favorite topics!).  These two new technologies were just presented at recent robotics conferences (ISRR 2011 and IROS 2011).  Be sure to check out the video below.

Vibrobots (and bristlebots) are simple robots that use a tiny pager / cellphone vibrator motor (with an eccentric weight) to
randomly bounce around — they are the subject of many Maker / DIY
projects as well as some well-known commercial toys (such as the $7.00
Hexbug Nano).  Naghi Sotoudeh, a Hizook reader from Iran, contacted us about his latest project: a remote controlled micro-scale vibrobot (measuring just 18 x 12 x 10 mm) that uses two vibrator motors to achieve steerable motion without any wheels.  Naghi’s design is similar to some previous steerable vibrobots (eg. the Harvard Kilobot project), but the vibrator motor arrangement gives his design a nice, distinctive faux-wheel look.  The hardware is fairly simple: a small PCB, two vibrator motors, a microcontroller, an infrared photodiode, and a very small battery.  In general, the software for this type of robot isn’t too bad either.  In short, this could be a great DIY project and potentially a nice mass-market product.  I have thought about making something like this into a Hizook-designed, manufactured, and marketed product.  But first… what do you think?  Would you fork over your hard-earned money for a RC vibrobot kit or pre-built RC vibrobot? 

It’s that time of year again… MIT Technology Review announced their 2011 "Young Innovators Under 35" Awards (TR35).  This year two roboticists are among the recipients: Brian Gerkey and Pieter Abbeel.  Brian Gerkey is currently the "Director of Open Source Development" at Willow Garage, where he architects ROS (the Robot Operating System).  ROS is quickly becoming the world’s standard robot software platform, supplanting Player –which was also developed by Brian.  Pieter Abbeel, a professor at UC Berkeley, has done some cool stuff with the PR2 (eg. towel folding) as well as really nice machine learning work on autonomous helicopter acrobatics.  Now we can add Brian and Pieter to the ranks of past TR35 robotics recipients: Aaron Dollar (2010), Andrea Thomaz (2009), Andrew Ng (2008), Robert Wood (2008), Josh Bongard (2007).  I’m noticing a nice trend… Hopefully TR35′s love for robotics continues.

The Swarmanoid project is a cool twist on swarm robotics — researchers use a heterogeneous swarm of robots to achieve distributed mobile manipulation. The swarm comprises three different robot varieties: Hand-Bots (manipulation and climbing), Foot-Bots (wheeled mobility and sensing), and Eye-Bots (quadrotors for recon and sensing).   The latest video of Swarmanoid retrieving a book won the "Best Video Award" at the Artificial Intelligence Conference (AAAI 2011) in San Francisco just the other day.  You can check out the robots and winning video below.