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.

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.

This is a guest essay by Fred Nikgohar.  Fred is the CEO of RoboDynamics, makers of the TiLR robot which was recently featured in a New York Times overview of telepresence robots.  Fred argues that we’ve reached a watershed moment in robotics facilitated by cheap 3D sensors like Microsoft’s Kinect (ie. PrimeSense RGB-D camera) — that the Kinect provides a roadmap where "the best solution to complex, low-cost sensing (or actuation for that matter) is to take advantage of affordable, mass-produced components, complementing them with the innovative use of software solutions that benefit from constantly declining prices of computation."

Heartland Robotics, the stealthy robotics startup founded by iRobot co-founder and robotics legend Rod Brooks, was in the news again last week after closing a $20M financing round.  Little is known about the company beyond broad superlatives from executives about building robots to "increase productivity and revitalize manufacturing."  Now, successful fundraising by a robotics startup is great news, but alone it was
insufficient to draw my laser-focus away from thesis work.  However, a Boston.com article this weekend provided a tantalizing new nugget of information that I absolutely must share — Heartland is working on a new mobile manipulator with a $5,000 projected price point complete with one or two arms, grippers, sensor head, and a mobile base.  If coupled with a depth camera (eg. Kinect) and a decent computer, this could be a really compelling robot platform!  If this price point is real, perhaps those superlatives aren’t so inflated after all…