At ICRA 2009, the Rollin' Justin humanoid robot (the lovable robot that "Danced Like in Pulp Fiction") demonstrated some impressive teleoperation capabilities.  The man-machine interface (MMI) consists of two components.  The first component comprises two DLR-III lightweight arms, the same type employed by the robot, terminated with force-torque sensing load cells to command the omnidirectional base or the arms / hands.  Meanwhile, the second component, a fully-immersive heads-up display with vicon (optical) head tracking, constantly streams robot-mounted camera images to the heads-up display while simultaneously panning and tilting the robot's head in concert with the user's head movements.  All-in-all, this is a very impressively engineered system.  Be sure to check out the pictures and video below.

There was a very interesting plenary talk at ICRA 2009 about "Computational Cameras" given by Prof. Shree Nayar of Columbia University.  A video of the plenary is included below, as well as a discussion of some of its contents -- from assorted pixel techniques for high dynamic range to flexible depth of field photography -- all very cool stuff!  These developments are particularly relevant to robotics, as cameras are probably the most ubiquitous sensors encountered.  This video was made available in the ICRA 2009 podcasts.  While there is a large push for open-access journals / conferences, freely-available recordings of conference talks is even more lacking.  As I find these more entertaining than television, I really hope this becomes a common trend (perhaps the RSS committee members are watching...?).

While most (semi)autonomous mobile manipulators employ expensive articulated arms with grippers (6 or more DOF), the Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech, the same folks who made EL-E, are also examining low-complexity end effectors modelled off of dustpans and kitchen turners for non-prehensile grasping of isolated objects from the floor.  When mounted on an iRobot Create (Roomba), the system's performance was impressive; it successfully grasped ~95% of the 34 test objects across numerous orientations / configurations and four different surfaces -- an impressive feat of robustness given that the end effector is a single under-actuated "sweeper" (1 DOF) working in tandem with a planar wedge, the whole system operates via open loop control, and the objects were quite varied (from small individual pills to large containers, and from deformable textiles to rigid bottles).  This system is slated to appear at ICRA 2009 in Kobe, Japan in the next few days and is documented in a paper entitled "1000 Trials: An Empirically Validated End Effector that Robustly Grasps Objects from the Floor" (of which I am a coauthor).  Read further for videos and additional discussion.

Back in November of 2007, I saw a presentation by Professor Siciliano from University of Naples where he briefly mentioned (and had a video) of a very cool humanoid robot named Justin.  I've seen a lot more of DLR-III lightweight arms now that DLR and Kuka are working together to push them out into industry; though I must admit that I like Justin's blue arms compared to the characteristic Kuka-orange.  Perhaps the most impressive aspect of these arms is that each has a power-to-weight ratio greater than unity.  This, combined with some very capable DLR-II Hands make Justin an impressive bi-manual research platform.

This paper from ICRA 2008 details the construction of a 60cm x 60 cm surface that provides wireless (battery-free) power and bidirectional communication to an initial swarm consisting of five line-following robots, each consuming 200 mW.  Power transmission in the system was achieved through magnetic flux coupling between a high Q L-C resonator placed beneath the operating surface and a non-resonant pickup coil on each robot.  The average power density demonstrated was 4.1mW/cm² for a static load, and the paper demonstrates much greater peak power for dynamic loads via capacitor storage and power conditioning circuitry.