ICRA 2011 kicks off in less than two weeks in Shanghai, China.  Unfortunately, I won't be attending -- I'll have to wait to see y'all at IROS 2011 in San Francisco come September.  However, I was browsing through the program and it looks like there are going to be a lot of great talks! A few that caught my eye: Morgan Quigley's low-cost 7 degree-of-freedom (7-DoF) series elastic actuator (SEA) arm for sub-$5k, Aaron Dollar's helicopter-mounted shape deposition manufacturing (SDM) hand,  and Rollin' Justin's fast reflexes to catch flying (tossed) balls... and these are just the talks that have videos posted online already (embedded below).  Eventually I'll get around to writing about all this cool research (after finishing my dissertation in a few months!) -- but for the time being, here's a quick scatter-shot overview.

Carol Reiley, a surgical robotics PhD student at Johns Hopkins' Computational Interaction and Robotics Laboratory, wrote in to share how they unwind after a long day of research.  She writes, "Here's a video of the Johns Hopkins Robotics lab playing the board game Operation on the $1.3M dollar (Da Vinci Surgical) robot. The video emphasizes the robot's precision and hand tremor reduction as well as how difficult Operation is to play, even with a robot. :-)" Fun, whimsical, and a bit meta.  Surgical roboticists seem to enjoy themselves; seems like just yesterday they were using the robot to make little paper airplanes or produce dance videos.

Perhaps you remember Garratt Gallagher -- he's the ROS / Kinect hacker responsible for 30% of all entries in the recent Kinect / ROS 3D competition, in which he  won first place for Impromptu Buttons (his other entries such as Finger Detection, People Follower, Kinect Minority Report Interface, etc. were also quite impressive).  However  I want to introduce you to his most exciting project to date:  Bilibot.  Started in December and funded with $5,500 through KickStarter, the Bilibot Project is an open source effort to create an affordable robotics platform based on the iRobot Create, Kinect, and a computer pre-installed and pre-configured with Ubuntu and ROS.   The goal is to create a platform for hackers, enthusiasts, and researchers that works right out of the box without the (often daunting) challenge of installing and configuring Ubuntu and ROS.  Frankly, the $150 Kinect may be popular in the gaming industry, but it will completely revolutionize robotics -- it is an amazing sensor, and the Bilibot project aims to make it even more accessible. 

I'm intrigued by several recent high-tech robot toys that provide an immersive, augmented-reality experience that is grounded in a real, physical robot.  Almost universally, these new toys are controlled by smart phones or tablet computers (eg. iPad / iPhone / iPodTouch or Android devices) and will likely be hacker / developer friendly.  They are becoming increasingly sensor-rich and often offer video feedback -- all enabled by the commoditization of robotic components.  For example, the Parrot AR.Drone is a quadrotor helicopter that enables UAV aerial dogfights.  Another is the forthcoming Orbotix Sphero, a simple robot ball that will presumably support many mini-games: like a real-life version of Super Monkey Ball or the best cat toy ever!  Yet another example for you hackers out there, Matt Might created an iPhone-based multitouch remote control for a Scribbler robot in just 6 hours and 200 lines of JavaScript / Python!

Many folks visiting Hizook today are looking for a "robot coffee machines," specifically, the Tassimo BrewBot by Bosch.  In actuality, BrewBot is not a robot at all!  They are using a cute robot coffee machine to sell decidedly non-robot coffee makers, and it makes me sad... I want the actual robot! Either way, kudos to the clever marketers at Bosch for making such a great commercial (embedded below).  In the meantime, if you're interested in seeing a real coffee making and delivering robot, go check out the Nestlé Nespresso Nesbot.  Dang it, now I've got a hankering for an espresso...

Tonight's episode of Big Bang Theory, a comedy sitcom about CalTech scientists / engineers, prominently featured a telepresence robot as "Shel-Bot."  Specifically, the show featured Willow Garage's telepresence robot called Texai that was covered in the NY Times just a few weeks ago.  Apparently this is the second robot appearance in Big Bang Theory's new season (one in each of two new episodes) -- though I have yet to watch last week's episode with a "gratifying" robot manipulator. It's so nice to see real robots on TV, though I'm sure my wife could live without my excited banter and shutter clicks as I (literally) take screenshots with our DSLR camera (see shots below).

While Willow Garage made an important announcement about the forthcoming commercial availability of PR2 robots earlier this week, I want to focus your attention on something a bit more whimsical.  At the PR2 launch party, Willow Garage founder (Scott Hassan) was throwing around the idea of a PR2 video competition for PR2 Beta Program recipients, complete with substantial cash prize.  True to his word, Scott set up a rules / video submission site; in a nutshell: the competition deadline was Aug. 17th, had $10k in aggregate prize money, and was to be judged by Scott, his wife, and his children.  Today the results were announced on the pr2-users mailing list.  You can find (all?) the submitted videos, including the winners, embedded below -- check 'em out and let us know which is your favorite in the comments!

Colleague and labmate, Tiffany Chen, pointed out an interesting new robot named "MeBot" from MIT's Personal Robotics Group.  Later this week, MeBot will be presented at the conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2010) in Osaka, Japan.  The associated paper, "MeBot: A Robotic Platform for Socially Embodied Presence," has been nominated for best paper.  In a nutshell, MeBot is a semi-autonomous robotic avatar that provides rich, remote interaction by conveying non-verbal channels of social communication in addition to video, something that is not provided by existing phone and video conferencing.  The expressiveness of MeBot is impressive.  It reminds me of the (now well-known) CrabFu Swashbot, but ups the ante by including video capabilities.  Be sure to check out the videos and photos below to see what I mean.

With micro / pico projectors being sold for under $250, and robot toy maker Wowwee getting in the game, it was only a matter of time before projectors would be found on robots -- especially since the general concept dates back at least three decades to R2D2's holographic projections in the original Star Wars trilogy.  In fact, Hizook previously examined a number of robots with projectors used to communicate intention.   Following the development of a laser pointer interface by the Healthcare Robotics Lab (to which I belong), myself and numerous labmates ruminated about the marrying of these two technologies -- it seemed a natural extension of the "Clickable World", wherein the world is composed of virtual buttons or icons selected via a laser pointer analogous to a PC mouse, to include visual feedback via an on-robot projector.  It seems ideas rarely stand in isolation; I'm now aware of two robotic systems that use both video projectors and laser pointer interfaces.  The first is a very preliminary "late breaking results" submission to HRI 2009, while the other is a fully-realized system developed in JST's ERATO program.  The latter research happens to have a compelling video, embedded below.

Like almost all roboticists, I'm a huge fan of robot movies.  My common favorites include: I-Robot, Blade Runner, Iron Man, Short Circuit, AI, Wall-E, Hinokio, and so on.  Well, there is a new Sci-Fi movie called "District 9" coming out this weekend that (based on previews) sports some impressive robotic systems -- particularly exoskeletons.  The writer / director of this new movie is Neill Blomkamp, who has also produced numerous short films featuring robots (a few of which are shown below).  In a psuedo-tradition, we're having a lab outing to a matinee showing of "District 9" this weekend.  I'll be sure to let you know how it goes in the comments, but in the meantime check out the pictures and trailers below.

The iconic Pixar animated lamp, Luxo Jr., unofficially debuted in animatronic form at Disney's Hollywood Studios in late June (videos below).  Both the animated and animatronic Luxo Jrs. have remarkable anthropomorphic emotive capabilities in spite of their simple, non-human form.  This reminds me of conversations in Dr. Andrea Thomaz's human-robot interaction course about applying animation techniques to design more effective social robots -- clearly Disney's Imagineers have perfected this art.

I came upon this new commercial (video below) entitled "The Runner -- Exploit Yourself" created by Big Lazy Robot (a design / visual effects studio) for Nike.  The humanoid robot performs impressive feats of urban acrobatics, strongly resembling a more agile version of the movie-star robot, Hinokio.  It is always interesting to compare robot fact with fiction.  Hopefully the future lives up to (nay, exceeds) our expectations.

Describing science as "beautiful" makes perfect sense to me; I believe the physics experiments described in The Prism and the Pendulum are on par with the greatest paintings and sculptures ever conceived!   However, I'm having difficulties classifying the $30,000 robot, Keepon:  Is it a research robot, an art-robot, or both?  On one hand, there is evidence supporting its role in important robotics research.  On the other hand, there are the numerous (many more?) whimsical videos of Keepon dancing to music or traveling the world, such as the "Keepon Goes Seoul-Searching" video to be shown on Friday at the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) 2009 conference (we show this video below).  Having seen Keepon in person, I can attest to its "cuteness" factor and quality design... but my questions are: "Where is the line between art and research drawn?"  "Does such a line, necessarily, exist?" and "How can HRI researchers and peer-reviewers objectively evaluate important robotics research that also possesses strong artistic components?"  I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Back in May 2008 it was announced that CMU professors Sara Kiesler and Jodi Forlizzi (from the HCI Institute) and Paul Rybski (from the Robotics Institute) were awarded $500k in Microsoft's Human-Robot Interaction funding to develop a social, snack-selling robot to traverse Newell-Simon and Wean halls (press release).  After seeing a prototype appear on Flickr in July, we've all been waiting patiently to see pictures of the final version.  Well, the wait is over -- photos of the new CMU snackbot, conceptual designs, and construction photos are contained below!  It appears that the CMU team is progressing nicely.

OK, I know what everyone is thinking... "What is this craziness? Inter-Galactic Love?" Well, let's just attribute it to a poor Japanese-English translation -- the title should have been left at just "Hinokio," which is a play on words from the old, classic film title "Pinocchio."  In my opinion, this is the second-best robot movie of all time in terms of robot realism and "cool" humanoid robots (second to I-Robot), though it does posses some of those cheesy Japanese memes.  The movie is about a Japanese boy who is unable to walk and thus uses a telepresence, humanoid robot to experience life; everything the robot sees, hears, and feels, so does the boy. The film has amazing graphics and cinematography, and the human-robot interaction techniques are very well thought-out. I'd recommend everyone grab a copy and watch it; it's definitely worth the time. Read further for more detailed information and some very cool images from the film.