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.

The Swarmanoid project is a cool twist on swarm robotics -- researchers use a heterogeneous swarm of robots to achieve distributed mobile manipulation. The swarm is comprised of 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.

Take a moment and envision an electromagnet: a simple coiled wire driven by a hefty electrical current gives a fully-programmable magnetic field strength (on, off, and everything between).  Electromagnets are ubiquitous, but it turns out that there is a little-known device with similar functionality yet zero static power consumption -- they are called electropermanent magnets, and they've been around and in use since the 1960's!  A 2010 PhD thesis by MIT Media Lab's Ara Knaian examines the physics, scaling, trade-offs, and several new actuator designs (eg. stepper motors) using these little-known wonders.  Recently, electropermanent magnets facilitated an innovation in "programmable matter," where they were instrumental in creating the world's smallest self-contained modular robots to date (12mm/side).  Read on for details about this fascinating technology, along with discussions about existing and possible robotic applications.

I'm a huge fan of so-called micro robots -- those with cm length scales, thus ? m³.  I've posted about numerous micro robots before, including the amazing Alice micro robot swarms from EPFL, and I am a long-time micro and nano autonomous sumo robot advocate (see RoboGames).  Perhaps that is why I'm so excited about the SwarmRobot.org open hardware micro-robot swarm, developed by the University of Stuttgart and the University of Karlsruhe.  All of the hardware and software is open (in the GPL sense), including parts lists, circuit board and chassis designs, and software.  With a stated goal to produce sub-€100 robots, I'd really like to see this take off.  Combined with a wireless power surface, a micro-robot in perpetual motion would make a great desk ornament!

It appears the I-Swarm robot project has produced some fully-integrated and apparently functional micro robots -- almost four years after we saw the initial conceptual videos appear online.  What makes these robots so impressive is the level of integration; they possess a micro-step locomotion mechanism, a solar cell, custom IR communication modules, and an ASIC (custom silicon circuitry) all in a very compact package.  I've quite impressed by the pictures and videos (embedded below).  Since I-SWARM stands for "Intelligent Small-World Autonomous Robots for Micro-manipulation", I'm a bit perplexed by the lack of manipulation capabilities.  They do have a small piezoelectric-driven cantilever arm in the front, but it currently doesn't seem as capable as AFM tips employed by the MiCRoN project's micro robots.  Perhaps, as the PhysOrg article notes, they just need additional funding -- appropriate for such quality engineering and top-notch research.

Alice is a micro robot development by Gilles Caprari at the Autonomous Systems Lab at Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne, or EPFL -- a University in Switzerland.   In a sense, Alice was the culmination of 8 years' worth of research efforts spanning a number of micro robots, including Smoovy, Jemmy, and Inchy.  From early on, Alice was designed to be a small, inexpensive, and simply-constructed autonomous micro robot.  Alice was quite an impressive robot, particularly when one considers the numerous extension modules developed and the large swarms that were constructed (videos showing ~90 robots operating simultaneously are shown below).  Alice measures in at just under  1 cubic inch (22mm x 21mm x 20mm or 9.24 cm³).   Fortunately, this robot sports a very open design -- documented both on the Alice homepage and in numerous publications (of which Gilles' PhD dissertation is probably the most illuminating).

There has been a lot of discussion recently by Intel's CTO (Justin Rattner) about some really compelling future technologies: wireless power and programmable matter (made of catoms).  Of course, the programmable matter (catoms) he is discussing are basically robots operating as a swarm.  Wouldn't it be neat to see the swarms actually powered wirelessly?  While Intel has thus far worked on the two technologies disjointly, work presented by myself at ICRA 2008 is addressing the intersection -- wirelessly powering a swarm of robots (publication here). 

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.