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.

We've seen robots controlled with projector interfaces and laser-pointer interfaces, and now we can add tabletop interfaces to the list.  My labmate, Hai Nguyen, pointed out the CRISTAL project from the Media Interaction Lab at the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences.  The CRYSTAL project is an interesting "smart home" technology that uses a tabletop interface (similar to Microsoft's Surface) and a ceiling-mounted camera to display and control household electronics such as lights, TVs, digital picture frames, and robots!  To command the robot, the user "draws" the desired robot path on the tabletop computer using their finger.  The robot then follows the route via optical tracking through the ceiling-mounted camera. Interesting interaction, and its always good to see robots become sufficiently ubiquitous that they're classified (and controlled) in the same manner as other home electronics.  Check out a video of the interaction below.

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.

I think this is both brilliant and hilarious... University of Delaware researchers, James Galloway and Sunil Agrawal, were awarded a two-year, $325k NSF grant to explore robot-enabled mobility for special needs children, with the goal of spurring cognitive development -- this is brilliant.  However, why focus solely on special needs children?  I think it is hilarious to imagine "regular" children using "smart wheelchairs" to putter around before they learn to crawl / walk -- it would certainly make for some entertaining rounds of baby-bumper-cars!  Adding to the hilarity, their initial prototypes are Pioneer robots pulling a plywood trailer, supported by casters, with a small chair atop (images below)!  But who am I to judge... we can all relate to "ugly prototype syndrome."

Early robots have found utility in warfare dating back to World War II (and arguably earlier), with the invention of simple electrical servo-mechanisms for fire control and targeting.  While fire control has become extremely advanced, its "human in the loop"  nature kept us (relatively) oblivious of the ethical implications of robots in warfare.  However, increased autonomy and point-and-click capabilities are forcing us to reevaluate the ethical implications of robots in warfare.  Enter a new book by P.W. Singer, entitled Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.  Singer was recently interviewed by NPR (and on The Daily Show by Jon Stewart), where he talked about a number of interesting issues.  Links and discussion follow.

The Situational Awareness Mast (SAM, also known as a Zipper Mast) from Geosystems Inc. is a telescoping linear actuator that has a unique property -- it's stroke length is an order of magnitude greater than its nominal height!  For example, the SAM8 is a 10 lb device with a stroke length (8ft) that is 24 times it's nominal height (4 inches)!  This can be used to vertically translate a robot's sensor suite for better visibility while still allowing for a low profile.  Read on for information on the different Zipper Mast variants, the patent describing the system, and an exclusive video of a Zipper Mast on an iRobot Packbot!

I think it is great that the Rotundus GroundBot (a spherical robot) made the Popular Science "Best of What's New in 2008"; however, I'm a bit perplexed... New Scientist featured the spherical robot all the way back in early 2005; how is it "new" now in 2008?  Either way, this serves as a convenient time to re-examine this novel robot -- one that brings back memories of the old solar-powered, spherical BEAM robots from Solarbotics (I believe it was called the "Solarball", but it appears they are no longer available).  Read on for some compelling images and pictures of the Rotundus GroundBot, the spherical robot.