The Int’l Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) conference took place this week in Japan. I scoured the list of presentations and picked out robots I thought were the most interesting and important. My list of highlights include a city explorer that politely asks for directions from passersby, another that can scamper up a pole and even one that can create ice sculptures (albeit very slowly). There is also a pretty entertaining video of crash-test dummies being plummeted by robots, which was picked up by a few places after my post.
Two researchers who specialize in tiny machines also have new work that I wrote about this week. Metin Sitti at CMU has refined magnetic control of his tiny creations, while Sylvain Martel at Polytechnique in Montréal has devised a way for a micro-machine to beckon swarms of bacteria to push it along. Though in early stages, Martel and Sitti aim to make robots that one day swim around in the blood or walk around in the stomach, respectively. (And of course, controlling swarms of micro-robots would make a great super villain power.)
In the realm of social robots, BBC wrote about an android that has joined Facebook in order to ‘foster meaningful relationships with people.’ The researchers intend or the robot to interact with people, maintain a database of their social relationships within Facebook and have real-time conversations. It’s a neat idea, but perhaps a bit premature for encouraging human-robot interactions. A Mashable post has an entertaining critique of the research and its coverage.
On the home helpers front, a Japanese company called Teijin debuted a new bot to compete with the vacuuming Roomba and other similar, circular spinoffs. The Fukitorimushi is an inchworm-like bot is covered in a special nano-fibrous cloth which picks up dust. The cloth is this bionic creature’s claim-to-fame: the cloth is made of fibers only 700 nanometers in diameter, which lets it pick up extremely tiny dust and dirt. The robotic creature emits blue-white light to look for dirty spots; once found, the little robot spends extra time wiggling over that area. I like the idea of creepy-crawlers that are actually help in the house!
Speaking of the Roomba, here’s a neat image recently circulating the blogosphere of how the random algorithms the Roomba uses actually do efficiently cover an area (from Signal Theorist).
Finally, a somewhat gratuitous robot can write your signature for you remotely. The robot is called LongPen and was the brain child of one of my favorite authors, Margaret Atwood, who reportedly wanted a way to sign books for remote fans. While it may not be as exciting as meeting an author in real life, Atwood points out that a remote signature is usually better than none at all.
