The latest Geminoid robot is the most lifelike one yet, and yet I still think there’s something creepy about its glazed, deadbeat expression and evil (OK, I might be reading into it) side-long glance.
His name is Geminoid DK, and yes it’s a he: Henrik Scharfe of Denmark’s Aalborg University worked with Japan’s Kokoro entertainment company to create this avatar of himself. The android holds the distinction of being the first Geminoid modeled after a non-Japanese person (it’s also the first facial-haired bot of the lot).
To make a dent in brown snake populations, feed them poison-stuffed mice; to devastate brown snake populations, create robots to do the job for you. That’s what conservationists want to do in Guam to stop these pesky reptiles from further destroying the native bird population. The robots would have to stuff mice with 80 milligrams of acetaminophen (poisonous to snakes), glue the mice to cardboard strips, and then attach paper streamers to these monstrosities—all so that these modern day Trojan horses get lodged in the snake’s forest canopy when they’re lobbed out of airplanes (and hopefully wind up in a snake’s tummy).
But that’s not all the the mischief that robots have been up to recently:
Forget about RoboCup, where teams of robots kick soccer balls around indoor fields. The first ever robot marathon finished up over the weekend, and one knee-high humanoid took home the prize with just one second to spare.
This video shows the winner’s final stretch:
Five robots competed in Robo Mara Full, the world’s first marathon for our plastic and metallic friends. The race, funded by the city government of Osaka, began on Friday; 54 hours, 57 minutes, and 50 seconds later, Robovie-PC finally completed its 422th lap, thereby hitting the 26.2-mile mark and sealing the victory. With an average speed of 0.48 miles per hour, these machines are no speed demons.
I haven’t watched Jeopardy! in years. Prepping a little too intensely for my 2005 appearance soured me on the show. (Who brings almanacs, Shakespeare for Dummies, and the periodic table to Burning Man?) It was only Watson that brought me back into the fold. And it was an unsettling reunion to say the least. Watson was flabbergastingly good and I knew within the first few minutes of Monday’s inaugural match that he would’ve cleaned my clock. But now, even as the mighty Brad Rutter bows in defeat and heretofore unstoppable Ken Jennings “welcomes our new computer overlords” (he actually wrote that under his answer in Final Jeopardy after the last game), I for one am urging humanity to not give up yet. Without taking anything away from the brilliant team that created Watson, my personal experience as a Jeopardy! contestant leads me to conclude he had some unfair advantages.
1. Watson would never have even made it on the show if his dad(s) hadn’t pulled some strings. The audition process I went through in 2005 would’ve almost certainly taken him out. There are two parts, a timed written test with 50 questions and a practice round. If you get 35 of the 50 on the written test right, you pass to the practice round, where your intelligence matters less than a big smile, confident manner, and engaging personality. Watson may have encyclopedic knowledge but he’s exactly not a bundle of charisma, in spite of the best efforts to trick him out. And even if he had exhibited some manufactured enthusiasm, his demographic would’ve worked against him in the final selection. Jeopardy! wants a diverse contestant base. I read more than once in articles by game-show-contestant consultants (yes, you too can hire someone to help get you on a game show!) that if I, a woman “originally from Troy, Michigan,” passed the written test and showed even the slightest sign of life in the practice round, there was a very good chance I’d be selected to appear. Watson is basically a white guy from New York—not exactly an under-represented category.
It’s official: The robots are taking over the space station.
It will start with Robonaut 2, the humanoid maintenance bot that NASA is sending to the International Space Station next week. And now Japan’s space agency (JAXA) has announced plans to send its own bot to the ISS. JAXA’s humanoid robot will not only talk and Twitter, but it will also act as a space nurse, monitoring the health of the astronauts.
The researchers behind the project say the bot would have a number of attributes that would make it a valuable crew member. For example, they say, it would never have to sleep–so it could keep watch when the flesh and blood astronauts are in dreamland.
And then there are its conversational skills, which would make it a lively companion for those lonley spacefarers. “We are thinking in terms of a very human-like robot that would have facial expressions and be able to converse with the astronauts,” JAXA’s Satoshi Sano told the AP.
The robotic ears of the U.S. Army just got an upgrade: now robots don’t have to be right next to a wall to detect humans breathing on the other side.
Created by the California company TiaLinx, the Cougar20-H is a radar-using robot that looks like a small blackboard on wheels. As Wired reports:
The … Cougar20-H “can … be remotely programmed at multiple way points to scan the desired premise in a multi-story building and provide its layout,” TiaLinx boasted.
The remote-controlled robot could save lives as troops battle insurgents in Afghanistan and other regions because it allows them to ‘see’ who’s inside a building before they physically enter. And there’s the possibility that it could be used to fight human trafficking or to help with rescue missions.
Robots aren’t only getting smarter nowadays–they’re also getting stronger. Researchers have now created a robot hand that can withstand hammer hits and other hard blows.
Led by Markus Grebenstein, the researchers at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) created a robot hand that functions virtually as well as a human’s appendage. The dexterous hand has 19 degrees of freedom–considering that the human hand has 20 degrees of freedom, that’s pretty good. The hand’s delicate movements are controlled by 38 tendons, each linked to a separate motor on the forearm. From IEEE Spectrum:
Another key element in the DLR design is a spring mechanism connected to each tendon. These springs … give the tendons, which are made from a super strong synthetic fiber called Dyneema, more elasticity, allowing the fingers to absorb and release energy, like our own hands do. This capability is key for achieving robustness and for mimicking the kinematic, dynamic, and force properties of the human hand.
The tendons, when tensed, are what allow the hand to withstand hits. But just how strong of a hit can it endure? The hand remained resilient after receiving a blow of 66 G’s administered by a baseball bat. Researchers are pleased with the outcome and see it as a big step towards more widespread use of service robots. As IEEE Spectrum reports:
“If every time a robot bumps its hand, the hand gets damaged, we’ll have a big problem deploying service robots in the real world,” Grebenstein says.
If you see a five-foot-long, 145-pound robotic stranger roaming your neighborhood in the near future, don’t be alarmed. It may just be TI, your friendly, box-shaped power line inspector, who may soon be coming to a power line near you.
Created by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), TI–short for Transmission Inspection–is designed to tightrope along power lines in search of flaws. Since power lines aren’t designed to hold heavy robots, TI technically travels along shield wires, the metal lines that hang above power lines to shield them from lightning.
As TI plods along power lines, covering a few miles each day, he’s able to independently evaluate the data his sensors gather–and if he finds a glitch in the power flow, he calls it in via radio signal. In addition to the automatic mode, TI’s computerized “Cirque du Soleil” act can also be controlled remotely.
When it comes to perceiving power line flaws, TI is as good as human. Infrared sensors monitor hot spots on wires, while lidar-equipped sensors use scattered light to tell whether power lines are too close to tree branches or other menaces. On top of all this, TI also picks up on electrical disturbances and sports a topnotch optical camera for more in-depth scrutiny–especially handy for anyone enamored by still life portraits of electrified squirrels.
In pursuit of a glorious future in which robots can outrun humans (what could possibly go wrong?), researcher Ryuma Niiyama has unveiled Athlete, a bot that’s intended to sprint.
The bipedal robot’s upper legs are modeled on the human musculoskeletal system, while the lower legs are fashioned from the spring-like blades that amputee runners use (and use so effectively that some have called the blades an unfair advantage).
Each leg has seven sets of artificial muscles. The sets, each with one to six pneumatic actuators, correspond to muscles in the human body — gluteus maximus, adductor, hamstring, and so forth…. The researchers are now teaching Athlete to run. They programmed the robot to activate its artificial muscles with the same timing and pattern of a person’s muscles during running.
Niiyama described his bot at the IEEE conference on humanoid robots last week, and has published a paper (pdf) on the project in the journal Industrial Robot. The challenge is to get all those artificial muscles working in sequence as the bot bounds across the landscape.
It’s a big challenge. So far, Athlete can take only three to five steps before tumbling to the ground. Still that’s pretty impressive compared to a hopping prototype from 2007 (seen in the video below), which took one great leap for robotics and promptly fell down. Humans, maybe you don’t need to run for your lives just yet.
The gecko robot just keeps getting better. Not only can the robot climb up walls like the sticky-toed lizard, but it can automatically right itself while falling.
Geckos, like cats and buttered toast, can naturally turn themselves around in midair. Cats are able to right themselves because they are flexible and can twist their bodies around. The gecko, on the other hand, uses its large tail’s inertia to twist its body around to the correct orientation, explains Cosmic Log:
Within about a tenth of a second, the geckos flipped their tails around to induce body rotation. Then they spread out their tails as well as their feet into a “belly-down skydiving posture” position to stabilize the fall. All of the geckos that used their tails in this way landed on their feet, even in wind-tunnel tests–while none of the tailless geckos could do the same trick.
Hit the jump for a video of the gecko-bot in action.
Discoblog is DISCOVER's compendium of quirky, funny, and surprising science news from the edge of the known universe. It's written by Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross. Email tips and suggestions to vgreenwood [at] discovermagazine [dot] com.
The latest Geminoid robot is the most lifelike one yet, and yet I still think there’s something creepy about its glazed, deadbeat expression and evil (OK, I might be reading into it) side-long glance.
The robotic ears of the U.S. Army just got an upgrade: now robots don’t have to be right next to a wall to detect humans breathing on the other side.
In pursuit of a glorious future in which robots can outrun humans (what could possibly go wrong?), researcher 
