This is cool.
It’s not a real android, just a guy in a suit with some CGI aftereffects to remove his full neck and stuff. But it’s still a cool video.
This is cool too. Some CGI androids checking out a new truck:
Kevin Pratt, from the Center for Robot-Assisted Search And Rescue and the Institute for Safety, Security, and Rescue Technologies at the University of South Florida wieghs in on our earlier post about Bee Brains:
A quick comment regarding the post about Bee Brains. There has actually been a fair amount of interest and research into bio-mimetic control and vision systems.
From my work with UAVs, I’m most familiar with a company called Centeye, which has produced a bio-mimetic, mixed-mode VLSI optic flow sensor based on how dragonflies navigate With their own work and work with Drexel, [PDF] they’ve been able to do autonomous collision avoidance and altitude hold with small fixed-wing UAVs.
I’m less familiar with this work, but Ruffier et al [PDF]. from University de la Mediterranee in France have also done some work in developing altitude hold capability for a small rotary-wing UAV using a silicon equivalent of the Elementary Motion Detector (EMD) neurons found in Drosophilia melanogaster (or fruit flys).
Suicidebots would just like to state that the best way to sweet talk us is to use phrases like ‘altitude hold capability for a small rotary-wing UAV’ and initiate cocktail conversation comparing the recessive tendencies of your own personal colony of drosophila melanogaster. R0wr.
Anyhow, these links and many many more are very enlightening, and will provide many hours of fun plotting your Robot Insect Defense Force. Be careful though, the fourth link down on the google search results for ‘VLSI chip’ will totally crash your browser. Okay, now you are all going to try it anyway and blame us, so save yer damn work first. . .
Be sure also to check out the links for the Center for Robot Assisted Search and Rescue, that place and what they have done deserves its own post pretty quick. . .
***
IN OTHER NEWS, we have diddled out template a bit and come up with what appears to be a very fine contact form. Do drop us a line about the site, that cool thing you saw that one time, and whatsisname that had that machine at that one event.
. . because robots are hyperkinetic and *never* sleep. . .
So as we wait with bated resistors in the SB bunker for fresh and exciting flickr streams from the Las Cruces, New Mexico X Cup, the world’s open competition for innovative space flight by private persons, we gently direct your attention to the MSNBC report filed a scant two or so hours ago by the intrepid Alan Boyle:
The Wirefly X Prize Cup ended in disappointment for Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace, which made two unsuccessful bids to win a $350,000 prize in the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. Its lunar lander prototype, nicknamed Pixel, missed a landing pad during one attempt and flipped over on its side during the other.
A noble attempt, accomplished by a group of dedicated and intelligent souls bent on furthering the aims of Science. Do please read the excellent wrapup by Mr. Boyle, especially the bit about the young kid saying the rocket belt demonstrator was better than any superhero, because Jebus, isn’t that waht we all hope to be in the eyes of the people whom we hope will continue our passions?
More in a bit my friends, as news becomes available.
In a world where mouthy parrots ‘reveal sex secrets’, in India some prophetic ones reveal your future with a flick of their acicular beaks. Even the most practical Mumbaikers…
Aw maaaaan, how am I supposed to afford the trip to Toshi station for those power converters noooow???
In a stunning upset for all those teams that have already blown a few hundred thousand dollars, it looks like DARPA won’t be awarding the much-publicized cash prize for the DARPA Grand Challenge.
Amid the wailing and gnashing of teeth from competitors, Yahoo News was heard to say:
The Pentagon’s research arm, which has twice hosted the high-tech contests since 2004, blames an obscure section in a defense spending law signed by President Bush this week. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency believes the law prevents the agency from awarding the $2.7 million prize money.
Granted, 2.7 million on a robotics project on this scale is pretty much a drop in the bucket, especially seeing at robotics follows the Vast Tract of Hyperspace model of economics*, but the lack of money could frighten off potential team sponsors, and could also hurt the chances of the little guys who aren’t working with a ton of sponsorship opportunities in the first place.
Except maybe there’s hope:
Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Brian Maka, said the agencies are still working out the details. “We are not aware of a decision to not award cash prizes,” Maka said in a statement.
We’ll be waiting here, feverishly twiddling our pwm cables until the final word from DARPA is passed down from On High.
In the meantime, competitors can at least be comforted by the knowledge that the winners will almost certainly have one reward for their endless hours of frustrating, backbreaking labor and heartbreaking expenditure of untold sums of money:
Shiny Trophies.
Mm, shiny.
That definitely makes it all worth it.
[via Slashdot]
*That is to say, no matter how much money you stuff into a certain project, there’s always room for more. Not that we’re bitter. Not us.
Say it through your vocoder twelve times fast!
Professor Mandyam Srinivasan of Austrialia National University is intrigued by bees and other insect applications to robotics:
“Anyone who has tried to swat a fly, or marvelled at a bee going home from a flower patch several kilometres away, will know that insects have a visual system that is fast, reliable and accurate,” he said. “How do they do this with such small brains? If they use short cuts, could the methods be used in the design of machines and robots?”
The bet here ’round the SB bunker is hells yeah, they could. The applications! Imagine a swarm of tiny, tiny robots bent on world domniation! Deadly!
And soooo cuuuutte! Here’s an image of what such a phalanx of doom may look like, courtesy Solarbotics:
That’s a dime, y’all. . .
[via OhMyNews]
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
Israeli military night vision goggles! For $5.00! With their case! I shit you not. I snagged them like an old lady seeing a rare procelain figurine. Somewhat reluctantly I went back to the old man to buy the goggles. He looked up and said, “Allright, but you gotta promise me to take Baby Jane too.” I’m thinking, “Baby Jane?!” He reaches down and pulls this doll out of a sack, wads up the sack and throws it in the …
Yeah yeah I know it’s a Microsoft viral marketing campaign (even though MS isn’t mentioned anywhere) but it should be good for whole minutes of fun.
Meet Ms. Dewey. She cracks wise and taunts your meatspace slowness, and occasionally even returns your search results. Watch her get impatient. It’s fun.
Ms. Dewey is wholly Flash-based and benefits from a screamin’ fast internet connection.
[via The Raw Feed]
Or rather, they look at rocks, pick up rocks, navigate rocks, and OMG they totally have Livejournals!
Say Hi to Mars Rover Spirit. . .
. . and give a big howdy to Mars Rover Opportunity
[via Memepool.
Thanks to Extreme Croquet and About Facts for the images.]
Heralds of the coming robot takeover can relax, robots that kill themselves are the next big things:
Coke Is It, by SWAMP, feature a little hexapod merrily bopping along from coke puddle to coke puddle, until the endless subjection to the consumerist military-industrial complex causes our little comrade to disintegrate out of sheer cultural despair. Well something along those lines anyway, we just enjoy watching it slowly dissolve itself in a slick of ascorbicly acidic deliciousness.
[via We Make Money Not Art]
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