So if wiggling ICE-powered donkey’s weren’t bad enough, Boston Dymanics now gives us robotic spidermen. Well, spiderbugs… (is that redundant?)
RiSE is a small six-legged robot that climbs vertical terrain such as walls, trees and fences. RiSE’s feet have claws, micro-claws or sticky material, depending on the climbing surface. RiSE changes posture to conform to the curvature of the climbing surface and a fixed tail helps RiSE balance on steep ascents. RiSE is about 0.25 m long, weighs 2 kg, and travels 0.3 m/s.
Each of RiSE’s six legs is powered by two electric motors. An onboard computer controls leg motion, manages communications, and services a variety of sensors. The sensors include an inertial measurement unit, joint position sensors for each leg, leg strain sensors and foot contact sensors.
Future versions of RiSE will use dry adhesion to climb sheer vertical surfaces such as glass and metal. Boston Dynamics is developing RiSE in conjunction with researchers at University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, Stanford, and Lewis and Clark University. RiSE is funded by the DARPA Defense Sciences Office.
The robot’s biological brain is made up of cultured neurons which are placed onto a multi electrode array (MEA). The MEA is a dish with approximately 60 electrodes which pick up the electrical signals generated by the cells. This is then used to drive the movement of the robot. Every time the robot nears an object, signals are directed to stimulate the brain by means of the electrodes. In response, the brain’s output is used to drive the wheels of the robot, left and right, so that it moves around in an attempt to avoid hitting objects. The robot has no additional control from a human or a computer, its sole means of control is from its own brain.
The researchers are now working towards getting the robot to learn by applying different signals as it moves into predefined positions. It is hoped that as the learning progresses, it will be possible to witness how memories manifest themselves in the brain when the robot revisits familiar territory.
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This is no ordinary robot control system – a plain old microchip connected to a circuit board. Instead, the controller nestles inside a small pot containing a pink broth of nutrients and antibiotics. Inside that pot, some 300,000 rat neurons have made – and continue to make – connections with each other.
As they do so, the disembodied neurons are communicating, sending electrical signals to one another just as they do in a living creature. We know this because the network of neurons is connected at the base of the pot to 80 electrodes, and the voltages sparked by the neurons are displayed on a computer screen.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Warwick, one of the leaders in the experiment, at TechFest in Bombay 2 years ago. I’ve read his books, and at first glance, he seems like a nut. But then, so did Einstein. He’s one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met, and I am certain that he’ll both cure Parkinson’s (some would say he already has done so, it’s just that the friggin’ Fed’s will take forever to approve it) and be a Nobel laureate for doing so.
We’ve always had our suspicions about David Byrne, but it just makes us love him more.
David Byrne has teamed up with our pals Hanson Robotics to make Julio, a singing head and shoulders bot. Julio is haunting, yet oddly compelling.
David Byrne also has a few choice things to say on Julio and robotics in general, and one of my favorite subjects, The Uncanny Valley:
Part of the enjoyment of seeing the various robots at Nextfest was experiencing a taste of the uncanny. The idea of the uncanny was proposed by Ernst Jentsch in 1906. He refers to the uncanny as something uncertain or undecidable which therefore makes us uncomfortable. [Freud disagreed—or elaborated on this]. He calls it un-heimlich, the un-home-like. His idea is that our psychological concept of home implies familiarity and comfort, a sense of ease, and, according to him, any concept we hold also implies the existence of its polar opposite—the un-home-like, the unusual, the unknown, the strange.
I love where this is going. It brings to mind an image of someone sitting in a comfortable chair, maybe with friends, and maybe they’re having drinks—and at the same time Jentsch posits that layered over or under this image is the profoundly creepy, the deeply strange and disturbing. We’re in the land of David Lynch and Hitchcock. ET landing in the familiar U.S. suburbs could be viewed this way, or the various living dead and vampire movies.
More recently Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori proposed the existence of something called the uncanny valley. This “valley” is an area of emotional uncertainty and often revulsion experienced by an observer when a robot or computer animation (for example) approaches being human, is almost believable, but not quite.
He suggests that our emotional empathy with animations and robots increases as they get closer and closer to being human (or animal)—but then, at a certain point, they fall into the valley, and our empathy turns to disgust. In his view they switch from being a cute thing approaching humanity to a bad or faulty version of humanity. It is at this point that we see them as not merely slightly strange, but as a human with serious problems. If the creation can succeed in being a little bit better as a believable creature the feeling of revulsion disappears. For some viewers, recent films like Beowulf fall into this valley, while others find the almost humans acceptable.
This is especially relevant to us over here lately, since we are in the process of moving out of the RoBunker and into the quality (if slightly unnerving) digs of Uncanny Valley, just outside of San Francisco. We’ll let you know if it makes visitors sick or just slightly weirded out.
[David Byrne links and stuff courtesy those fine dorks over at Metafilter]
Because who does not love light, aerodynamic aerial cuisinarts with minds of their own?
These hellys are already doing tasks in Asia and elsewhere, collaboratively, and with a minimum of breakage and crashing. Collaborative robots are what is going to make Skynet wake up one day, so everybody get on their good side now.
You can even buy one of your very own here from Rotomotion.
Yes, that is a diagram of a wee small orb’s first shaky foray into autonomous movement. We are beyond proud over here in the RoBunker, because hell that must have been approximately a ton and a half of hell to make it all go. From Michael Prados, One Of The Lead Swarmies and Possessor of The Will To Orb:
Jon, Niladri, and I coded all day, and then went to the soccer field to sit in the dark and code and debug some more. The culmination of this massive brain exertion is the stumbling attempt at a straight line in the linked jpg [above]. It may not look like much, but for the first time, all the major pieces of orb navigation are working together to autonomously guide the orb along a specified path. We are giving it a way point 20m in front of its initial position, and asking it to go there.
Le Roteur Superieur commemorates this historic moment with un petit pastiche de Seuss:
Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You’re off to Great Places!
You’re off and away!
You have brains in your Orbs.
You have code in your SPU
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.
You’re on your own. And you know what you know.
And YOU are the SWARM who’ll decide where to roll.
You’ll look up and down streets. Look ‘em over with care.
About some you will say, “I don’t choose to go there.”
With your nice IMU and your SPU full of code,
you’re too smart to go down any not-so-good road.
And you may not find any
you’ll want to go down.
In that case, of course,
you’ll head straight out of town.
It’s opener there
in the wide open air.
Out there things can happen
and frequently do
to Orbs who are brainy
and swarmy as you.
And when things start to happen,
don’t worry. Don’t stew.
Just roll right along.
You’ll start happening too.
Well, my friends, this robot is the work of a robot freak from Oakland, California named Justin Grey, whom we have had the pleasure and privilege of working with on many occasions. Justin builds gorgeous fire-based instruments of irresistible destruction.
I have asked him for more info about his newest creature, but in the meantime here is a video of a robot he made last year, named Robot Libby after his dog:
Cute little incredibly disturbing robots learn to empathize with their human overlords, the better to conquer them with (disturbing) cuteness:
Much like a human child, the robot learns from experience how to respond to emotions displayed by people around it.
If someone shows fear or cries out in pain, the robot may learn to change its behaviour to appear less threatening, backing away if necessary. If someone cries out in happiness, it may even detect the difference, and one day fine-tune its responses to individuals.
“It’s mostly behavioural and contact feedback,” project coordinator Dr Lola Canamero is quoted as saying in a BBC News story on Feelix Growing. “Tactile feedback and emotional feedback through positive reinforcement, such as kind words, nice behaviour or helping the robot do something if it is stuck,” she said.
AquaJelly is an artificial autonomous jellyfish with an electric drive and an intelligent, adaptive mechanical system. AquaJelly consists of a translucent hemisphere and eight tentacles used for propulsion. At the centre of the AquaJelly is a watertight, laser-sintered pressure vessel. This comprises a central, electric drive, two lithium-ion-polymer batteries, the charge control device and the servo motors for the swashplate.
Further proof that the Netherlands is still cooler than we are:
Payment is automatic too. It just magically gets debited from one’s account. Way to never, ever have to get out of the car ever again. As The Rotor Says, “I Love Living In The Future!”.
The New Space Station Robot Asks to be Called “Dextre the Magnificent”
“In a surprising and potentially troubling request, the new space station robot known as Dextre demanded that astronauts refer to it in the future at “Dextre the Magnificent.” Brandishing power tools that would make any handyperson blush, the mobile servicing system thanked humans for creating it and promised a glorious future where humans would retain an important role in the new robot order. Dextre was deployed last month to help build and service the International Space Station. As seen in the above picture, Dextre is truly a technological marvel, wielding long arms capable of handling both small tools and large modules with precision dexterity. ”
According to [Han Moravec, founder of the CarNAYgie Mellon's Robotics Institute], our robot creations are evolving similar to how life on Earth evolved, only at warp speed. By his calculations, by mid-century no human task, physical or intellectual, will be beyond the scope of robots.
Well? Go on, discuss. . .you in the back there, speak up.
This machine holds the same sort of fascination that backhoes and pile drivers do: large, loud, cool industrial machinery, used for completely boring reasons. Presenting the UT-1 Ultra Trencher, the size of a condo and selling for a measly 10 millions pounds:
“Weighting 50 tonnes and the size of a small house, it is designed to bury largediameter oil and gas pipelines laid on the ocean floor. It does this by ‘flying’ down up to a mile deep below the surface using powerful propellers. It then lands over the pipeline and deploys a pair of ‘jet swords’ either side of the pipe which inject high pressure water to ‘fluidise’ the surface. Burying the pipelines protects them from fishing, shipwrecks and natural currents. This enables oil and gas to be safely transported from the offshore fields to land to provide secure energy supplies.”
“Jet Swords” can also be used to, oh I dunno, slice apart undersea telecom cables in preparation for the oncoming robot destruction!
Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
And on a lighter note, here’s my favorite video of a crab being catastrophically decompressed into a deep sea pipe:
The pressure was something like 2700psi at a depth of 6000ft, and from what I could gather the cut the rov was making was something like .25 inches wide. Good Times!
