Dirk van der Kooij is a designer who uses a low-resoution 3D printer of sorts to print out plastic furniture with plastic recovered from recycled refrigerators.
Images of the finished product are available on his web site as are the chairs themselves, for €840. (via @curiousoctopus)
I followed a link to this video from Twitter. "Oh, a small jumping robot," I thought, "I bet it hops over a chair or something." Not even close. Check this out:
Boston Dynamics is at it again...they did the Big Dog and cheetah robots as well. What are the odds that they change their name to Cyberdyne Systems in the next few years? (via @jcn)
Update: I did a quick calculation...if a 6-ft-tall human could jump as high as this robot relative to its height, they could jump 315 feet into the air, high enough to land on the roof of a 30-story building. (If you ignore the scaling issues, that is.)
Amazon announced recently that they bought a company named Kiva for $775 million. In cash. Kiva makes robots for fulfillment warehouses, of which Amazon has many. When I heard this news, I was all, robots are cool, but $775 million? But this short video on how the Kiva robots work made me a believer:
Also, pro-tip, it's pronounced ro-butt. (via ★interesting)
Flesh and blood cheetahs are the fastest land animals, capable of traveling at more than 70 mph for shorts periods of time. This robotic cheetah can only do 18 mph but could probably go forever and ever until everything on the Earth has been caught and consumed by its steely jaws.
For reference, Usain Bolt's average speed over 100 meters is ~23 mph, so at least he's safe...for a little while. (via ★interesting)
You remember the BigDog robotic prototype constructed by Boston Dynamics? Now they have a human robot that can run, do push-ups, and just generally acts pretty human.
Take this robot, some super-realistic human masks, and a Siri-powered iPhone 4S, and we're in Terminator territory. (via ★interesting)
Watch until at least 45 seconds in.
I wanna see three of these riding a team sprint in a tiny velodrome.
I think I've featured this robot on the site before (yep, here it is), but she seems to have acquired some new skills. Throwing the mobile phone into the air and catching it is flat-out unbelievable but I liked the quiet deftness of the hand's rice tweezing.
See also the universal gripper, the salami sorter, the robot who considers towels, and the pancake sorter. (via ★mouser)
I am unclear on exactly how this works, but it does work amazingly well.
The gripper uses the same phenomenon that makes a vacuum -- packed bag of ground coffee so firm; in fact, ground coffee worked very well in the device. But the researchers found a new use for this everyday phenomenon: They placed the elastic bag against a surface and then removed the air from the bag, solidifying the ground coffee inside and forming a tight grip. When air is returned to the bag, the grip relaxes.
(thx, phil)
It's no secret that I could watch food-sorting robots all day. This salami sorter is no exception:
The good stuff starts around 55 seconds.
Who knew that watching a towel-folding robot could be so funny and fascinating?
I found this on Mike Migurski's site and I cannot improve upon his description of the video:
There is so much here. The "previously-unseen towel" part of the title, the slightly-femmy movements of the robot, the way the 50X speed-up makes it look like a Svankmajer film, the diligent care with which it smooths out each towel when it's done, and the palpable shock when it returns to the towel table and there aren't any left to fold.
Wow. I had no idea that robots could move that quickly. (via justin blanton)
Sure, it looks like Astro Boy with heartburn, but Kenji Yanobe's Giant Torayan is not the kind of toy you leave with just any kid.
This GIANT TORATAN doll is the ultimate child's weapon, as it sings, dances, breathes fire, and follows only those orders given by children.
Masterminded at Nagoya Institute of Technology, its Command Device uses voice-recognition technology to differentiate between instructions given by adults versus those given by younger evil geniuses.
Half-dragon, half-Mary Poppins, all awesome.
The Big Picture collects a number of photos of robots...particularly robots interacting with humans. (The third one is particularly freaky/awesome.) I'm wondering how these photos will look 50/60/70 years from now when (presumably) robots are smart & capable enough that they are thought of a new sentient life form (rather than as machines) and are entitled to the rights that humans have.
The best robots of 2008, including soccer players, humanoid bots, and a self-healing robotic chair.
The world's robot density is highest in Europe, although Japan makes use of robots at twice the rate of any other country.
There are now 1 million industrial robots toiling around the world, and Japan is where they're the thickest on the ground. It has 295 of these electromechanical marvels for every 10000 manufacturing workers -- a robot density almost 10 times the world average and nearly twice that of Singapore (169), South Korea (164), and Germany (163).
When the war with the machines starts, Africa will be humanity's last stronghold.
First, a fruit fly is tethered to a rod with a cylindrical LED display around it. The display shows geometric patterns that are known to make a fruit fly move left or right - a kind of virtual reality simulator for flies. Since the fly is tethered, it can't actually move, but it tries to anyway. "The fly's pretty dumb," says roboticist Brad Nelson, who created the "flyborg" with colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.
The patterns on the display are triggered by images transmitted from a camera mounted on a miniature robotic car. If the car approaches an obstacle, the display shows the appropriate pattern and the fly reacts accordingly. As it does so, another camera detects minute changes in the movements of its wings. "We measure the lift force and kinematics in real time," says Nelson.
The goal is to figure out how the fly makes decisions about movement so that those decisions can be replicated by a computer.
Big Dog is cool and all but this is a video of a robot with 6 legs and a goateed humanoid head wearing sunglasses and a fedora dancing to Lou Bega's Mambo No. 5. You know, if you're into that sort of thing.
Robots are getting better...the Big Dog robot can recover itself from slipping on ice, walk in the deep snow, and keep its balance when kicked hard in the side.
Great video. (via mouser)
It looks like humans are just as capable of forming bonds with robots as they are with dogs. Perhaps the robot dogs will comfort us while we propagate memes for our machine overlords.
The 2007 robot of the year is a mechanical arm made by Fanuc Ltd. and used for packaging. The arm is capable of grabbing 120 items per minute from a conveyor belt.
Swiveling frenetically, they analyzed digital images of items scattered randomly on a swiftly moving conveyor belt and picked up the items using suction cups that blow air in and out at their tips. They then worked together to place line up the items in rows inside boxes.
Here's a video of three of these babies in action.
iRobot, the makers of the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, also makes a pool cleaning robot.
On the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, robots are fast becoming part of the US military family. "The colonel just could not stand the pathos of watching the burned, scarred and crippled machine drag itself forward on its last leg. This test, he charged, was inhumane." (via cd)
Ken Graney's Roomba has broken the three laws of Roombotics. "The first law states that the device 'must not suck up jewelry or other valuables, or through inaction, allow valuables to be sucked up.' The second law prescribes that Roomba 'must obey vacuuming orders given to it by humans except when such orders would conflict with the first law.' The third and final law authorizes a Roomba to 'protect its own ability to suction dust and debris as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law.'"
The top movie robots of all time, including #5 and the Iron Giant.
Buried treasure worth $10 billion (!!!) is found on the Robinson Crusoe Island by a robot invented by a Chilean company. The loot is comprised of gold and jewels stolen from the Incans by Spanish conquistadors. The estimated 2004 GDP of Chile is $169.1 billion. (via mm)
The World Series of Poker..........Robots. Robots make anything cooler.
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