humanoid

If Baxter had a favorite band, it might be The Carpenters. Rethink Robotics' new droid could hum "Close to You" while it gets cozy with human workers along the assembly line.

The Boston-based startup launches Baxter today, billing it as a revolutionary humanoid robot that could help stem the tide of manufacturing going overseas for cheap labor.

For one thing, Baxter itself is surprisingly low-cost. Priced at $22,000 including software upgrades, it goes for far less than traditional industrial robots and puts automation in the hands of small and midsize companies that may not have been able to afford it. Labs and universities are also expected to show interest.

Also, unlike most factory robots, Baxter doesn't require a safety cage. People can work alongside the droid, which is covered in soft materials in case of impact. Sensors tell it when people are near, and it will stop moving if it does make contact with something unexpected. … Read more

Got a chip on your shoulder, pal? Or is that just a 20-axis humanoid telepresence robot?

For cyber-boffins from Japan's Yamagata University, it's the latter. It seems this creepy little golem has been riding around on shoulders in northern Japan, probably freaking citizens out.

The project, dubbed the MH-2 wearable communication robot, was recently presented at the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in St. Paul, Minn., where it turned some heads.

As IEEE Spectrum tells us, the MH-2 is a telepresence robot that acts as an avatar for your friends around the world. With its intricate parallel wire mechanisms and 20 axes of motion, it can reproduce their movements in a realistic fashion. … Read more

You can kinda be in two places at once with telepresence robots, but most machines limit you to chatting with folks on the other end and moving around. They don't even have arms.

Japanese industrial robot maker Yaskawa Electric, known for its Motoman line of robot arms, has been improving its Smartpal service robot since 2005. Once conceived as a robot bartender, the latest generation Smartpal VII is a Kinect-controlled telepresence tool that lets users tidy up at mom's house from hundreds of miles away.

That was the scenario Yaskawa presented recently at the iRex 2011 robot trade show in Tokyo, where it held a demo.

While a staffer moved his arms around in front of a Kinect, Smartpal mimicked his motions, picking up stuffed animals and tidying up, as seen in the vid below. … Read more

Pong, you've come a long way, baby.

Students at China's Zhejiang University have been demonstrating a pair of humanoid robots that can play a pretty mean game of table tennis, by machine standards.

Wu and Kong stand 5.2 feet tall and weigh 120 pounds. They have camera eyes that feed real-time images of the ball to their processors at a rate of 120 frames per second.

Incorporating a high-speed industrial-automation Ethernet technology, the droids take some 50 to 100 milliseconds to respond to the ball's speed and trajectory, knocking it back to the other side of the table.

Their margin of error is less than an inch, according to Xiong Rong, head designer at the university's robot lab. … Read more

Visitors to the recent IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) in San Francisco had a chance to check out this cartoonish droid from local firm Meka Robotics, and it's quite an eyeful.

The video below provides a close-up look at the one-armed humanoid. It's called the Dreamer robot and it's under development by Luis Sentis and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin.

The robot runs on Willow Garage's ROS and consists of several components, including Meka's S2 Humanoid Head, which houses expressive eyes and emotive ears. Dreamer's peepers are high-resolution FireWire cameras and its head can move along seven axes of motion. … Read more

If you're freaked out either by humanoid robots or the thought of dental work, proceed with caution. If both make your skin crawl, you might want to reach for the nitrous oxide.

Showa Hanako, a robotic dental patient out of Japan we told you about last year, has been reborn as Showa Hanako 2. Now the android can not only open and close her mouth, move her tongue, shake her head, blink, cough, sneeze, choke, roll her eyes, and tell her dentist, "Ouch! It hurts!" She can look ultra-realistic doing it.

Jointly developed by Showa, Waseda, and Kogakuin universities and produced by Japanese robot maker Tmsuk, Showa Hanako 2 was created to be a training robot for dental students. But where her elder sister looked like a stiff plastic doll tethered to a dental chair, Showa Hanako 2 looks like a stiff real woman tethered to a dental chair. That's largely because where she used to be made of PVC plastic, she now features silicone skin, tongue, and mouth lining made by Orient Industry, a creator of sex dolls. Needless to say, Orient has a high stake in making realistic-looking and -feeling body parts. … Read more

Rumor had it that Apple or Google was going to release this vaguely humanoid robot, and of course rumor was wrong. Turns out it's a California telepresence company called RoboDynamics.

The robot is named Luna and is intended to be a programmable, open-source household companion. SchultzeWorks, also in California, did the design.

There's little information about Luna on the RoboDynamics Web site other than a description of it being "the world's first personal robot," which would have Sony's Aibo spinning in the pet cemetery. Actually, there are several claimants to that title.

According to IEEE Spectrum, however, Luna is just over 5 feet tall and weighs 65 pounds. It has an 8-inch LCD screen, camera and microphone systems, as well as 10-bit wheel encoders and a PrimeSense 3D Sensor.

It runs on a Linux-based system called LunaOS and can operate for four to eight hours on a full battery charge. It seems to be able to navigate autonomously. If you adjust its arms, it can carry a tray like a waiter.

As seen in the PR video below, it uses the LCD screen to display facial expressions. (If you're going to introduce a humanoid robot, I think Vangelis makes for dubious theme music. Well, maybe the "Blade Runner" soundtrack would work for androids). … Read more

Robots can make pretty good entertainers, and by the looks of it, a German humanoid called Rollin' Justin has the makings of a side show star.

The subject of a paper being presented to this year's IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Justin is an iPad-controlled robot with head-mounted stereo cameras that allow it to catch two thrown balls simultaneously.

In the video below, it moves on its wheeled base as the balls are thrown, getting into the right position for the catch within milliseconds. Justin was developed at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) as a robot to repair satellites in orbit through telepresence control.

The ball-catching is a demonstration of Justin's coordination abilities. In the abstract of the paper above, DLR researchers say the robot can also prepare coffee. Fetching beer, of course, has already been robotized.

I think Justin would draw a bigger crowd if it could catch thrown knives, but I'd pay to see it go up against a robot pitcher and batter. … Read more

Swiss automation firm ABB is showing off a concept factory robot called Frida that's more humanoid than the typical one-armed drones on the assembly line.

The two-armed Frida is being billed as a "harmless robotic co-worker for industrial assembly." Of course, any robot described as being "harmless" should be treated with extreme caution.

It has seven-axis arms, flexible grippers, and camera-based parts location and runs via ABB's IRC5 controller. It's designed as a lightweight, portable complement to human parts assembly.

Frida stands for "Friendly Robot for Industrial Dual-arm Assembly," but I reckon the first word in that name won't sit well with some people. Still, it has padded arms and can sense when a human hand gets too close, as seen in the video below. … Read more