Friday Link Dump

It's that time of year for me folks - exams and final projects. I'm swamped. So, here's all the links I've built up over the past few days. Enjoy. I'll be back on track in a week or two.

Air Force secret UAV."The new craft is referred to as Penetrating High Altitude Endurance (PHAE), and is thought to be able to cruise at 70,000-80,000 ft".

University of Texas researchers get $10 million USD to develop bionic arm. "The research is part of the Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2009 project sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency."

Frontline Robotics / Whitebox Robotics gives more details on the PC914 vaporbots robots. Improvements include, "Upgrade from USB 1.1 to USB 2.0" and a SDK. I'll believe it when I see it. WBR/Frontline, let's do an interview.

Japanese researchers demonstrate a legged ... er ... wheelchair legchair. Sci-fi jokes insue. More pictures and details here.

Korean company knocks off the Aibo with their "Genibo" bull terrier-bot. "'Genibo' resemble bull terriers and are 30cm tall, 33.4 cm long and weigh 1.5 kg. The speech recognition feature enables the robots to understand and comply with 100 words including commands like, "come here," "sit," "wag your tail," and "do a headstand.""

LEGO Mindstorms NXT wallpaper and website icons. They're seriously pushing this community aspect. A website toolkit?

Robot Hall of Fame.

Move over Chroino and Manoi, here comes a sexy fembot to draw attention.

Live feeds of the FIRST competition this weekend.

A group of scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology are working on yet another ultralight flying machine. The robot, currently with a 14" wingspan, is designed to fly around in indoor environment. Such environments present special problems for navigation.The researchers are trying to have the robot act like a house-fly in avoiding obstacles.

A fly navigates using its large, compound eyes, which let it see almost an entire field of view at once. Their optic lobes contain motion-sensitive neurons that respond to images moving across the retinas.
Those moving images, the so-called optic flow, combine data that the insect perceives as it flies straight, and data it senses from other motions such as turning, bobbing, or tilting side to side.

Apparently, flies tend to fly in straight lines until they encounter an obstacle, then they make a sharp 90 degree turn and continue. The scientists on the project tried to emulate this behavior by placing two cameras on the robot's wings and maintain stability using a tiny gyroscope.

In the latest test, the robot was capable of navigating autonomously in a 7 meter x 7 meter room for up to 5 minutes straight.

Cornell is also working on tiny flying robots, along with Epson.

First Acquires VEX Line from Radio Shack

There's been lots of rumors swarming around that Radio Shack was killing the VEX Robotics line of toys. I got some news a month or so ago, but hesitated to post about it since it was totally unconfirmed. However, most of the VEX stock in my area was placed on deep discount and sold within a weekend.

I just got a PM today on the ROBOT Magazine forums pointing me to this press release from Innovation First, which states that Innovation First has bought the, "Vex® Robotics Design System brand name and trademark registrations from RadioShack Corporation." You may remember that Innovation First partnered with Radio Shack to develop the kit back a year or so ago.

Plans are to expand the line and continue production.

“We plan to stock the full line of Vex products and accessories and will seek additional distribution partners to fully serve the consumer and education markets in the US and abroad. We’ll also be stepping up efforts to drive innovation into the product assortment and will offer even more unique parts through the www.vexlabs.com website.”

Vex can now be purchased off of Innovation First's new Vex website, www.vexlabs.com. Also note that the VEX Development Kit and accessories are still available on Radio Shack's website for deep discounts. Currently the kit is on sale for $150, discounted from $300.

After buying LEGO Mindstorms NXT and eyeballing several upcoming Pleos, I'm really torn as to weather I should drop the cash for a VEX system. Thoughts?

An Interview With iRobot's Helen Greiner

A while back we posted about an interview with Colin Angle, the co-founder and CEO of iRobot. Next up is an interview with Helen Greiner, co-founder and chairman of iRobot. Greiner discusses founding iRobot, her interest in robots (started with R2D2), and iRobot's biggest setback (late night robot fire before a big deadline)

She also reveals she has a Roomba she's named "Arnold", and discusses the possibility of using Roomba's in educational environments by tapping into the serial interface.

Greiner also says that she hopes to branch into walking robots sometime in the future.

I think, in the future, walking robots will be extremely important, but the technology's just not quite there yet. The strength-to-weight ratio in the motors doesn't allow the output to be as effective as the track systems we already have on the market today.

iRobot is also doing research into swarm robots.

Our swarm was a research project to look at [the question]: If one robot can do a job effectively, what can a whole team of hundreds of robots do together? We built a swarm of 128 robots and we were doing core research into distributed algorithms to see how these robots can work together to get a job done more effectively.


Engadget also has more interesting tidbits about iRobot and Helen Greiner from an interview they did in Aug. of 2004.

NY Times Talks NASA Centennial Challenges

The NY Times has an excellent article on NASA's foray into the Grand Challenge model of research and development. Instead of paying millions to contractors to develop new technologies, why not sponsor contests and only pay the winners? Folks have fun and NASA gets tons of cheap R&D.

[T]he agency is offering 13 contests, which it calls Centennial Challenges, that anyone can enter. The prizes range from $200,000 to more than $5 million, for building gear as diverse as solar sails, lunar excavators and the tiny elevators.

The article talks a good bit about the Beam Power Challenge, a competition to build a robot that will climb a ribbon 200 ft into the air as quick as possible. The end goal is to create a space elevator. NASA also has a competition to build the strongest ribbon possible, to further foster development.

You can see the full list of challenges on NASA's website.

"Look, a hundred years ago, a couple of pesky bike mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, bested, in effect, the government-funded player, to become the first to fly," he added. "That's why you put on these things: to attract the bicycle mechanics."