Ken Rinaldo's Quirky Robots

Ken Rinaldo is an artist known for interactive robotics and bio-art installations. He sure knows how to make robots cool, cute, and thought-provoking. His installation 'Fusiform Polyphony' consists of several long-necked robots suspended from a platform that seek eye contact with human beings. A camera in each of them captures facial expressions and sort of semi-randomly converts this into new dynamic behavior of the robot. These furry creatures are made of polyurethane casts, carbon fiber rods, laser cut aluminum, and for the uncanny-valley-factor, some human hair, supposed to suggest a hybrid state between robots and human beings. This work reminds one of Philip Beesley's installations, although Ken Rinaldo has managed to create a much different experience with highly energetic movement. And perhaps to some surprising, humans seem to be totally in love with the robots and vice versa. There seems to be hardly any distrust or fear, maybe some cautionary exploration at most.

Cubli, the self-balancing cube

As the Zurich-based developers say, to them Cubli is simply a cool little cube that can balance and walk, but it may have much more potential. I definitely see this newborn technology growing out into more advanced things. Although it will probably be much too power-consuming for most application, it seems quite powerful and an interesting way to create locomotion without moving exterior parts but through angular momentums generated on the inside. Cubli is essentially a kind of modernist project, a technical feat, and it may therefore be a bit surprising that things like this still get millions of YouTube hits in a few weeks, but it is undeniably very impressive and relevant. Watch it in action here:

Morphs: Moving Architecture with Decentralized Brain

Architect William Bondin calls his structures Morphs, an acronym for 'Mobile Reconfigurable Polyhedra.' These are intended to move slowly through public spaces such as parks and engage and interact with the people present there. The core innovation here is that the structure is built out of tetrahedras which consist of trusses that can extend to up to twice their length. This property allows a tetrahedra to shift its center of gravity so that at some point it can flip over in any of the three directions. This allows the structure to navigate through a space.

To do this navigation, the system relies on some simple principles that are in accordance with embodied cognition. It has sensors distributed throughout the system that measure properties such as the presence of water, temperature, and light, and based on simple rules it learns to behave so that it will avoid water, roads and shaded areas, and go towards areas more crowded with people and with more sunlight. It also learns about its environment in order to determine where it has already been and where it should go. This behavior is inspired by slime molds, which offload their memory to the environment by depositing slime so that they know where they have already been.

The environment is a crucial factor in designing embodied agents, as Rolf Pfeifer and Josh Bongard describe in the book "How the Body Shapes the Way we Think". And it is often overlooked by designers of intelligent agents, who may tend to think from a cognitivist perspective and focus on the brain as the main controller of behavior. We need to think of behavior as a dynamically evolving interplay between the agent's brain/neural system, body and the environment. Together, these factors make the system reach certain 'attractor states' of behavior that fit the embodiment in an optimal way so that it will behave most efficiently. The book mentions some interesting ideas about how to have the environment contribute to the emergence of intelligent behavior:

- 'Scaffolding': Structuring the environment with passive objects to simplify tasks. With adequate scaffolding, mechanisms for successful navigation will be very cheap.

- Offloading memory to the environment - information about the past can be contained in the current situation this way and included directly into sensory-motor loops rather than requiring cognitive action.

- Getting the material properties (elasticity, stiffness, damping etc.) of the body exactly right to fit the environment is crucial. If we get the material properties right, the desired behaviors ('trajectories towards attractor states') will emerge from the interaction with the environment. I can't stress enough that every detail is crucial here - imagine for example if your achilles was only a little bit less elastic or a little longer; it would completely change the way your entire body moves!

- Placement of sensors is also crucial - it is best to have sensors there where the most structured data can be derived from the environment.

Based on these kinds of principles for embodied intelligence, as the Morphs are a nice example of, I would like to see much more innovation!

Robot galloping at 16mph

"WildCat" is the latest work of Boston Dynamics, and the successor of their cat-inspired "Cheetah" project. Where Cheetah was tethered and could run 19mph, this one runs free at 16mph. So, is it mostly creepy or mostly cool? Watch it in action and decide for yourself:



I do suggest that this device needs some 'humanification', so it appears more friendly at least. Creating some vacuum formed shells for it won't be that expensive. In the end, once its use expands beyond the military, it will become more explicitly part of the social fabric and will have to have some capabilities for social communication as well, and possibly could also act to spread information. I'm not saying that it needs to have a face, it just needs to at least be able to communicate its intentions so that people will accept it as part of the social world. Robots are going to look strange, but I think it's easier to accept that when their intentions are known or even better, felt.

Eccerobot: an embodied approach to artificial intelligence

The current prototype of the anthropomorphic Eccerobot, born in the labs of the ETF robotics research group at the university of Belgrade, Serbia, shows an interesting approach to robot design. The developers chose to approach the project not just from the idea that more and better computational intelligence leads to a better design, but that intelligent behavior is for a large part dependent on the physical embodiment of a robot. So rather than creating a robot with stiff parts and very sophisticated actuators and control software, they designed the torso to be flexible, including muscles and tendons that connect the actuators to the plastic bones through ropes and pulleys.

Theo Jansen's lifework

In an age where things seem complex and changing all the time, there is still an underlying creative evolution that keeps the entire process somewhat stable and in harmony. People who remain aligned with this evolution are rare, but Theo Jansen is definitely one of them.

Out of all things, he has decided to focus most of his life to his Strandbeesten, which we all know. In his words, the idea of Strandbeesten has taken possession of him and has since been spreading like a virus. Theo has been speaking at TED Delft a couple of days ago, and shown the world the evolution of his work over more than 20 years. He truly is one of the pioneers of creating objects with embodied behavior, objects that are not driven by abstract electronic brains, but where the intelligence is in the structure of the body itself. And recently he has been taking this further in giving the beasts more 'intelligence'. Watch and listen to his story here:

Robotic balls that drive the cats nuts

A Boulder, CO based company called Orbotix claims to have developed the world's first robotic ball, and it's going to hit the shelves soon. It can be controlled by Apple and Android smartphones, and is meant to be a mixed reality gaming product. Think of playing pong on the floor of your living room, office golf without a club, or just chasing the cats around.





Of course this is just a fun little gadget for the gadget geeks among us. But I can see this going somewhere, towards more impactful innovations. We have the spherical robot going, what else can we do with it? Maybe we will develop it into a new means of transportation, a replacement for the single-axis wheel, or perhaps a complete multifunctional and intelligent home robot/pet. We live in times of great innovation, the world is getting linked, the world is starting to move.

Fitbot, a robot that tries on clothes for you before you buy

Fits.me has come up with a new prototype of their robotic manikin, or 'FitBot', for virtual dressing rooms. It allows people who buy their clothes on the web to preview what the garments would look like on their own body. You enter the various sizes of your body into the website, and it will return to you an image of the FitBot with those sizes, wearing the item you selected.

This appears to be a very complicated system for this purpose, especially when you consider the enormous amount -hundreds if not thousands- of variations that the FitBot needs to be photographed in for each piece of clothing. But it's worth it: the sales to new customers of clothes retailer Hawes and Curtis have gone up by an impressive 57%.



The ideal technology here would of course be to see a fully robotic or at least a very advanced software version of yourself in a fitting room, linked to the movements of your own body. Who knows, maybe we will have our first experience in a virtual body in the consumerist context of shopping. But it seems to be unavoidable that one day it's going to be quite common to have virtual out of body experiences during the activities of everyday life.

Here is a video that shows the prototype in action:

Robot ballcatcher

Here's your chance to see a robotic expert ballcatcher in action. It's made possible by the German fellows at DLR, who have done some sophisticated programming that has the robot determine and continually update a predicted path of the ball. It can then position its hand towards it in order to bring about a smooth catch. The robot can even do this with two balls thrown simultaneously, so it definitely outranks any virtual character in catching qualities, even the Frisbee catching dog in Wii Sports Resort. Imagine the children of the future throwing balls over with inexhaustible robots, or a robotic fridge throwing you a full can of juice and receiving the empty one from a distance, or vending machines that you can just throw money instead of having to fumble and tumble to get that coin or card into the slot. The commercial opportunities of giving technology these basic motor skills are quite endless.

It's a little bit of a pity that this level of artificial intelligence still requires the robot to be hooked up to external processors, but at least we're getting nearer at unraveling and emulating the human embodiment.

Bionic bird

You can't say that the people at Festo are very creative, but their creations are nevertheless astonishing for the technical accomplishment and techno-spiritual, light feel to their work. Here it is for the first time that we see an artificial bird that at first glance is pretty much indistinguishable from a real flying bird. Festo has accomplished this through an extremely efficient motion of the wings, that can rotate at different angles.

Be ready for a future in which we make our own animals.

Incredibly lifelike android

Danish scientist Henrik Scharfe has created a slightly more youthful looking replica of himself in the form of a robot. And not too surprisingly, he has done this in collaboration with Hiroshi Ishiguro, the man who has also created his robot copy, as well as the recent human-looking Elfoid phone system.

The innovation behind this project is mostly in how enormously realistic the face is starting to look. In terms of behavior there is not much going on, as the robot is simply coupled to a human person that directly controls the robot. But maybe soon we will see collaborative projects of companies who work on different parts to create a more complete humanoid robot.



It is definitely a step towards a posthuman existence once we include machines into our concept of a social person. If robots become so real that we mistake them for human beings during an interaction, up to the point that we don't even find out that it was a robot we were interacting with, we cannot fool ourselves anymore and deny that there is a fundamental difference between man and machine, can we?

A question this fundamental is not (yet) the aim of the researchers though. For now they are interested mostly in creating technologies for telepresence that lie in between a purely digital and a purely realistic representation. Furthermore, they are also interested in the emotional interactions that may take place from human to robot, as well as cultural differences in how these robots are perceived.

Here are some images to show you what a day in the life of a robot developer may look like:

Linking a robot body to a human one with Kinect

I know it's a little nerdiness-heavy and lacking slickness of presentation, but hey, this is the real world, and these early developments towards a world where human and machine live as a brotherhood are just too interesting to not write about at least occasionally.

Enter Taylor Veltrop, who has linked his Kinect to a humanoid robot so he can operate it directly through his own body movements. As he indicates himself, it's nothing but a first rough version towards fluent robot motion control - algorithms such as IK would have to be implemented to give the robot an own mind-connection to its body so that it can make an intelligent conversion of the movements it perceives, instead of blindly following what it sees directly - but it's pretty good already.



The moment when the creator has his robot do push-ups, commenting himself with "Let's do some push-ups", it really seems as if he has created a little version of himself that can now do things through simple control so that the creator does not have to do them anymore within the limits of his own embodiment in the physical world. Whereas this does open up great possibilities, and I do think that in making technology more active we are stimulated in becoming so as well, we on the other hand are reminded again of a future scenario where we have forgotten about the mental and physical development of our own bodies and become the jolly onlookers to a seemingly active world - akin to the media consumers depicted in Pixar's Wall-E. So let's all stay aware.

Running robot

Ryuma Niiyama has developed a prototype for a robot that displays almost human-like athletic abilities. It's physiology is based on the elasticity of combining rigid bones with flexible tendon-like elements and air muscles as actuators. The result is a crude but already convincing early version of a robot that can run like a human.

Robot that tries clothes for you

Did you ever order, say, a dress, online that ripped in half as soon as you tried it on? The solution is nigh, as the web-based company Fits.Me has developed a shape-changing robotic manikin that can morph into your body size and try the clothes out for you before you buy them. Thanks to this technology, clothing retailers can send in their clothing for the robot to try it all on with various body sizes, after which customers can enter their body measurements and have the clothes shown in the way that they would look if they would be wearing them.

The guy that presents his company in the following video seems to have a fetish-like obsession for his work, and watching a robotic system change shape is always interesting, so don't miss it:

A flock of robots

The images we have in our heads of robots being present everywhere around us still mostly associate to those generated by the media. Let's replace them quickly with images of 'reality' so we're preparing ourselves for such a future. For example, watch the movie below, which shows an experiment in the "fully autonomous deployment of large aerial swarms."



The creators of these artificial birds imagine the robots to be useful especially for setting up communication networks in rescue areas. What's interesting from a technology point of view is that the robots were designed as efficient as possible through biology-inspired strategies. For example, the collective of aerial robots develops and maintains pathways for communication in a way that ants develop pheromone pathways to a food source.

See more on the official project page here:
http://lis.epfl.ch/?content=research/projects/SwarmingMAVs/

Robotics meets furniture design

The first steps towards robotic products are being taken, also at Lausanne Polytechnique. Researchers there are investigating how robotics can be applied to make furniture move by itself, change shape according to the situation, and repair itself.

So far, they've come up with an ingenious module that can rotate around multiple axes, and can connect to other modules. By combining these robotic modules with static elements, then, they can create a walking table, a shape-changing ottoman, or a chair that assembles itself. Their simulations so far are more impressive than the actual hardware they've built, but I hope to see that table that runs away from you in real life at a furniture or design fair someday soon.

Conversation with robot reveals they like to garden and take over the world

A cute little house in a town in Vermont houses nothing less than an advanced conversational robot named Bina48. New York Times reporter Amy Harmon goes out to find out what's on her mind. It appears that Bina, who was developed by David Hanson whom we also know from the robot Zeno, is sometimes confused but more and more able to hold a conversation that triggers laughs instead of frowns. What's more, she reveals that she likes to garden, and sees friendship as a way to accomplish something together, such as "building a better future, or conspiring to take over the planet". Be reassured though; Bina48 did not come up with this herself. Her mind is the fruit of the mind of an actual person named Bina Rothblatt, who promotes the digital uploading of human consciousness.

This sincerely makes me wonder if we could recreate the conversational mind of people like Jesus Christ and Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha.

Four-legged human exoskeleton and a robotic jumper

The guys at Chiba Institute of Technology know what they're doing.

Robot babies

The Japanese have done it again. They set another step towards replacing themselves with this robot baby, cutely called 'Noby'.

The rationalization behind the project is that the prototype should help scientists understand the learning process of infants. This they intend to do by programming several behaviors into the babybot, seeing how they react to actual, meat-based people, and comparing this to the behavior of real children.

Next to the knowledge generated by the project, the scientists state that this project should lead to the development of more human-like robots with better social behavior.

Noby is also quite a technological feat: it simulates the human senses with cameras, microphones, and 600 sensors that allow it to feel touch.

If I may suggest an improvement, I would press on the aesthetic of the thing: from a superficial perspective, it just looks rather creepy. If we want robotic realizations to radiate a positive light towards the 'mainstream' people, it starts by the simple notion of making it look nice and acceptable. Noby was definitely born in the uncanny valley, and needs to start crawling its way up like a baby turtle to the sea.

Littledog gets an upgrade

The best robotic locomotion I have seen up to yet comes from Boston Dynamics' recently upgraded 'Littledog'. It learns proper footholds and can learn special manoeuvers for situations that stress the motor capacities of the robot. In short, this is a robot that is starting to incorporate intelligence into its body, not just its brain. I also like how the robot is an unobtrusive, abstract device, without any explicit human interaction points. Maybe it should get a movable spine soon though, because the slips look especially painful, which also makes the movement look less 'natural' to me.