The robotics department of the Chiba Institute of Technology in Japan recently set up a Youtube Channel, to show off the fruits of their labor. They have some pretty impressive creations on display, such as the ridable Hyperion 4 legged robot, and the crazy looking jumping robot. Cool stuff! [via neatorama]
More below.
The Hayabusa space probe returns to earth:
A Japanese space capsule that may contain asteroid dust has been recovered from the Australian Outbreak, hours after its parent craft ended a seven-year mission in a spectacular fireball.
The Hayabusa explorer returned overnight after a 4-billion mile journey that saw it become the first spacecraft to successfully land on an asteroid and return to Earth. It jettisoned the capsule just before burning up.
This is a pretty amazing folding transformation of a single-color 2-unit cube into a pair of stellated rhombic dodecahedra of different colors. Among its other interesting properties, the Yoshimoto Cube can actually be folded into a cube having the color of either star. You can buy the (fairly pricey) toy version pictured above from the Museum of Modern Art Store. It is also possible to make your own, from paper, by following the instructions in the video below. It is, reportedly, a very rewarding, if time-consuming, process. You can download the pattern here.
photo credit: Catherinette Rings Steampunk
Robots are cool, but unless you stop by Stanford regularly or make it to MIT often, chances are you don’t see that many in your day-to-day life.
That’s where the internet comes in, and specifically YouTube, which offers hours and hours of robo-themed footage for your on-demand entertainment.
So, grab the popcorn, hit up the videos now and let us know in the comments which automatons get your vote.
Oh, and should you subscribe the the belief that robots are pretty much evil and will eventually overturn their human masters and rule the world, then you might still want to watch these videos to check out the kind of tech on display and see how far off such an uprising might be.
A video entitled “Giant Robot Dinosaurs from Japan” is never not going to be good. The next logical step is clearly to use these creations in a new feature film called “Rob-assic Park” in which an amusement park gets overrun by robo-dinos while Jeff Goldblum stalks around looking tall and saying I told you so.
A bit of a YouTube star, if there’s ever a robot to be voted least likely to rise up against his human overlords, it’s Honda’s humanoid “Asimo” who resembles a kid in a space suit and boasts a nice line in running, climbing stairs and conducting symphony orchestras.
This amazingly advanced robot boasts cognitive skills, a high level of motion (with 25 degrees of freedom) and is programmable, so you can customize it to do pretty much anything. Currently available to academic institutions for a high price, a consumer model is planned for 2011, so watch the demo above to start getting excited.
Sony’s Qrio (notable for being the first bipedal robot capable of running) never reached production (it’s development was axed at the same time robo-dog AIBO got his marching papers), but as this video shows it could bash out some sweet moves in its time.
The DARPA-funded BigDog is a quadruped robot designed to be used as a kind of robotic mule in the field. This video demonstrates its incredible stability over all kinds of terrain, and even when taking a hit. It’s certainly much improved from the early beta.
This video is in Japanese, but music, or for that matter robot awesomeness, needs no translation. If this has got you hot for robots playing instruments, then be sure to check out the violin-playing android, also from Toyota.
Hanson Robotics busies itself by “awakening intelligent robotic beings and granting them sparks of true consciousness and creativity.” Its Alice-bot is one example of the progress it has made with giving robotics realistic facial impressions with the aim of enabling “machine empathy” in the future. Be afraid robo-phobes.
Human barkeeps fear for your future! This “alcohol administering automation” created for Japanese beer brand Asahi could well be tending bar in a few year’s time — if they can programme it to have selective vision and a suitable sneer when someone orders anything with “Lite” in its name.
If you’ve got the technical ability to re-create something from the underwater world as a robot you’d go for a shark, right? Not these guys. They make a blue goldfish. And it doesn’t even have any frickin’ lasers.
The benefits of using robots in oxygen-free outer space have not gone un-noticed by the NASA brainiacs. NASA’s Robonaut, a futuristic space-man with flexible fingers, could one day be used in space to carry out repairs, leaving the humans free for more important tasks. Like tweeting.
If the amount of videos on YouTube capturing cats sat on robotic vacuum cleaners is anything to go by, then the accepted wisdom that cats are clean animals certainly appears to be true.
Still waiting on that big-screen OLED TV? Yeah, so are we, but here’s some news that could mean they’re coming soon: OLED tech has just been obsoleted. Seriously. We still can’t even afford an 11-inch model and now we have to start pining for something new: OLET.
That’s Organic Light Emitting Transistor, tech that researcher Michele Muccini at the Institute of Nanustructured Materials has just proven can be between two and 100 times as efficient as OLED. OLETs rely on three layers of material, with the bottom layers carrying a charge, the middle layer (the meat in this high-tech sandwich) emitting photons when excited by the bottom, and the top layer selectively letting those photos through. All three combined are just 62nm thick.
It’s this separation of layers and horizontal flow of current that gives OLET its efficiency and it’s believed that it could not only be used for (next) next-generation displays but also for on-chip optical interconnects. When will an OLET HDTV will hit the market? Don’t even go there.
Anime News Network