Rave Computer has announced a new ruggedized MIL-SPEC-810F in-vehicle computer that looks good for use in autonomous vehicles and robots too. The RCV 6100 is based on a 1.6 GHz Atom N270 with up to 2GB of RAM. The fanless design can operate in temperatures ranging from -30 C to 60 C (-22 F to 140 F) and run on 6 - 36 VDC. IO includes a PCI-104 expansion connector, 2 mini PCI express slots, compact Flash and SIM slots, GB Ethernet, 802.11b/g/n, GSM or WCDMA, Bluetooth, GPS, 3 USB ports, 2 RS-232, 1 RS-485, 1 LVDS, 1 VGA, 1 DVI-D, audio in and out, 4 GPIO ports (4 in and 4 out). And, of course, you can run GNU/Linux on it. For even more info, see the RCV 6100 spec sheet (PDF format). How much will all this cost? Rave isn't saying but our guess is you should apply the old rule of thumb: if you have to ask, you can't afford it. Via LinuxDevices.com

Sabu M. Thampi has posted a very short introduction to Swarm Intelligence (PDF format). In his paper, he describes the biological origins of swarm intelligence in flocks of birds, schools of fish, and swarms of bees. He goes on to describe the importance of swarm intelligence to robotics, using the computational models of ant colony optimization (ACO) and particle swarm optimization (PSO). Pseudo code for the ACO algorithm is included. CC licensed image of swarming grackles by flickr user AlphaTangoBravo

A topic that's arisen here several times in the past is whether or not future robots, assuming they achieve a level consciousness and intelligence comparable to humans, would be capable of religious beliefs. A new study, The Neural Correlate of Religious and Nonreligious Belief (PDF format) used fMRI to compare the brains of fifteen Christians with fifteen nonbelievers, shedding some empirical light on brain differences in how they each evaluated the truth or falsity of religious and non-religious propositions.

For both groups, and in both categories of stimuli, belief (judgments of “true” vs judgments of “false”) was associated with greater signal in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area important for self-representation, emotional associations, reward, and goal-driven behavior. This region showed greater signal whether subjects believed statements about God, the Virgin Birth, etc. or statements about ordinary facts. A comparison of both stimulus categories suggests that religious thinking is more associated with brain regions that govern emotion, self-representation, and cognitive conflict, while thinking about ordinary facts is more reliant upon memory retrieval networks.

Applying their findings to intelligent robots, it seems that while consciousness and intelligence might be enough to practice religious rituals, that emotion is key to evaluating the underlying religious propositions. Emotion is already an important topic of research in robotics, so these new findings should keep the debate going over the eventual possibility of religious robots.

Travis Deyle from Hizook writes, These new robots are pretty phenomenal. I'm sure they would be of interest to your readers. He's talking about the latest Meka Robotics T2 humanoid torso, H2 Compliant hands, and S1 Humanoid head. Put them all together and you get Simon, show in the YouTube video above. Simon's mouthless head is a bit creepy and definitely timely given our recent post on the uncanny valley effect. The 4 DoF hands and 7 DoF arms rely on series elastic actuators that simulate biological compliance. For more check out Travis's blog entry which includes lots of exclusive photos, specs, and even complete data sheets that aren't up on the official Meka website yet.

We're all familiar with Masahiro Mori's Uncanny Valley, the hypothesis that attempts to explain why non-anthropomorphic robots seem cute but as their appearance becomes more human, humans find them creepier. Deep in the uncanny valley, we find zombies, corpses, and androids, such as the one pictured above, created by Hanson Robotics. Is it time to rethink the Uncanny Valley hypothesis? Johan Eklund writes, I just finished my thesis about "humans heterogeneous reactions towards robots". Johan goes on to summarize his findings:

In my own opinion I have an explanation of our "forgiving reactions on the abstract robot" that is novel (with refs to Scott McCloud's examination of comics). A focus on the theoretical explanation of our positive reactions to the abstract robot, could also compliment or replace a simple listing of our heterogeneous reaction to robots, which can be found elsewhere. The short version of "our forgiving reactions towards the abstract robot" is that the abstract expression is further from our daily visual experience with the world, and because of that we don't intuitively know the premisses and implications that are valid. This stands in contrast to the more analog expression which is more in accordance with our experience with the world. Because of this we immediately know the premisses for the analog expression but not so for the more abstract expression. Not immediately knowing the valid premisses for an abstract object can thus be describes as: "a forgiving reaction to the abstract expression".

For more see Johan's full thesis (PDF format) or, if you don't read Danish, try the English language abstract of his thesis (PDF format). Johan also recommends David Hanson's recent TED talk for more on the subject.

Erico Guizzo of IEEE Spectrum writes, "this iRobot project was discussed before at robots.net, so I thought readers might want to finally see the iRobot morphing robot blob in action". Rachelle Wise emailed saying, "A Minnesota engineering student created this robot that plays Guitar Hero! There's a YouTube video of it playing. The robot is named Roxanne. :)" Rog-a-matic spotted an interesting design concept for a robotic wheelchair. He also found this bolt-on kit to simplify turning any vehicle into an autonomous robot. Robodave found a Omnizero.9, "Pretty cool homebuilt biped transformer robot". He also sent a link to Omnizero.9's website. Remember that Power Loader exoskeleton suit that Sigourney Weaver used in the film, Aliens? Pink Tentacle has a story with video on a very similar real-life exoskeleton being developed in Kyoto, Japan. Closer to home, the AssemblyBlog posted a report on robot agriculture developments. Know any other robot news, gossip, or amazing facts we should report? Send 'em our way please. And don't forget to follow us on twitter.

As reported in some previous posts, whiskers are a great sensing device for autonomous robots, because they allow to detect and categorize objects and surface textures while only lightly touching them. The latest episode of the Robots podcast takes a closer look at using Active Touch in robotic applications. Our first guest, Tony Prescott from the University of Sheffield in the UK, has been looking at how rats actively use their whiskers to sense their environment. Prescott has pursued his goals of understanding how Active Touch can be used in robotics and its role for the brain in the scope of several large European projects, such as BIOTACT and ICEA. To test models inferred from high-speed images of real rats, Prescott has been working with a rat-like robot called SCRATCHbot (see video above) developed in collaboration with the Bristol Robotics Lab. Our second guest, Elio Tuci, is working on applying active touch to more complex scenarios, such as a robot arm touching an object. Read on or tune in!

NASA has published a new Tech Brief on TRESSA, the Three-Robot System for Traversing Steep Slopes (TB login needed to view full brief). TRESSA is a group of three autonomous robots that work together to climb steep slopes. And by steep we mean up to 90 degree slope angles. Two of the robots, called Anchorbots, remaining at the top and support the third robot, named Cliffbot, with tethers as it negotiates the rocks. The Anchorbots dynamically adjust the tension of the tethers, allowing Cliffbot to go up, down, or across the slope. This is more complicated than it sounds as the Anchorbots have to combine the amount of tether tension needed to offset gravitational forces with anticipation of desired motion of Cliffbot. The robots also monitor themselves and each other for faults and communicate any potentially unsafe conditions to each other. For more detail on the TRESSA project, see the 2007 JPL paper, TRESSA: Teamed Robots for Exploration and Science on Steep Areas (PDF format).

Ed Okerson writes, "at a DPRG club meeting a few months ago, some of the members were discussing building robotic musical instruments. Well, here is a very interesting application for a mechanically actuated piano." Ed's talking about Austrian composer Peter Ablinger's mechanically actuated piano which speaks by breaking human speech down into "pixels", each of which is a piano note. The voice processing and piano control was done using custom software developed by the Ablinger and run on a GNU/Linux machine. A translation of the German narration describing the process can be found in the "more info" section of the YouTube page.

Tamara Denning and other researchers at the University of Washington have released a paper on the privacy and security risks of household robots, titled "A Spotlight on Security and Privacy Risks with Future Household Robots: Attacks and Lessons" (PDF format). Under the assumption that future homes will be populated with numerous commercially designed household robots, the researchers examined the security of the three currently available robots: The WowWee Rovio, the Erector Spykee, and the WowWee RoboSapien v2. What did they find?

Our experiments uncovered a number of vulnerabilities — some of which we deem to be quite serious, such as the possibility of an attacker compromising a Rovio or a Spykee and leveraging the built-in video camera to spy on a child in her bedroom

In addition to SSIDs and other leaked information over home WiFi networks, the researchers found that the Spykee, the least secure of the robots, is susceptible to Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attacks and makes remote connections to the spykeeworld.com server in some configurations. The research use their findings to develop a set of questions designed to promote more secure household robots that will preserve their human's privacy. As an aside the research hit the usual problem of finding no adequate definition of the word robot. They choose to define it as "a cyber-physical system with sensors, actuators, and mobility".

On Friday, October 9 at 4:30am (11:30 UTC), NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) impactor will hit the Moon, followed four minutes later by the impact of the LCROSS robotic mothership, which will fly through the 10km high debris plume collecting data about the presence of water, minerals, and organic molecules. NASA will have the Hubble, the LRO, and hundreds of big Earth-based telescopes pointed at the event. But the plume should be big enough to be seen and recorded by amateur telescopes 10 inches or larger. NASA is asking everyone who is willing to participate by observing and photographing the event. Visit the LCROSS Citizen Science website to get involved. To find an LCROSS public viewing event (or let others know about one you're hosting), visit the LCROSS public events page. (sadly, there are none in range of Dallas, TX yet). There's also an LCROSS Observation Google Group where you can find out more about how to see the event. If all else, fails, you can watch the impact live on NASA TV.

The G-20 protests have generated a lot of geeky news. In additional to the usual tear gas grenades and stun grenades, this year's G-20 protest marked the first public use by the government of a 150 DB sound cannon against civilian protesters. The result was a call for a DIY HERF gun that protesters could use to disable the sound cannons. Next, the FBI arrested Elliot Madison for using twitter to describe police movements during the protests. (the EFF has just obtained the legal documents for the Madison case) Now, we've heard that the CMU Machine Learning Lab has put on their own G-20 protest, demanding attention be given to important AI and robotics issues with such punchy slogans as "free variables", "support vector machines", "repeal power laws", "Baysians against discrimination", "end duality gap", "ban genetic algorithms", and of course, "Map reduce, map reuse, map recycle". Arthur Gretton shot some nice photos of the protest, one of which is included above.

The LinuxDevices blog reported yesterday on a new ARM controller from Phidgets that runs GNU/Linux and is designed with robot applications in mind. Called Phidget SBC, the board is based on the Samsung S3C2410 ARM processor, which uses the ARM 920T core running at 266MHz. You get 64MB of RAM and 64MB of flash, a 10/100 Ethernet port, and (of course, since this if from Phidgets) 4 full-speed USB ports that can be used to connect to the full range of Phidgets. You'll also find 8 digital inputs, 8 digital outputs, 8 analog inputs, a JTAG port, reset button, and some LED on the board. They're taking pre-orders now and expect to start shipping this month. Cost is $265 direct from Phidgets or $244 at Trossen Robotics.

The latest episode of the Robots podcast takes a closer look at the emergence of communication - and how it can be studied using robots. The first part features an interview with Sara Mitri, an interdisciplinary researcher at Switzerland's EPFL and the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Mitri and colleagues have taken an unusual approach to the problem: Using the ground-based S-Bot robots (pictured above) as a model for biological organisms, they used artificial evolution to study complex behaviors like communication. And as the broad media coverage of her recent publications in Current Biology and PNAS show, the advantages of this approach have not gone unnoticed: While retaining many of the real-world complexities present in biological systems, the robotic models allow complete access to all model parameters. And there is another key advantage: Today very little is known about the evolution of phenomena like communication, because they leave no trace in the fossil record. By conducting artificial evolution, this work allowed to reconstruct part of that missing evolutionary history and shed light on the origins of communication in all animals, from simple cells to us humans. In the second part of the podcast, Jürgen Jost, director of the "Complex Structures in Biology and Cognition" group at Leipzig's Max Planck Institute discusses the question of intentionality of robot communication. Tune in!

The US Navy is trying to save some money by making their ships more fuel efficient. Keeping a ship's hull free of barnacles, oysters, algae, and other marine life can decrease fuel consumption by up to 40 percent and increase speed by 10 percent. To do the job of cleaning, or "grooming", a vessel's hull, the Office of Naval Research has developed the Bio-inspired Underwater Grooming (BUG) robot (PDF format). The BUG is an autonomous robot that uses negative pressure vortex regenerative fluid movement (which civilians refer to as "suction") to stick to the hull of a ship. Four wheels drive it forward while sensors including biofilm detectors and flourometers allow it to avoid obstacles and plan paths that will take it toward fouled surfaces. The Navy hopes BUGs will be online by 2015, saving up $500 million in maintenance costs per ship while reducing the Navy's carbon footprint. The robot could also be used on non-military ships and yachts. For more info, see the ONR news release.

This seems to be a week of robot art and music. Alien Globes of Doom, created by Detroit electro-mechanical art collective, Apetechnology, impressed visitors to Strange Beautiful Music III, the third annual New Music Detroit festival at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). The glowing, buzzing globes of doom are robots that interact with the surrounding crowd, bumping into them and responding to touches or shoves to change their direction. See MOCAD's Facebook page for more photos.

Rog-a-matic sent us a link to a Daily Mail article on a "robot" named Joules that rides a bicycle. Joules is actually a humanoid-robot-shaped bicycle motor that can be mounted on the rear seat of a tandem two-seat bicycle, allowing the human occupant on the front seat to get away with just steering. Obviously you could just get a powered bicycle but this is intended more as a robot art project than a practical device. And, as you can see in the above video, it does look pretty cool. Anyone who has built robots can appreciate the work that went into this. Carl, the builder, was challenged by his son, a former pro bicycle racer, to build an electric tandem powered by actually pumping the pedals rather than a direct electric drive. If you're interested in the technical details, check out the builder's original post on the Endless-Sphere Electric Vehicle Technology Forum.

Everyone likes to hear an occasionally song about small blood sucking robots, right? Here's Margot & the Nuclear So and So's with a live performance of Tiny Vampire Robot from their recent show in Bloomington, Indiana. Margot & the Nuclear So and So's is a sort of folk indie band (or "chamber pop" if you go for that sort of thing) from Indianapolis, Indiana. Their name was partially inspired by G.W. Bush's inability to pronounce the word "nuclear" but we don't know who inspired the misplaced apostrophe in their name. If you like it, check out the band's website. You can buy a CD or MP3s of their other albums but this song is destined for a future album, so enjoy the YouTube video or catch them live if your city is on their current tour.

The inbox is still overflowing with robots news, so here's another random news dump, this time entirely from the backlog of the Swirling Brain. We've got a Science Daily story on the possibility of replicating the human brain in some form of machine within 10 years; an engadget story on plasmodium based veggie bots; a Killeen Daily Herald article on the recent Army Robotics Rodeo tests at Fort Hood in Texas; an AirForceTimes story on tube-launched UAVs; a TECH Universe article on parasitic energy stealing robots; an io9 blog on the impact of robots on our economic future; and an IEEE Spectrum article on segmented self-steering airships; a TMCnet.com article on the rise of robotics gaming; a PCWorld story about a LEGO robot that solves Sudoku puzzles; and finally, a truly strange and interesting story about Rohan Jhunjhunwala, who is building robots for elephants at the Oregon Zoo including an apple launching robot to feed them and an elephant piano for the animals to play. Know any other robot news, gossip, or amazing facts we should report? Send 'em our way please. And don't forget to follow us on twitter.