Ioannis K. Erripis from the Robots Podcast reports on a new hand developed at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at Germany's Aerospace Centre DLR. It combines accurate object manipulation, robustness and strength in a quite compact and light package. The robotic hand is inspired by the human one although anatomic fidelity isn't the main objective. It can handle small and fragile objects but it is also able to exert forces of 30 newton at the fingertips. It is also able to survive a baseball bat hit (an impact with a 66 g acceleration - see video) while being relatively compact and light. The key of these hands' amazing ability lies in its operating principle and its clever inner workings: The fingers are held and operated by a web of 38 tendons made from a very strong polyethylene fiber. The hand will be a part of a complete two-arm torso and researches are focusing on grasping and manipulations strategies and two-arms coordination. More details on the mechanics after the jump.

RobotGrrl is hosting a live streaming Internet video program at 8pm EST Thursday nights called Robot Party. The 30 minute stream includes cool DiY demonstrations, Robot Roll Call, and the infamous 5 minute hack. RobotGrrl will take your questions and comments afterwards on Freednode IRC channel #FMCG. RobotGrrl tells us the only thing Robot Party lacks is a cohost:

Maybe you can mention that I am looking for a cohost? I think having a cohost would be less boring. The person just has to be available at that time slot- and they have to have Skype :) They should also be enthusiastic about robots!!!

The next episode of Robot Party is coming up Thursday at 8pm EST, so check it out.

John Payne from the Robots Podcast has sent news on a recent video by Daniel Mellinger and Vijay Kumar from UPenn's GRASP Lab. Following a great deal of other work with robotic quadrotor aircraft, their latest video above shows a team of quadrotors cooperating on a construction project. For more information on similar work (including some more complex cooperation tasks with pieces of wood), have a look at a recent Robots Podcast interview with Kumar and Mellinger, at Mellinger's YouTube channel and at work done by my colleagues at the Flying Machine Arena (FMA on YouTube).

Researchers at the Institute of Neuroinformatics in Zurich are using their Silicon Retina (Website down due to disk crash) to perform a balancing trick normally reserved for biological systems. Balancing a pole is one thing, but balancing a tiny pencil is quite another due to the computational speed required, specifically the image processing part. Inspired by the human eye and visual cortex, the team is using a vision system that focuses on individual pixels to produce data quickly that, in turn, controls the motors that moves the base of the pencil. Watch the fascinating video

The creative collectors of interesting lists over at Oobject continue to work their magic. Their lists of the bizarre and funny can easily consume countless hours of an otherwise productive day. Here's a sampling of entries to soothe a typical robot enthusiast's appetite for inspiration and giggles: Wall Climbing Robots, Exoskeletons, Toy Robot Commercials, Cyborg Technologies, B Movie Robots, Robotic Car Garages, Self-Assembling Machines, Sewer Robots, Mechanical Animals, Cardboard Robot Costumes.

Modeled after the Black Ghost Knifefish using computational fluid dynamics simulation, Researchers at Northwestern University are exploring an interesting form of locomotion that could be useful for underwater robotic propulsion. Using precise control of counter-propagating waves along undulating fins just like the fish of the Amazon Basin rivers, the robot can control movement in 3d space.

You may have noticed a new menu item on the site this month: Podcasts. We're going to be working a little more closely with our friends at the Robots Podcast this year to share news back and forth in ways that will benefit our readers as well as their listeners. We've been carrying the release announcements for the podcast for some time but if you still haven't listened to one yet, go check it out right now! In other news, Billy McCafferty let us know about his new blog, SharpRobotica.com, which will focus on the software side of robotics. I also have a couple of Swirling Brain stories that piled up during the holidays: an ubergizmo story on Aldebaran Robotics newer, bigger Romeo humanoid robot; and an io9 story with photos and trailers from Real Steel, a new robot movie. 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.

In its latest episode, the Robots Podcast interviews Joe Jones, co-founder of Harvest Automation, the first employee of iRobot, and inventor of the Roomba (together with another Harvest Automation cofounder, Paul Sandin). Jones shares his deep insight into robotics in both academia and business and explains how his startup is the next logical step after the Roomba - and taps into a potentially huge market for autonomous robots. Read on or tune in!

A series of robotics novelties were showcased at the annual Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas. Among the most remarkable novelties was a new telepresence robot by iRobot called AVA. The working prototype uses Microsoft Kinect-type sensors for safe navigation. It moves using omniwheels and can be controlled using an ipad mounted on its height-adjustable head or by simply pressing touch sensors around its neck. Another interesting robot was demonstrated by CMU's Quality of Life Technology Center. Rather than using a stiff robotic arm, the group showed how an assistance robot can use inherently safe inflatable arms to perform tasks like sponge-bathing a patient (much more QoLT@CES2011 here). Other novelties included Dreambot's Wheeme massage robot, two new Robovie humanoids by Japanese company Vstone, a new Scooba floor-scrubber by iRobot, the relaunch of robot toy dinosaur Pleo by Innvo Labs, the Hom-Bot vacuum cleaner robot LG Electronics, the first US demo of Cyberdyne's HAL exoskeleton, and the smart-phone controlled Sphero robot, essentially a small, remote controlled sphere, shown in the video above.

Are you working on combing 3D sensor technology with the Willow Garage open source Robot Operating System? It's not too late to get in on the Willow Garage ROS 3D contest. Our friends at Willow Garage sent us these details:

December was such a busy month at Willow Garage I didn't get a chance to let you know about the ROS 3D Contest. Willow Garage is offering $8,000 in prizes for participants that combine an RGB-D sensor (e.g. Kinect, PSDK5.0) with ROS to produce something new, interesting, and fun. The contest ends on January 23. The combination of ROS and Kinect has proved very interesting. Kinect news coming out of CES might dominate the headlines for the next week or so, but it's worth thinking about how Kinect is catalyzing the open source world.

Tim also provided some links for more info on the Kinect and ROS and to all the details on the ROS 3D contest. The video above offers some interesting info on integrating ROS and the Kinect from Willow Garage researcher Radu Bogdan Rusu.

If you're a long time reader, you may remember our mention in 2008 of Emanuel Diamant's provocatively titled paper "I'm sorry to say, but your understanding of image processing fundamentals is absolutely wrong" (PDF). Diamant is back with a presentation created for the 3rd Israeli Conference on Robotics, with the equally provocative title: "It's Cognitive Robotics, Stupid" (PDF). In it he laments the lack of agreed upon definitions for words like intelligence, knowledge, and information that are crucial to the development of robotics.

I will argue that this lack of proper definitions is the main reason why the field of research in Artificial Intelligence (and some of its subfields like Cognitive Robotics, e.g.) has been derailed for the last 60 years. <...> There are more than 130 definitions of Data - Information - Knowledge notions. There are more than 75 definitions of Intelligence.

This lack of agreement on what we're all trying to build is something I and others have complained about numerous times over the years. Diamant tries to push things forward with some new definitions that include ideas from Solomonoff, Kolmogorov, and Chaitin dating back to the 1960s. He goes on to show a possible interrelation of physical and semantic information and concludes that semantic information is a mutual agreement between members of a group and cannot be accessible outside of that group. Rather than thinking of robotics as a data-processing computational task, we should be thinking along the lines of incorporating robots into our group of shared semantic information. For more, check out Diamant's other papers on Vision, AI, and robotics.

Need to control some stepper motors? The TI DRV8811 bipolar stepper motor driver is a simple solution but it poses an interesting problem - how do you decide what values to use for the passive components? In a recent blog post Jose Quinones of the Dallas Personal Robotics Group explains the problem:

Selecting these components is not a trivial endeavor. Make them too big and your switching frequency is too slow, with a high pitch squaling noise making your life miserable. Make them too small, and the switching losses increase, removing total power dissipation capability from the H Bridge’s power FETs. We need to match these values as close as possible to the optimal set of parameters in order to maximize our output.

Fortunately, Jose's blog post goes on to provide some helpful notes on selecting the R C values you'll need. He explains in detail how the current regulation engine works and how to compute the TBLANK and ITRIP parameters. He's got plenty of schematics and diagrams too. Jose should know what he's talking about because he's designed a stepper controller based on the DRV8811.

The Robots Podcast has been collecting holiday-season-spirited videos of robots on its YouTube channel. So far seven videos, including the one above, have been added - check them out or mail the Robots team to add your own! Happy Holidays everyone!

In its latest episode, the Robots Podcast interviews science fiction author Greg Bear. Over the years, Bear has been awarded two Hugos and five Nebula awards and has been called the "Best working writer of hard science fiction" by "The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science Fiction". In the interview, Bear discusses how robots can double as mirrors for the human condition and the moral issues of delegating more and more responsibilities to AIs. He then dives into Isaac Asimov’s work, sharing some of his insights after writing a sequel to the Foundation series. For more on Greg Bear, including a short promo clip of his latest book HULL ZERO THREE, read on or directly tune in to the interview.

It's well passed time for us to post our annual countdown of the top 10 Christmas gift ideas for robot geeks. There are still a few shopping days left, so it's not too late to get out there and buy some robot gifts for all your loved ones. All your loved ones are robot geeks, right? No? Well I'm sure some of them are and we're here to tell what sort of cool swag they'd like to find under the Christmas tree this year. As always, the robots.net founding editors, steve, Rog-a-Matic, and The Swirling Brain put their heads together and came up with a list of cool robot gift ideas. Using no particularly empirical method, we determined what the top 10 were and present them below. Read on and have a Merry Robot Christmas!

There's been a lot of activity in robotic music in the last couple of years, perhaps inspired by Pat Metheny's interest in bringing back the collection of robotically actuated instruments known as an Orchestrion. The Trons are a robot band from New Zealand who apply the principle of the orchestrion to their own brand of rock music. Greg Locke wrote to tell us about The Trons:

I run a robot rock band in New Zealand called the Trons. They have been going about 3 years now and have played over 80 live shows, mainly in NZ but also including two trips to Europe. All the songs are original and all instruments are played by the robots. The robots are built mainly from junk and salvaged electronics, with a bit of hi tech stuff to make sure the timing is all OK. They play gigs like normal human bands, usually doing a 30 or 40 minute set. Audiences dance, clap, sit and watch, or sometimes even stage dive.

Hit the read more link to see another video of the group performing Sister Robot, their first hit. The Trons have released an album that's available on itunes or as a CD/DVD. If you want to see more photos of the robot band, check out their flickr photo gallery.

In a time when some schools are trying to encourage science and engineering education, Franklin High School in Portland, OR not only tried to shut down FIRST team 1432 but is keeping their tools, equipment, and $7,500 the students raised for their team. An article in a local paper called The Bee quotes one of the team members:

“We found ourselves standing outside the auto shop waiting to get in on October 21st. Three times previously, Principal Shay James refused to let us have our robot for the OMSI display on October 23. Finally, James allowed us to remove the robot only. All of our computers, parts, and tools are still locked in the auto shop.”

To get an idea of how the school's actions are affecting the team, here's a quote from Team 1432's website:

It appears we will lose $3,540 from Intel and another $3500 from the grant money that came through FIRST – M.J. Murdock, Oregon Community fund. <...> The school seized all of our property – 7 years of gathering tools, equipment, building materials and computers and kept it from us for the last 31 days. We find out on Monday what they will let us have back. This has kept us from doing Girls Generation, Bunny Bots, and a second regional. It has also cost us half of our new members because of the instability and uncertainty.

The school claims none of its 100 staff members are willing to act as "advisor" for the group. The principal declined to be interviewed for The Bee's article and according to Rebecca LohKamp, "In all the years we’ve been there, a Principal has never come to see us". This apparent lack of interest was confirmed by the school's business manager who told the paper that the robotics team would conflict with plans for a more academic, classroom-based, "smaller scale" robotics curriculum.

We'd bet if this were the football team rather than a club that promotes educational activities, the school administration wouldn't have any problem finding the resources to support them. But until Shay James and the other bureaucrats get a clue, might we suggest that local robot clubs around the country get in touch with Team 1432 and ask how they can help out? One thing that might help is if a 501(c)(3) group could become their fiscal sponsor and help them recover some of their funds from the school. And it probably wouldn't hurt to let the Franklin High School staff or the Portland Public School system know what you think.

Update: The latest update on the team's website clears up a few things from The Bee article. They confirm there were at least 5 teachers willing to act as advisor but school staff "talked them out of it". The school now claims it has returned most of the team's money to the donors.

Thanksgiving is the time when all robots give thanks for Black Friday sales on components needed to make more robots. We want to do our part to help you bring more robots into the world, so here's a list of the best places to get your Black Friday robot bargains in 2010. Like last year Pololu is offering some of the best Black Friday deals around:

Starting this Thursday, November 25th, 2010, Pololu is offering huge discounts (up to 60% off) off selected products, including the Pololu 3pi Robot, Maestro Servo Controllers, Simple Motor Controllers, sensors, and more!

Electronic Goldmine is offering $10 off any order of $60 or more if you use coupon code 60NOV2010 during checkout. Tower Hobbies is offering a $30 discount on orders of $199 or more. BGMicro has a whole page of cool, discounted electronics for their Thanksgiving Specials, and don't miss their Virtual Sidewalk Sale. HobbyPartz has a long list of discounts on servos, motors, LiPo gear, and more on their Black Friday Super Special page. If you're up for braving the 3am crowd of frenzied shoppers at the meatspace Black Friday sales, you can pick up a Roomba 400 at Kohl's for $99. And in New York, you'll be able to pick up all sorts of Open Source hardware kits at the new MakerBot Botcave store, which opens for the first time on Nov 26.

Update: Trossen has added a Black Friday Sale. Alex from Trossen Robotics writes, We’ve had our heads buried with developing a new product line and forgot that Black Friday and Cyber Monday is this weekend, lol. We just blogged about a quick sale we put together. Customers get 10% off their entire order by entering “cyber10” in the coupon code section during checkout.

Update 2: While I was home stuffing myself with Turkey and dressing, Barry from Robot Add-ons emailed to let us know you can get 15% off Roomba parts and accessories by using the code "robotnet15off" during checkout at Robot Add-Ons. There's still time left to get some Cyber Monday bargains.

Former Royal Air Force officer Tony Sale built a 6-foot-tall humanoid robot from scraps of a crashed bomber back in 1950. Now, decades later, Mr. Sale has retrieved the walking robot from storage. George, as he is named, was built way before computers were affordable and small enough, so he's remotely controlled. All it took was new batteries and some oil to bring George to life after standing quietly in the garage for 45 years. George the robot has been donated to the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park which he helped found.