According to Hizook, DARPA will soon be announcing another Grand Challenge, this one focused on humanoid robots. To win the competition, a robot will have to climb into an open vehicle, drive to a designated building, enter the building using a key, navigate a 100 meter, rubble-strewn hallway, climb a ladder, locate a leaking pipe and stop the leak by closing a nearby valve, and then replace a faulty pump, all semi-autonomously. This challenge will be run for two successive years, as it is not expected any team will be able to build a machine that can accomplish all this the first year. Teams will be divided between hardware and software, and there will be both funded and unpaid teams in both categories, with the potential for unpaid teams doing excellent work to displace funded teams showing less promise. More details to be forthcoming when the formal announcement is made.

GarabatoBOT (in English DoodleBOT) is a little robot that can make simple doodles on a vertical white-board. Its five custom components, a central body, two arms, and two pulleys, are fabricated by deposition, using a MakerBot. (Designs are available from Thingiverse.) Aside from those it consists of two stepper motors, a corresponding power driver, an Arduino Pro Mini microcontroller, and a Bluetooth modem. The pulleys are press-fit on the stepper motor shafts, and are used to reel in/out strings or thin cables which attach to the upper corners of the whiteboard, or at least to points which are widely separated. The DoodleBOT is suspended on those strings/cables and moves about as their lengths are adjusted.

MIT Professor Daniela Rus and her student Kyle Gilpin have co-authored a paper on smart sand, and the robot pebbles they are currently using to develop the concept. They will be presenting this paper at the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), to be held May 14th through 18th in St. Paul, Minnesota. Robot Pebbles are cubes, 12mm on a side, containing rudimentary microprocessors and four electorpermanent magnets each. Through these magnets they are able to communicate and transfer power, as well as using them to bond together. Rus and Gilpin have developed an algorithm that enables a pile of robot pebbles to duplicate the shape of any object placed into it. The copy is made up of robot pebbles, and all the other pebbles in the pile simply fall away when it is removed.

There has been more news than we've had time for lately. The Tek Robotic Mobilization Device (RMD), developed by Turkish R&D company AMS Mekatronic, allows users lacking use of their legs to stand upright, and to move about while in a standing position (via The Verge). Boston Dynamics has recently posted videos (after the break) of their RHex robot, designed to scramble over rough terrain, and their Sand Flea robot, which can jump as high as thirty feet. The Human Centered Robotics Laboratory at UT Austin has posted a video (after the break) of Hume, a bi-pedal robot they've designed in cooperation with Meka Robotics, to achieve the skill of Human Centered Hyper-Agility (HCHA), with particular focus on running. DARPA has posted video (after the break) of their tank-like Robotic Suspension System, which can level out small irregularities in the terrain it crosses, much as the suspension system of the M1 Abrams provides a stable platform for its main gun. The Robotics Suspension System was develop as part of the Maximum Mobility and Manipulation (M3) program. A video from Aalborg University (after the break) shows a time-lapse view of a student of Manufacturing Technology assembling Little Helper++, a single robotic arm mounted on a mobile base.

Google Maps Street View technology being applied to the Amazon river and the communities along its banks.

This TED talk was delivered earlier in March, and posted on the 27th.

In a bit of serendipity worthy of Mary Poppins, the news of Amazon's acquisition of Kiva Systems arrived just in time for Robots Podcast to arrange an interview with one of the cofounders of Kiva Systems, Raffaello D’Andrea, who is also Professor of Dynamic Systems and Control at ETH Zürich. (Professor D'Andrea was previously featured on Robots Podcast in October, 2008.) While the Kiva Systems deal provides the motivation for the current interview, many aspects of his work are mentioned. The breadth of that work is represented by a video which appears on the homepage of his personal website.

Read On or Tune In

In the above video Yale Song, a PhD student in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, explains the project he has undertaken in concert with his advisor, computer science professor Randall Davis, and David Demirdjian, a research scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), to develop a gesture recognition system that, when complete, will allow robotic aircraft to recognize and respond to the hand signals used by carrier crewmen to direct pilots, on deck and at takeoff and landing.

The above video shows CHARLI-2, from Virginia Tech's Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa), reacting to blows from behind, first without then with stabilization.

It's been too long since I've posted a news round up and the editor's mailbox is full! Norri Kageki sent a link to a GetRobo blog post that includes some great video of a tele-operated humanoid boxing robot. Our friends at the new NooTriX blog pointed out a recent post about venture capital and funding initiatives for robot start ups. Speaking of robot funding, the Plasticpals blog says the National Science Foundation has provided a $6M grant that allowed American universities to buy six HUBO 2 humanoid robots from KAIST. And, as the US economy continues to its recovery, Robotics Business Review reports that demand for roboticists grew 44% in Jan 2012. The Swirling Brain spotted a crazy video of a Japanese robot marathon from a year or so back where bipedal robots had to do 422 laps on a 100 meter indoor course. 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.

The F.A.T. Lab and Sy-Lab hackerspaces have combined forces to develop the Free Universal Construction Kit (don't worry, they drop "Free" for the acronym: UCK). The kit consists of 3D printer design files for 80 adapters that provide interconnections and interoperability between ten popular children's construction toys including Lego, Duplo, K'Nex, Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, Zome, and other less well known kits. They even have one adapter brick that has all ten connectors on it! All of the part designs are released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Lots of robot builders use one or more of these construction kits, so I expect these will be a boon to roboticists. The group has anticipated negative reaction from the corporations who control the "intellectual property" (doing the right thing is seldom profitable). So the groups also see this project as a "transgressive architecture" that promotes civic activity.

Most market leaders regard interoperability as an anti-competitive nuisance, a regulatory check on their ambition, or a concession to the whining of lesser players. Quite simply, interoperability is the request of the disenfranchised. And which end-user, in so many ways, is less enfranchised than a preliterate child?

You can download individual adapters from Thingiverse.com. The entire kit of designs is expected to be available via bittorrent from The Pirate Bay's physibles channel soon (which should protect it from any legal threats). Hit the 'read more' link to see videos explaining the problem and UCK as the solution.

Monday afternoon Amazon and Kiva Systems announced that the companies had reached an agreement whereby Amazon will acquire Kiva Systems for approximately $775 Million in cash, with the deal expected to close next quarter. Kiva Systems produces robotic material handling equipment that brings warehouse inventory to the people who fill orders rather than making them walk the warehouse to find it, as depicted in the above video. Amazon's own warehouse operations have been rapidly expanding, and the company is expected to make good use of Kiva's technology in-house, as well as continuing to offer it to others.

DARPA PM Kathleen Fisher talks about the program to make high assurance systems possible, using the hackability of recent automobile automation as an example. More information, including slides, available here.

DARPA Deputy Director Daniel Kaufman discusses the exposure of supposedly secure networks and the Cyber Analytical Framework, which aims to dramatically improve their security. His manner is refreshingly straightforward. The slides for his presentation are here.

While attending SCHUNK Expert Days, the symposium on service robotics, Amanda took advantage of the opportunity to interview Bruno Siciliano, Professor of Control and Robotics, and Director of the PRISMA Lab, in the Department of Computer and Systems Engineering at the University of Naples Federico II, and Rolf Pfiefer Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the Department of Informatics at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.

Read On or Tune In

Microsoft Robotics Studio 4 is no longer beta. The above video shows Follow Me and glimpses of other demo applications created using MSRS4 running on the MSRS Reference Platform.

It's been a while since we've heard from Rodney Brooks, so we were pleased to hear from Robotdalen communications manager, Jessica Karlsson, about a recent keynote presentation he gave at their event.

Robotdalen is a Swedish robotics cluster enabling commercial success of new ideas and research within robotics and automation. On February 9 we arranged the event Robotics Innovation Challenge. One of the key note speakers at the event was Rodney Brooks, one of the world's foremost roboticists and founder of the robot companies iRobot and Heartland Robotics.

It's a short video but packed with good stuff. He discusses why the world needs robots. He offers advice to academics on adapting from expensive, one-off research to the turn-key, mass produced robot technologies that attract venture capital. He suggests robots today are about where the PC was in 1973, right on the verge of taking off. He points out that talking to venture capitalists about "killer apps" when discussing a robot business plan may not be a good idea. He gives a quick overview of the 14 failed business models iRobot went through before it was successful. And he offers the advice that historically in robotics, the intuitive solution is almost always wrong. You can see more video from the conference on the Robotdalen YouTube channel.

This is the first video showing the ‘Cheetah’ robot, created by Boston Dynamics under DARPA’s M3 (maximum mobility and manipulation) program. The robot broke the previous speed record for legged robots by demonstrating its ability to run at a speed of 18mph (~30km/h). The robot uses flexible legs that provide it with the fast reaction time necessary to follow the terrain at such speed and the record-breaking performance was displayed on a treadmill with the robot powered by an external hydraulic pump. The patterns used for its motion are similar to those of fast-running animals in nature. It certainly looks less imposing than the preview released before and although it is inspired by its nature analogs its legs are quite dissimilar in structure. A prosthetic leg also named 'Cheetah' performs under the same principal by flexing and un-flexing its back at every step in order to quickly react to fast running. Athletes are using it with great results. DARPA’s ‘cheetah’ is expecting to run without an external power source later this year. For more information you can read the full press release here.

Keep your cat engaged long after you can no longer lift your arm to aim the laser. CatBot is an automated cat laser toy with an Arduino controller. (via Laughing Squid)

The blog Homo Artificialis has posted a three-part series on the potential for creating artificial bodies into which human minds might be transfered. The series begins with Russian media entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov discussing a stepwise approach, then continues with MIT Professor of Computational Neuroscience, Sebastian Seung talking about his work mapping the neurons in a human brain and the connections between them. Finally, Henry Markram of the Blue Brain Project explains his efforts to create a computer model of the human brain.