In the latest episode (#108, July 13th, 2012), Robots Podcast talks with Andra Keay, cofounder of Robot Launchpad, a robotics startup accelerator based in Silicon Valley, about recent events, lean startup methodology, funding, and gender. (Her Masters thesis project on “the Naming of Robots” explored how roboticists express identity and gender through their technology.) Calling herself a Robot Startup Evangelist, Andra is passionate about growing robotics, one startup at a time. Supported by key actors in the field including Erin Rapacki and Ryan Calo, Robot Launchpad aims to bridge the software, web and mobile startup worlds of Silicon Valley and San Francisco with the robotics community and the flourishing local maker sphere. She brings us into her world of lean startup methodology, minimum viable products, and tells us about the importance of women in science. Before launching Robot Launchpad, Keay completed her Master of Digital Cultures at the University of Sydney, specializing in Human-Robot Interactions. Passionate about robotics for a long time, she has also been running science and robot workshops for children since 1995, including coaching competition teams in MoonBots, FIRST LEGO League, and RoboCup Junior.

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We're overdue for another roundup of news from the editor's inbox! Reader Bill Rogers sent a link to a recent CNN story on the Uncanny Valley and how the brain copes with conflicting information. Yuval Haimovits let us know about the latest research on thought-controlled robot avatars. Our friends over the plastic pals blog sent links to stories on the newest Chinese humanoid robot, news on the TeenSize-OP robot from Robotis, and a strange toe-tapping robot named Shimi powered by an Android phone (see also our story on Shimi). Long-time reader Guy Posey wrote to let us know about his new e-book titled, ELI-C, a novel with robots, cyborgs, even a "mysterious sorcerer". Check it out! Author Joe Tripician let us know about his new science fiction book, Immortality Wars, which takes on the Singularity along with nanotechnology and mind uploading. 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.

Last Monday (July 2nd), Hizook posted a thoughtful piece, Being Honest in Robot Videos: Motion Capture, Speedup Rates, and Teleoperation, which covers even more ground than its title suggests. The article doesn't take issue with unrealistic portrayals of robots in movies, nor with robots built as art or robot performances. Rather it calls into question what might be termed misrepresentation in videos depicting research robots, due to missing or inadequate notice of certain conditions, resulting in the creation of a false impression regarding the current state of the art and unrealistic expectations for the near future in the minds of the general public, undermining support for needed research on the premise that it's already been done. The article touches on the use of external localization and motion planning systems (as opposed to accomplishing the same feats entirely with on-board sensors and processors), the distinction between teleoperation, scripting, and autonomous operation, time compression (making the robot appear to be moving faster than it really is), and tethering (for physical support, for power, and/or for low-latency, high-bandwidth communications), and suggests some best practices for providing notice of each. The comments which follow the article are also worth reading.

Above, researchers at UPenn and MIT print blood vessels, using sugar. Once the sugar hardens, cells suspended in gel are added. Once the gel solidifies, the sugar is dissolved and removed. After the break, another video shows a process where powdered stainless steel is printed using a binder (weak glue), then infused with bronze.

Would you like to watch Curiosity pile up sand behind its wheels as it struggles up a slope, this video is about as close as you're likely to get, at least until Curiosity actually lands on Mars. For more, check out the JPLnews channel on YouTube.

A two-armed robot, called Mahoro, jointly developed by Japan's National Institute of Advanced Science and Technology (AIST) and Yaskawa Electric Corporation, and marketed by Nikkyo Technos, Co., Ltd., already being used in labs at pharmaceutical companies and universities, is both faster and more precise than veteran laboratory technicians performing the same repetitive tasks. Using the robot to handle hazardous materials also reduces risk to laboratory personnel. DigInfo TV has more detail.

Direct from their website...

To celebrate their 25th year in business the Boca Bearing Company is giving away over $20,000 in cash and prizes as part of their 2012 Boca Bearing Innovation Contest. Winners will be chosen based on a video submission of their innovative mechanical project that utilizes ball bearings, roller bearings, linear bearings or any form of full ceramic or ceramic hybrid bearings anywhere in the application.

One finalist will be chosen by the voting public each month in 2012 to win an iPad2 ($500 value each). The Grand Prize winner and two Runner Ups will be chosen by Boca Bearings from the monthly finalists. The two Runner Up Finalists will each win their own 3D Printer from Makerbot Industries ($2500 value each). The Grand Prize winner will receive a check for $10,000.

The Boca Bearing Company believes in supporting those individuals or companies with a focus on Art, Science, Technology, Engineering & Math. These are the creative people that push the limits of new technology and will be the drivers of our future economy.

The first video in this playlist is a presentation given last year at the announcement of the event. The rest were taken at the event itself, and show the nature of the competition as well as something of the level of sophistication of the competitors.

Professor Mary-Anne Williams came to robotics through RoboCup. Her background began in computer science, from which she moved to AI, with a primary interest in knowledge representation and reasoning, having done some work in belief revision (how to update a knowledge base when you receive new or contradictory information). In 2001, she attended the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), with which RoboCup was co-located, and was captivated by the Sony AIBO (then used as players in RoboCup soccer). She was also impressed with how much progress there'd been since the first RobotCup, a few years earlier. Returning to Australia, she wanted to see her belief revision algorithms running on a robot, thinking they might improve performance. However, the only way to get an AIBO in 2001 was to actually start a soccer team, so that's what she did. That team placed third the following year and won the competition in 2004. Ms. Williams is a Research Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), Australia. She is also Director of the Innovation and Enterprise Research Laboratory (a.k.a. The Magic Lab), which has come under the umbrella of Quantum Computation & Intelligent Systems at UTS. Her work focuses on cognitive models of decision making and behaviour in complex and dynamic environments, including applications in mobile robotics. In this interview, she talks about her work, her involvement with the International Conference in Social Robotics and the PR2 robot.

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SoftWear Automation, the latest in a string of ventures founded by Steve Dickerson - a retired Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Professor Emeritus at Georgia Institute of Technology - and nurtured by Georgia Tech's startup accelerator, the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), has been awarded a contract for $1.25 Million, by DARPA, to develop automated sewing work-cells, that the company hopes will reinvigorate the domestic garment industry and DARPA hopes will shorten the time from requisition to delivery while lowering costs, as well as reducing reliance on foreign suppliers. (The Department of Defense currently spends about $4 Billion per year on uniforms.) Part of that $1.25 Million will go to Georgia Tech, which is expected to provide considerable support for the development of the technology. The idea for SoftWear Automation began when, in 2007, Professor Dickerson was asked to participate in a seminar on the future of robotics. Danger Room provides perspective, and Gizmag has both more detail and a small gallery of conceptual hardware prototypes.

Tovbot's Shimi made its first public appearance two days ago at Google I/O, where not just one but three Shimis performed in perfect coordination. Tovbot was formed earlier this year by a group of robot researchers and entrepreneurs hailing from Georgia Tech, IDC in Israel, and MIT Media Lab. [Their] goal is to foster a new paradigm of personal robots - robots that don't just clean your floors or your pool, but also interact with you on a personal, almost human level. According to a news item on Georgia Tech's website, Shimi, a musical companion developed by Georgia Tech’s Center for Music Technology, recommends songs, dances to the beat and keeps the music pumping based on listener feedback. Automaton has more detail.

This year's Field Robot Event (FRE 2012) began today and runs through Saturday. I will bring together what reports I am able to find once the dust settles, but meanwhile you can view videos from past years' events by entering "Field Robot Event" in YouTube's search field.

This video is a performance piece incorporating a troupe of 16 quadrotors. It's a very nice way to spend a few minutes.

Researchers at the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering have succeeded in making an artificial fingertip outperform humans in identifying a range of textures. That fingertip, the BioTac® from SynTouch LLC, is a molded elastomeric sleeve with a fingerprint-like pattern on the outside and sensors on the inside, filled with a conductive fluid. What the USC researchers have done is to develop algorithms for interpreting the data produced by the fingertip and for optimizing the movement of the robotic arm or hand on which it is mounted to most efficiently produce useful data. Their findings have been published in Frontiers in Neurorobotics. SynTouch LLC, founded in 2008, is a start-up technology business that develops and manufactures tactile sensors for mechatronic systems. BioTac® sensors are available as an evaluation kit, and also as kits for the BarrettHand and the Shadow hand.

This will be the 10th edition of the Field Robot Event. Organized by Fontys University of Applied Sciences and Wageningen UR (University & Research), it will be held in Venlo, The Netherlands, on the grounds of Floriade 2012.

(PDF of slides from above presentation video about the 2012 Field Robot Event)

In this episode Robots Podcast talks with Dario Floreano about his new role as director of the Swiss National Center of Competence for Research (NCCR) in Robotics which brings together leading experts in the field working at Swiss institutions, including EPFL, ETH Zurich, the University of Zurich, and Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA). NCCR Robotics was launched in December 2010 and will run for up to twelve years. The center aims to develop human­-oriented robots that assist people in their daily lives and improve their quality of life. Their research is currently organized into five projects that they hope will result in new design principles, approaches, and technologies required for the conception and design of human-oriented robots, the materials and components they are made of, and the control methods that enable them to interface and operate with humans. Floreano also shares the latest developments from his Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at EPFL, including flying robots that physically interact with their environment (see previous post) and soft “cells” that can assemble in air.

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Researchers at EPFL, in Switzerland, have developed an aerial system which absorbs the energy of low-speed collisions, rights itself, and resumes flying.

Japanese company DOUBLE Research and Development has developed a three-fingered robotic hand using a single pressure sensor and a single actuator. The linkage through which the fingers are attached to their mount automatically equalizes the pressure applied by each.

Researchers at the Exertion Games Lab at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia have created a robot to support you while exercising. Joggobot is a modified version of the popular AR Drone quadrocopter platform developed by French company Parrot. The robot will track a marker pattern printed on your t-shirt and fly ahead of you when you go out for a run. The researchers describe Joggobot as an "exertion game". They believe that jogging is play - we are not jogging to get from A to B, but for the experience of jogging - and point out that jogging with a physical device that reacts to its environment and, similar to a human jogger, has a limited amount of energy for exercise creates a very different interaction experience than pure audio-visual stimuli such as aerobic videos. They hope that the robot can improve the jogging experience and enhance our understanding of why we jog (and hence why we do not jog enough).

Researchers at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University in the U.S. and the Instituto Superiore di Sanitá in Italy have created a robotic zebrafish that can mix with real zebrafish and influence their behavior. The robot visually resembles an actual zebrafish. It is roughly 15 centimetres long and spray-painted with the zebrafish' characteristic blue stripe pattern. To influence fish behavior, the researchers controlled the robot's tail motion to mimic that of real fish. This new research builds on past projects for mixed robot-animal societies which has tackled chickens and cockroaches. Such mixed societies add a powerful new experimental option to the toolbox of behavioral biologists to understand social interactions between animals, which are usually very difficult to understand by observation alone.