Every week we post a collection of the best robot photos submitted by our readers to our robots.net flickr group. Why? Because everyone likes to see cool new robots! This week's collection includes, coincidentally, several alcohol related robots. There's a drunk graffiti robot, a Taiwan Beer display robot, even a collection of flasks bearing robot artwork. There's also the usual assortment of walking, flying, and rolling robots, both real and artistic. Want to see your robot here? Post it to flickr and add it to the robots.net flickr group. It's easy! If you're not already a flickr member, it's free and easy to sign up. Read on to see the best robot photos of the week!

Bernard Froment sent us info about MOSAIC, his collaborative open hardware project to develop service robots. Speaking of service robots, Shannon let us know that the 2013 International Robotics Summit (Innorobo) for service robotics is coming up March 19-21 in Lyon, France. We noticed a tutorial on PID control for robots using an Arduino (it looks to be in Portuguese but that's what Google translate is for). The Open Hardware news site, FreeIO.org mentioned an interesting interview with Catarina Mota. Roboter Soong told us about the company he co-founded, Makeblock, which makes components for robot construction. Remember those killer robots we were talking about earlier this week? One of the X-47B prototypes was hoisted onto a Navy aircraft carrier for its first carrier take off and landing trials. NASA, meanwhile, has been busy reconsidering the advantages of analog vs digital electronics and produced an analog microchip that can perform Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) calculations super fast using only a few transistors where the equivalent digital circuit would require thousands; this could revolutionize onboard processing for space probes. The Swirling Brain sent a link to Toshiba's newest robot, which is designed to enter radioactive nuclear power plants that are too hot for humans. Know any other robot news, gossip, or amazing facts we should report? Send 'em our way please. Don't forget to follow us on twitter and Facebook. And now you can add us to your Google+ circles too.

The Illinois Institute of Technology's Robotics Lab is working on an interesting variation of the popular quadrotor flying robot. They've added a rolling cage that allows the robot to roll along the ground as well as fly. Why would you want to do that? Because rolling requires a lot less power than flying. From the researchers:

Experimental results show that the hybrid robot can travel a distance 4 times greater and operate almost 6 times longer than an aerial only system. It also solves one of the most challenging problems in terrestrial robot design — obstacle avoidance. When an obstacle is encountered, the system simply flies over it.

The research on this project is being done by Arash Kalantari and Matthew Spenko of IIT. The lab is also working other interesting projects including perched landing of micro air-vehicles, agile non-holonomic robots, and omnidirectional rough terrain robots. See the Robotics Lab research projects page to read more about out their other robots. Read on to see video of the HyTAQ robot rolling and flying.

One of the problems with the artificial muscles commonly used in robots is their poor performance compared to biological muscles. This is an important reason why they generally have not found favor as a replacement for conventional motors. A new artificial muscle developed at the University of Texas at Dallas Nanotech Institute may change that. Researchers there, led by Ray Baughman, are working on muscles made from carbon nanotubes, twisted into yarn and filled with paraffin wax. The resulting muscles can lift 100,000 times their own weight and generate 85 time the mechanical power of natural, biological muscles. According to Baughman,

"Because of their simplicity and high performance, these yarn muscles could be used for such diverse applications as robots, catheters for minimally invasive surgery, micromotors, mixers for microfluidic circuits, tunable optical systems, microvalves, positioners and even toys."

The coiled nature of the yarn provides two additional applications. First it can twist and untwist at up to 11,500 RPM, allowing it be used in much the same way as the rubber band that powers a model airplane. Second, the yarn can be sewn into fabrics which then have macro-level properties that can change in the presence of certain chemicals, lighting conditions, or temperature levels. A paper on the latest development appeared in the 16 Nov issue of Science. Unfortunately Science is a pay-walled journal so it's not generally available yet. You can, however, read other related papers on the Nanotech Institute's publications page. You can also get a little more info from the recent UTD news release. Read on to see video of the super-muscles lifting weights and doing other cool things.

A recently published paper, titled Network Cosmology (PDF format) has demonstrated remarkable similarities in the structure and dynamics of several large scale networks that you may have heard of: the human brain, The Internet, and universe. The paper is by six researchers including Dmitri Krioukov, perhaps best known as the scientist whose four page physics paper titled "Proof of Innocence" (PDF format) was presented to the judge in court, saving Dmitri from a $300 traffic ticket. Having avoided his traffic fine, Dmitri and friends went on to demonstrate that many complex networks from the brain to the entire universe seems to be governed by similar underlying laws. To do this, they looked at the math of causal sets a representation of the quantum gravity that underlies spacetime. From the paper:

"We show that the structure of these networks in de Sitter spacetime, such as our accelerating universe, is remarkably similar to the structure of complex networks -- the brain or the Internet, for example. [...] We show that as a consequence of a simple geometric duality, the growth dynamics of complex networks and de Sitter causal sets are asymptotically identical. These findings suggest that unexpectedly similar mechanisms may shape the large-scale structure and dynamics of complex systems as different as the brain, the Internet, and the universe."

According to the researchers, the probability of the equivalence between all these complex networks being pure coincidence is very low, so there's almost certainly some fundamental law at work. It would be very interesting to identify and understand a new law of physics that affects the emergence of four-dimensional space from the quantum vacuum, the development of our brains, and the dynamics of our social network of friends. The paper contains lots of math, so we recommend against reading it while you're driving.

Every week we post a collection of the best robot photos submitted by our readers to our robots.net flickr group. Why? Because everyone likes to see cool new robots! This week's collection includes a law enforcement robot from Knoxville, a variety of robot art, some robot toys, hobby robots, and even a cat that likes robots. If you'd like to submit your robot photos, join the robots.net flickr group. If you're not already a flickr member, it's free and easy to sign up. Read on to see the best robot photos of the week!

The USC Robotics Research Lab recently posted a journal paper online that appeared in the August 2012 issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE, titled Using Socially Assistive Human-Robot Interaction to Motivate Physical Exercise for Older Adults (PDF format). That title may give you visions of Bender chasing elderly people around the room with a deadly weapon; or perhaps Pusher and Shover robots. But what authors Juan Fasola and Maja j. Matarić are talking about is nothing like that. From the paper:

"This paper focuses on the design methodology, implementation details, and user study evaluations of a SAR system that aims to motivate and engage elderly users in physical exercise as well as social interaction to help address the physical and cognitive healthcare needs of the growing elderly population. SAR systems equipped with such motivational, social, and therapeutic capabilities have the potential to facilitate elderly individuals to live independently in their own homes, to enhance their quality of life, and to improve their overall health."

The robot, named Bandit, is a biomimetic anthropomorphic robot, which in this case means a vaguely humanoid torso mounted on a wheeled platfrom. The robot attempts to engage the elderly person in a variety of games, some of which involve making arm gestures and asking the human to imitate them. The robot observes and offers advice as they attempt to repeat the exercise. Studies of interactions with elderly volunteers seems to support the idea that the robot can succeed at motivating exercise in way humans find enjoyable. You can learn more about the project on the UCS Interaction Lab Robot Exercise System webpage. Read on to see photos and video of Bandit in action.

We've posted more stories on robot ethics over the years than I can count. The general public and lawmakers still seem ignorant of the issues and even many roboticists still seem unclear on the import of autonomous robots that can make the decision of when to kill and who to kill without a human in the loop at all. But each day we come closer to having fully autonomous war robots. Some researchers, like Ronald Arkin, believe we can create robots that fight only for us and kill only in an ethical fashion. Other researchers, like Noel Sharkey, have warned that we shouldn't build autonomous weapons and that, if we do, they will eventually be copied and turned on us as well. A good comparison of Arkin's and Sharkey's views can be found in Part 1 and Part 2 of the Robots podcast on Robot Ethics. The latest development in this area is the publication of a 50-page report by Human Rights Watch called Losing Humanity: The Case against Killer Robots (PDF format). From the report:

Based on the threats fully autonomous weapons would pose to civilians, Human Rights Watch and IHRC make the following recommendations, which are expanded on at the end of this report:

• Prohibit the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons through an international legally binding instrument.
• Adopt national laws and policies to prohibit the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons.
• Commence reviews of technologies and components that could lead to fully autonomous weapons. These reviews should take place at the very beginning of the development process and continue throughout the development and testing phases.

Noel Sharkey was a technical reviewer on their report and provided input. Even if it's too late to stop the development of fully autonomous robots or Apocalyptic AI, it's well worth reading this report, which covers a lot of interesting points. If not an outright ban, it's likely we'll at least seen changes to existing laws as well as new ethics requirements researchers. While we have yet to reach the point of fully autonomous killer robots, several robots are quite close, such as the Northrop Grumman X-47B, pictured above, and the Samsung semi-autonomous Techwin SGR-A1 border guard which can fire on and kill humans. If you're not up for reading the full report, read on to see the short video released by the Human Rights Initiative to summarize the content.
CC licensed image of X47B from flickr user US DoD

It's almost time once again for Black Friday, the annual, post-Thanksgiving chaos of consumerism in the United States. As long as it's happening, we might as well point out a few bargains that will be of interest to robot builders. Pololu's Black Friday sale begins at midnight on Thursday. Exact details are still under wraps but based on previous years, it will be well worth checking out. Rick Stiles of Trossen Robotics let us in on the details of their sale:

We'll be running 2 promotions from Black Friday through Cyber Monday. The coupon code "Cyber2012" will be a 20% discount on the following products: the PhantomX Reactor Robot Arm Kit, PhantomX Pincher Robot Arm Kit, PhantomX AX-12 Quadruped Comprehensive Kit, PhantomX AX Hexapod Comprehensive Kit, and the ArbotiX Commander v2.0. The same coupon code is also good for 10% off anything else in the store.

Mail order surplus electronic company Electronic Goldmine has Black Friday specials planned but hasn't announced them yet. They have an email sign up for those who want an early warning. BG Micro has some specials, more specials, and a "virtual sidewalk sale" going on. SparkFun is skipping Black Friday but taking part in Cyber Monday with an offer of free shipping on all orders. American Science and Surplus has some typically bizarre items on sale. And it's usually worth checking Amazon for Roombas, or other home robots or robot toys and maybe at Harbor Freight's Black Friday sale for tools. If you hear about any others, let us know and we'll update this posting.

Dr. Chris Chesher is a senior lecturer in Digital Cultures, and is currently conducting research into the cultures of contemporary robotics, in association with the Centre for Social Robotics at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics. His research investigates how various technologies become historically woven through social structures and cultural practices. He brings a new and interesting perspective as his approach mixes science and technology studies, media studies and ethnography in an effort to understand robotic technologies and everyday-life.

Read On | Tune In

This is the first of a new weekly feature on robots.net. Every week we'll post a collection of the best robot photos submitted by you to our robots.net flickr group. Why? Because everyone likes to see cool robots! This week's collection includes a little of everything to give you and idea of the sort of photos we'd like to see. Photos of real robots, robot competitions, robot being used in research and STEM education projects. But we'd also like to see robot art of all kinds, movie robot replica projects, vintage toy robots, pretty much anything related to robots. If you'd like to submit your robot photo for next week's collection, join our flickr group. If you're not already a flickr member, it's free and easy to sign up. Read on to see the best robot photos of the week!

This week's dump of stories from the editor's in-box include an NFS news release about robobees, a story of NASA engineers building a fuel-cell powered UAV in their spare time to do wildlife surveillance and other ecological missions. A review of Thomas Nagel's new book on consciousness. We've also got a story about a US DOE initiative to develop a simple programming language for biology lab robots, called PaR-PaR. Reader Kra5h sent a link to his instructable on hacking the Snap Circuits Rover. FIRST robotics Team 3940 has created an Indiegogo campaign to fund AutiBot, a robot they're developing to help Autistic children. The FreeIO.org site is looking for suggestions of good electronics and embedded design books to recommend in their resources section and they've also put up a poll asking what open hardware project you'd like see them work on next. Lastly, Robots.net has started a new flickr group where you can post photos of your latest robot project. We'll be picking some weekly favorites from the group to post about here. Know any other robot news, gossip, or amazing facts we should report? Send 'em our way please. Don't forget to follow us on twitter and Facebook. And now you can add us to your Google+ circles too.

Engineers love to do crazy things and when they involve robots, we love to tell you about them. We've reported on a lot of ping-pong playing robots over the years but usually they're based on conventional industrial robot arms or humanoid arm designs. What if, instead of a multi-jointed arm, you wanted to design a cartesian ping-pong playing robot? That is, a robot that can only move linearly on an X, Y, and Z axis. That's the question Hossein Jahandideh and his fellow engineers asked themselves. And to make things more interesting, they used a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm to plan for the approach of the incoming ping-pong balls. The result is the paper, "Ball Striking Algorithm for a 3 DOF Ping-Pong Playing Robot Based on Particle Swarm Optimziation" (PDF format). From the paper:

"It has been shown that a robot as simple and low cost as a Cartesian robot holding a standard racket can be programmed to play ping-pong against a human player. A PSO-based algorithm was proposed to determine when and how to hit the ball. This algorithm, aside from having a near perfect success rate at throwing the ball to a specified target, can also be adjusted to follow various strategies, such as the ball reaching the target with maximum speed, or with maximum spin, etc."

The paper covers all the math developed to build and test a simulation of the cartesian ping-pong playing robot. The construction of an actual robot is still in the planning stages. We look forward to seeing video of their results. The authors note that the algorithms developed in the paper should be applicable to conventional, non-cartesian robots as well.

According to a University of Maryland news release the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a $2 million grant to UMD and UMB to further their development of a tiny surgical robot that would assist neurosurgeons in the removal of hard to reach brain tumors. The robot is known as the Minimally Invasive Neurosurgical Intracranial Robot (MINIR) and has been under development at the Robotics Automation & Medical System Laboratory for a number of years. The MINIR Prototype has been tested while under continuous magnetic resonance imaging. The grant will allow the development of a second-generation prototype, MINIR-II. From the MINIR website:

"We envision MINIR to be under the direct control of a human operator, with targeting information obtained exclusively from frequently-updated MRI. MINIR will be fully MRI compatible, so that frequently-updated MRI can be used to provide virtual visualization of the target by the human operator as the target's 3-dimensional shape changes during tumor removal."

As seen in the rendering above, the MINIR robot will fit inside the MRI scanner with the patient, allowing surgery to be done while the patient remains in the MRI machine. For all the details, you can check out the paper, "Toward a Meso-Scale SMA-Actuated MRI-Compatible Neurosurgical Robot" (PDF format). Other papers about the MINIR robot may be found on the MINIR project webpage. Read on to see photos and video of the earliest MINIR prototype in action.

Move over, Raspberry Pi, there's another open hardware single board computer (SBC) out to win your hearts and minds. The weirdly named Olimex OLinuXino is making the news today on PCWorld, Slashdot, and FreeIO. The OLinuXino sounds like it might be Xenu's computer of choice. But in reality, it's a Nano-ITX with a 1 GHz ARM A13 Cortex A8 CPU with 3D Mali400 GPU. No word yet on whether there's source for the Mali400 GPU driver but a free software driver project called Lima exists. The board has 512MB of RAM, VGA out, SD slot, USB, audio in/out, a Real time clock, a UEXT connector that supports modules with Zigbee and bluetooth. It also has some GPIO pins, 3 I2C, 2 UARTs. Like many ARM SBCs, it lacks any A/D or D/A, which may be problematic for robotics users. But with the addition of an Arduino to handle I/O, this might make an interesting robotics controller. The board can run a variety of GNU/Linux distros like debian and can also run the Linux-based Android distro used on most mobile devices. Cost for all this open hardware goodness? About $57 USD.

A DARPA program is developing autonomous underwater robots that will stalk submarines and continuously report their location and movements. In particular, these robots will look for the quiet diesel submarines that are becoming more common and perceived as a threat to both military and civilian maritime activity. Russian and France are selling these inexpensive ($200-$300 million) submarines like crazy to anyone who wants them and at least 40 nations now own and operate them including tiny countries like Venezuela. From DARPA's news release, program manager Scott Littlefield says:

“Key features and technology for the vessel include advanced software, robust autonomy for safe operations in accordance with maritime laws, and innovative sensors to continuously track the quietest of submarine targets. Our goal is to transition an operational game-changer to the Navy. This should create an asymmetry to our advantage, negating a challenging submarine threat at one-tenth their cost of building subs."

DAPRA calls the robots Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessels (ACTUV). In August DARPA awarded a $58 million, 3 year contract to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). Yesterday, CMU NREC announced they'd been selected as part of a team assembled by SAIC to build and test the ACTUV robot.

An interesting 2009 paper by Ronaldo Vigo and Colin Allen has been released online, titled How to reason without words: inference as categorization (PDF format). The paper takes on the common idea that reasoning is a singularly human activity that relies on our language-based conception of inference. The alternative model of reasoning presented in the paper could apply to nonhuman animals as well as to robots. From the introduction:

We describe an alternative framework that is capable of providing a unified approach to reasoning and the subsymbolic perceptual processes underlying similarity assessment, discrimination, and categorization. The framework is provided by the modal similarity theory (MST) of Vigo (2008), which we describe in ‘‘Modal similarity theory’’.

The paper looks at similarities and differences between the reasoning abilities of animals such as dogs and young human children. It then attempt to build a plausible case for how inference could be accomplished without language. An experiment involving similarity assessment of iconic images is described. A connection is drawn between similarity assessment and boolean operators. Finally they propose that reasoning is based on more fundamental, non-linguistic processes that include discrimination, categorization, and similarity assessment.

Purdue University received a $6 million grant to develop an autonomous agricultural robot capable of pruning grape vineyards and apple orchards. Let's hope the Purdue robot puts up a fence around the orchard to keep out the Robo-squirrels being developed at the University of California. UC is also advancing the state of the art in split-brain research. Other brain research this week includes an MIT study of what actually happens when the brain passes from consciousness to unconsciousness. A better understanding of the human brain may help researchers finally get artificial intelligence right - Noam Chomsky says they've been getting it wrong all this time. Poly Bug sent us a link to CIROS, a Korean humanoid robot who slices cucumbers and tosses salads. Franke Tobe of the Robot Report let us know about a new article he's posted about Eldercare Robots. And The Swirling Brain spotted an article describing a new method proposed by physicists that may finally settle the question of whether or not our reality is just a computer simulation. Know any other robot news, gossip, or amazing facts we should report? Send 'em our way please. Don't forget to follow us on twitter and Facebook. And now you can add us to your Google+ circles too.

Long-time readers will remember in the early 2000s we had frequent stories of open hardware board designs from a website called FreeIO.org. The FreeIO.org project was started by Diehl Martin, better known as Marty. He named all his boards after breakfast foods, which gave us the opportunity to write fun headlines like "Hot Grits for your Robot". Other boards were called Donut, Toast, Cornbread, Biscuit, Juice, and Flapjack. Schematics, CPLD source, CAD files, Gerber files, were all released under the GNU GPL. Marty's designs were also raised as an example when Jim Turley wrote his famously wrong prediction in 2002 that open source hardware would never become widespread. But in 2004, things slowed down when Marty announced he'd been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He continued to work on new boards until he posted his farewell message in 2006. Marty passed away in October of 2007. After that, the FreeIO.org project ground to a halt for a few years. But today, the FreeIO.org website was relaunched! From the announcement:

"The time has come to get things rolling again and I’m starting with a relaunch of the website. Marty’s free hardware designs are still here and hopefully we’ll find volunteers to work on new hardware projects to add. I’ll also start updating the resource pages to make them more useful again. Meanwhile, I’ve decided to make the site more immediately useful by aggregating all the free hardware and open hardware news, so members of the open hardware community can have one central place to find out what’s going on."

We're not sure where the website is headed in the future but we're glad to see FreeIO.org back online and look forward to using them as a reliable open hardware news source. They're already posting news updates from the major open hardware and free hardware organizations such as the Open Source Hardware User Group, the Open Source Hardware Association, and the Open Source Hardware and Design Alliance. Who knows, if we're lucky, maybe we can drum up support for an open source robot controller board!

The 2013 Robotdalen Innovation Award Competition is now open for nominations. Do you have a robot that's innovative and has commercial potential? Does it have a sound theoretical foundation that has been translated into reality? Does it benefit the environment and society? If so, head on over to the Robotdalen award criteria and application page and fill out the form. If you win, you'll receive "hands-on help from the Swedish robotics initiative, Robotdalen, to further develop and commercialize [your] innovative robotics solutions". This is an international competition open to entrepreneurs, researchers, inventors, start-ups, robot developers, even students. Oh, and did we mention the winner also gets a €6,000 cash prize? You've got until January 13 to submit your application. Pictured above are the 2012 award winners. Photo by Terése Andersson. Read on to see videos of the 2012 event and the call for entries in 2013.