According to a CMU news release, CMU's Robotics Institute has entered a five year agreement with Anglo American PLC to develop autonomous robots for a variety of mining tasks including mapping and inspection. From the news release:

Automating the most difficult, costly and dangerous mining jobs will improve safety and increase the productivity and efficiency of Anglo American’s operations. Advances in robotics will allow the mining of hard-to-reach ore deposits that cannot be economically extracted under existing methods and mine layouts

Mining is a very dangerous business and seems like an ideal job for robots. The robot pictured above is a multi-purpose mining robot that is being developed at the Robotics Institute NREC facility. More information can be found in the NREC new release. The technology described here is probably descended from the CMU Groundhog mine-mapping robot that we've reported on as far back as 2002.

The annual Cornell Cup USA competition is a general engineering contest sponsored by Intel. But, while it's not a robot competition, many of the entries are robots, such as the University of Pennsylvania HAWK (Helicopter Aircraft Wielding Kinect) UAV, pictured above, one of the 2012 winners. This year is no exception. Cornell announced the 30 teams who will participate in the 2013 event. Among this year's entries are speech recognition systems, STEM robots, a wheelchair mounted robot arm, several elder-care robots, an autonomous ocean search robot, a smart-home project, a brain-interfaced wheelchair, AUVs, UAVs, a robot shopping cart, a robot for firefighters, a black box for humans, a leaf collection robot, an upper-body exoskeleton, and a swarm of robot that will sanitize hospitals with UV light. Cornell is in the process of creating blogs for each of the teams to post status updates. You can find the team descriptions and blog links in the news release.

Skin is the human body's largest sensory organ. Understanding how it works will help roboticists create more useful android skins. We're a step closer to understanding the skin's sensory system thanks to a new report announced by Johns Hopkins researchers. The scientists created detailed maps of the branching patterns of sensory nerves in mouse skin. The resulting maps revealed ten distinct groups that seem to correspond to differences in nerve functions. For example, some nerve types gather information from a single hair follicle while others branch into groups that collect averaged information from 200 or more different locations. From the new release:

Nathans says the images now in hand will help scientists “make more sense” out of known responses to stimulation of the skin. For example, if a single nerve cell is responsible for monitoring a patch of skin a quarter of an inch square, multiple simultaneous points of pressure within that patch will only be perceived by the brain as a single signal. “That is why we can’t read Braille using the skin on our backs: the multiple bumps that make up a Braille symbol are within such a small area that the axon branches can’t distinguish them. By contrast, each sensory axon on the fingertip occupies a much smaller territory and this permits our fingertips to accurately distinguish small objects.

For all the details on the research, including lots of diagrams and images of the nerve networks, see the paper, "Morphological diversity of cutaneous sensory afferents revealed by genetically directed sparse labeling" (PDF format). In a related new release, Johns Hopkins researchers announced the discovery of strong evidence that there are specific nerve cells responsible for itch signals, distinct from nerves involved in pain.

Today's edition of best robot photos of the week just goes to show that humans and robots love to hang out together. Whether it's at dance parties, school, coffee shops, bus stops, or the park; humans and robots can run into each other anywhere and enjoy some much needed digital to analog social interaction. 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! 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!

Several mainstream news items on robots this week including an interesting piece in the New Yorker titled, Why Making Robots Is So Darn Hard. Meanwhile Salon and the New York Times dragged robots into the growing debate of "profits without prosperity" - the recent phenomenon in which big corporations are making more and more profit but without the traditional increase in general prosperity among corporate employees. In the New York Times article, Robots and Robber Barons, economist Paul Krugman cites robots as one of two possible causes for the problem. Salon, in the article, Robots don't destroy jobs by economist William Lazonick, counters that for every human worker a robot replaces, it adds multiple new job opportunities for humans. The Salon article posits the real problem is not robots but corporate abuse of profits, the fault of humans, not machines. Leaving economics behind, The Swirling Brain pointed us to some cool photos and video of a robot ornithoper made from 3D printed parts. And everybody loves a top ten list, right? The Public Library of Science (PLOS) recently posted a list of Ten Simple Rules for the Open Development of Scientific Software. 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 latest release of the popular robot operating system ROS, nicknamed Groovy Galapagos, was released on 31 December. The Groovy release includes a lot of changes to the core infrastructure aimed at making ROS easier to use, more modular, and more scalable. Portability has also been improved with support for most GNU/Linux distros, Android, and even some proprietary operating systems such as Mac OS X and Windows. Developers will also be happy to see that all ROS packages have been consolidated on GitHub:

Traditionally, ROS code has been scattered across numerous version control systems (git, svn, hg, etc) across different hosting services throughout the world. Though the ROS wiki has acted as a central point of documentation, issue/ticket tracking has been just as disparate as the usage of VCS tools. With ROS Groovy, an effort has been made to move core packages to GitHub along with all issue tracking. This has brought several benefits including making ROS more available to the wider open source community and providing VCS consistency for ROS packages. Most importantly, utilizing GitHub has involved the ROS community more and given it more ownership of the codebase. GitHub's pull requests have made it much easier for the core ROS development team to apply patches from the community as well as respond to design feedback more rapidly.

Developers should expect to see a few changes in the build tools as well. Stacks have been removed, rosbuild has been replaced with a new build tool called catkin, the core ROS GUI tools have been replaced by a single tool called rqt, the Wx toolkit has been replaced with Qt. For a full list of changes, see the ROS Groovy Galapagos release notes. ROS is free software released under a variety of licenses that meet the guidelines of the Free Software Foundation and Open Source Initiative. If you'd like it try ROS, you can download the source or pre-packaged binaries for most systems.

The National Geographic Explorers Journal blog brought to our attention the OpenROV Project, which was recently funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised over $100,000 USD. The project was founded by friends Eric and David, who wanted to build an ROV from low-cost off-the-shelf parts. The OpenROV can be used for educational purposes or for actual underwater exploration. The current version of the OpenROV is limited to a depth of 100 meters but the design is open source and you're invited to modify and improve it. In addition to the open source hardware, this little underwater robot relies on open source software running on a GNU/Linux-based embedded processor. There's a USB HD video camera and LED light arrays on board too so you can see where you're going. At present the OpenROV is strictly a DIY project that you build from the designs and source code available on the OpenROV wiki. But kits for about $750 and even fully assembled ROVs should be available soon. Read on to see the original kickstarter video that describes the ROV and a more recent video of the ROV in action

In episode #120, reporter Per speaks with Mel Torrie of Autonomous Solutions, Inc., which he founded in 2000, with encouragement from John Deere, as a spin-off of the Center for Self Organizing and Intelligent Systems (CSOIS) at Utah State University (USU). From agriculture, the company branched out into mining and construction, then survived one lean period because it had also invested in golf course mowing. ASI has also participated in three DARPA challenges, supporting the University of Florida's team for both runnings of the DARPA Grand Challenge, and then as an independent entrant in the DARPA Urban Challenge. ASI has distilled its autonomous vehicle experience into a kit that can be quickly and easily installed in new vehicles, now marketing this kit to automotive manufacturers for use in their internal testing programs, allowing them to push their cars through grueling tests more quickly than human drivers can tolerate.

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Circuit Cellar magazine recently posted in full their two-part article by Tom Kibalo on the construction of his subsumption-based mobile robot, called TOMBOT. Part 1 of the article covers construction of the hardware and Part 2 covers the subsumption software and basic behaviors for obstacle avoidance, collisions, and light tracking. The robot is a differential drive design using continuous-turn RC Servos as motor. It lacks wheel encoders. The robot sports an XBee radio, a PIC32 CPU, and a small LCD display. It's a good basic introduction to behavior-based robots and well worth a read.

Just as researchers today struggle to find working definitions for words like consciousness and intelligence, they struggled to find a standardized meaning for the word information in the early 1900s. Ralph Hartley, a research for Bell Laboratories, first introduced a theory of information based on the idea that information consisted of strings of symbols, a reasonable idea in the age of telegraph, telephones, and radio. Shannon and Weaver moved things along in the 1940s, resulting in Shannon-Weaver Information Theory (SWIT). While Hartley's theory was concerned primarily with sets of symbols, SWIT was concerned with the probability or uncertainty of events (the likelihood a particular structure or sequence of symbols are meaningful). Both theories fall far short of describing what a modern cognitive scientist or AI researcher means when they talk about information. A newer theory was developed in the field of psychological research, Representational Information Theory (RIT). The idea behind RIT is that communication between animals and their environment is mediated by concepts. The only drawback of RIT is that it only supported binary dimensions. RIT looks at information in terms of complexity rather than uncertainty like SWIT. In a new paper published in the journal Information, researchers described a generalized version of RIT, called GRIT that may be useful in the fields of AI and robotics:

"concepts live in the mental space of organisms ranging from aplasia to insects and from dolphins to humans. Some may argue that they also live in the mental spaces of intelligent robots and expert systems. Regardless, the point is that only by using concepts as mediators can information as a measurable quantity reflect human intuitions as to what is informative."

The paper includes a technical appendix with mathematical examples of Generalized Representational Information Theory (GRIT) showing examples such as the one above that includes three dimensions (shape, color, and size). For all the details, read the paper, titled, "Complexity over Uncertainty in Generalized Representational Information Theory (GRIT): A Structure-Sensitive General Theory of Information" (PDF format). The paper was written by Ronalda Vigo of the Center for the Advancement of Cognitive Science, Psychology Department, Ohio University. Hartley's 1928 paper is available online as Transmission of Information (PDF format). Shannon's 1948 paper (on which the later Shannon-Weaver book was based) can be found as "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" (PDF format).

This week's edition of Best Robot Photos of the Week is a special holiday collection of Christmas robots submitted by our readers. We also received one holiday photo made by Hanukkah nanobots. No one posted photos of Kwanzaa bots or Festivus droids this year. Whatever your preferred winter holiday, just remember that Axial Tilt is the reason for the season and enjoy our these photos of holiday robots. Want to see your robot photo here? Post it to flickr and add it to the robots.net flickr group. If you're not a flickr member yet, it's free and easy to sign up. Read on to see the best robot photos of the week!

Yet another brain mapping project has announced some pretty amazing new findings. Researchers at UC Berkeley's Gallant Lab have succeeded in decoding the semantic mapping space in which the brain stores all the information we take in. They've mapped the space both as abstract, multi-dimensional graphics and they've mapped the actual locations where the information nodes are stored in the physical brain. They've learned all sorts of new things about how the brain categorizes things. For example, one semantic dimension (abbreviated PC) of our brain space categorizes things by whether they move - cars, motorcycles, people vs buildings, cities, and the sky. Another dimension distinguishes between things involved in social interaction (people, verbs, furniture) and things involved in less interactive outdoor activities (geological formations, animals, vehicles). They've identified four semantic dimensions so far but believe with higher resolution scans and more work, many more will be revealed.

"Across the cortex, semantic representation is organized along smooth gradients that seem to be distributed systematically. Functional areas defined using classical contrast methods are merely peaks or nodal points within these broad semantic gradients. Furthermore, cortical maps based on the group semantic space are significantly smoother than expected by chance. These results suggest that semantic representation is analogous to retinotopic representation, in which many smooth gradients of visual eccentricity and angle selectivity tile the cortex (Engel, Glover, & Wandell, 1997; Hansen, Kay, & Gallant, 2007). Unlike retinotopy, however, the relevant dimensions of the space underlying semantic representation are not known a priori, and so must be derived empirically"

The mapping of the semantic space onto the brain reveals that as much as 20% of the brain, including parts of the somatosensory and frontal cortices, is devoted to storing these highly organized semantic maps. Less surprisingly, the maps confirm the location of previously established specialized areas. Information about humans, for example, overlaps the fusiform face area (FFA) of the brain which is known to be involved in face recognition. For more see the paper "A continuous semantic space describes the representation of thousands of object and action categories across the human brain" (PDF format). The paper will be in Neuron Vol 76, Iss 6. If you're using a browser such as Google's Chrome that supports WebGL graphics, you can explore an interactive version of the researcher's semantic brain map. And read on to see examples of the semantic space mapped onto the physical brain as well as a short video describing the research.

For the past two weeks the Boston Dynamics LS3 (Legged Squad Support System) robot has been undergoing field tests in the woods of central Virginia with personnel from the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab. DARPA issued a news release with video of LS3 following a marine through real world terrain and responding to voice commands. The four legged robot is designed to carry up to 400 lbs of gear anywhere a squad can go. The robot is semi-autonomous and designed to look out for itself and while keeping up with the marines. The tests seem to have positive results, Lt. Col. Joseph Hitt of DARPA reports:

"This was the first time DARPA and MCWL were able to get LS3 out on the testing grounds together to simulate military-relevant training conditions. The robot’s performance in the field expanded on our expectations, demonstrating, for example, how voice commands and 'follow the leader' capability would enhance the robot’s ability to interact with warfighters. We were able to put the robot through difficult natural terrain and test its ability to right itself with minimal interaction from humans.”

Read on to see the video, which includes shots of the robot following a soldier through the woods and being intentionally forced into situations where it will stumble. At times the robot has to run to keep up, while climbing hills, slogging through mud, and following a soldier through a maze of shipping containers.

Berkeley Lab reports the creation of a powerful microscale actuator that can deliver three orders of magnitude greater force per weight than human muscles. The tiny actuators are only about 100 microns in size and made from vanadium dioxide. They could potentially replace less-powerful piezoelectric actuators, which are complicated to make and require toxic materials. From the abstract of the researcher's report:

Here we demonstrate a set of microactuators fabricated by a simple microfabrication process, showing simultaneously high performance by these metrics, operated on the structural phase transition in vanadium dioxide responding to diverse stimuli of heat, electric current, and light. In both ambient and aqueous conditions, the actuators bend with exceedingly high displacement-to-length ratios up to 1 in the sub-100 μm length scale, work densities over 0.63 J/cm3, and at frequencies up to 6 kHz. The functionalities of actuation can be further enriched with integrated designs of planar as well as three-dimensional geometries. Combining the superior performance, high durability, diversity in responsive stimuli, versatile working environments, and microscale manufacturability, these actuators offer potential applications in microelectromechanical systems, microfluidics, robotics, drug delivery, and artificial muscles.

More details can be found in the paper, Giant-Amplitude, High-Work Density Microactuators with Phase Transition Activated Nanolayer Bimorphs (PDF format) and the Physical Review Letters report, "Decoupling of Structural and Electronic Phase Transition in VO₂" (PDF format). Additional information can be found on the Berkeley Lab's Wu Group webpage. To see some cool video of the microactuators actuating, read on.

Jan Scheuermann was diagnosed with spinocerebellar degeneration in 1996. As the connection between her brain and muscles degenerated, she lost any ability to move. In 2011 she saw a video of a UPMC research study that interfaced a robot arm to the brain of Tim Hemmes, another quadriplegic. She called immediately and said, "sign me up!" On Monday, UPMC issued a news release with her results.

Before three months had passed, she also could flex the wrist back and forth, move it from side to side and rotate it clockwise and counter-clockwise, as well as grip objects, adding up to what scientists call 7D control. In a study task called the Action Research Arm Test, Ms. Scheuermann guided the arm from a position four inches above a table to pick up blocks and tubes of different sizes, a ball and a stone and put them down on a nearby tray. She also picked up cones from one base to restack them on another a foot away, another task requiring grasping, transporting and positioning of objects with precision.

Two 96 channel intracortical microelectrodes were implanted to provide the brain-computer interface with the 7 DoF robot arm. More technical details can found in the paper, "High performance neuroprosthetic control by an individual with tetraplegia" (pay-walled) and in the NIH Study description. See also the UPMC photo gallery. Jan herself was less interested in the technical details than in the pleasure of being able to move a limb for the first time in eight years. And she had a goal in mind. "I’m going to feed myself chocolate before this is over," she said when the study started. Read on to see the video of her eating chocolate.

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 several well-known robots such as the Asimo, iCub, Nao and even a miraculous appearance of Crow T Robot. There's a blurrycam photo of a mysterious legged planetary robot prototype. Plus a few art robots too! 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!

In Robots Podcast episode 119, reporter Per talks with Ian Bernstein about the hugely successful Sphero robot and the company he co-founded, Orbotix. A hardware tinkerer from a young age, Bernstein became involved with BEAM Robot Games. First attending New Mexico Tech then Colorado State University, he decided to start his own company after the options available at a career fair all bored him. In 2010, realizing the technology in smart phones far surpassed that being used in most consumer robots and wondering why those phones couldn't be used to control robots, he and cofounder Adam Wilson participated in an intensive, three-month program sponsored by startup accelerator TechStars, which helped them define and design their product, and helped them establish contacts through which they were able to find funding and a production facility they could work with. Sphero, the result of this process, is not just a product by a platform with its own growing ecosystem.

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First up this week, Pololu Robotics is having another sale, this one in honor of 12/12/12 and running through the end of the month. Lots of cool bargains from 12% to 50% off, so check it out! Casey let us know about his ATOMS Express Toys kickstarter campaign, a set of modular robotics actuators and sensors for LEGOs. Even cooler is an IndieGogo campaign for a palm-sized UAV based on a dragonfly and developed by robotics researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In less fun robot news, NYU student Josh Begley is tweeting every US Drone strike since 2002 and observers have noticed a distriburbing trend toward "double tap" strikes - that's a second strike on the same target shortly after the first to kill emergency responders. This is usually considered a war crime or terrorist act. After last month's story on the Human Rights Watch group's concern about autonomous killer robots, the DoD issued a new directive that says any autonomous robots "shall be designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force" but denied any connection to the HRW report. Back to fun stuff, The Swirling Brain tipped us off to a Gizmodo story with video showing a "phallic UAV get all grabby with its scary six-foot arm". He also sent stories on a creepy Biomimetic robot with muscles and bones. 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.

MIT posted an article on the MIT Marine Robotic Team which serves as a good introduction to the group if you're not familiar with them. The team works on gliders, rafts, ROVs, AUVs, and other marine robots. The group is introducing future engineers to marine engineering and collaborates with other MIT groups such as the Society for Women Engineers and Keys to Empowerment Youth. A recent project allowed them to travel to Ketchikan, Alaska:

During their time in Alaska, the team also worked with middle school students and teachers by helping with a program called SeaGlide. The goal of SeaGlide is to introduce students to underwater vehicles and teach them how to create mini-gliders using water bottles and an arduino.

The article details the experiences of Jackie Sly, Adrian Tanner, and other team members as they focus on developing autonomous glider robots that will be used to detect oil plumes and ocean currents. For more details see the MIT article about the team.

There's a new Robot iPad app out for robot fans. It was designed by the folks at IEEE Spectrum magazine and should appeal to anyone who's interested in robots. It's got lots of photos and video of cool robots that even kids will enjoy watching. There are also interviews with well-known roboticists that older, geekier iPad users may enjoy. Erico Guizzo, the robotics editor of IEEE Spectrum magazine writes:

I've been following your stories on robots.net for a long time, even before I started writing about robots at IEEE! Just wanted to let you know about an iPad app we're launching today, featuring 126 robots from 19 countries, with 360-degree views, interactive animations, hundreds of photos and videos, and more.

Rodney Brooks also gives the app his seal approval, saying it's a "state-of-the-art app with an incredible collection of robots including many of my old, dear friends". You can't beat that recommendation. It's almost enough to make me want to buy an Apple product. Ha, just kidding! Maybe an Android version is in the works? You can grab the Robots app from itunes for just $1.99 right now if you want to try it out. Read on to see some video of the Robots app in action.