Randommization
Meet Flippy, he’s just a robot arm, but this bit of machine represents big change. This creation of Miso Robotics is more than just a novelty made for display. Flippy here has real world skills – and this burger cooking robot is pretty good in a restaurant environment. Miso Robotics describes Flippy as “The world’s first autonomous robotic kitchen assistant”, and the bot seems up for the job.
A few days ago, we saw Boston Dynamics SpotMini robot opening a door. That’s quite a feat for a bot, but what happens when you increase the difficulty for the robot? Here’s the bot trying to open a door, while a man tries to stop it. The robot continues to persevere in its attempt to open the door, even as the human puts several obstructions in its path.
Here’s a cool video of Boston Dynamics SpotMini quadruped robot opening a door for its SpotMini buddy. Opening a door – while quite a simple move for humans, can be quite a feat for robots. Here we see the first SpotMini end up being helpless at the door (no surprise there), until its buddy shows up with an arm-like attachment to open the door. The bot opens the door, uses its foot to keep it ajar, and then pulls it open. Simple, eh? Quite a leap for bots though.
Of all the appliances that have made life easier at home, the task of folding laundry still falls to manual labor. Well, there’s hope on that front now, with good hope that in a few years, you can have a bot to fold laundry. There are a handful of contenders in the field for folding laundry, one of them being FoldiMate. This bot is the size of a European washer and can (optionally) scent and dewrinkle clothes while it folds them.
Can’t seem to learn the right moves for dancing? Fear not, for these robotic socks will be your instructor. The idea behind these socks designed by Pascal Ziegler is to get you started with the moves for the Foxtrot, the Mambo, or the Charleston. The socks are equipped with pressure sensors and vibration motors to guide the feet movement of pair dancers.
The RX1 Behemoth is built to be a mighty warrior. It is based in part on the Spyrius space theme set that LEGO released back in 1994, and it takes some cues from the official 6949 Robo-Guardian set. Except this one is much taller, and for all purposes, stronger than those puny predecessors. It stands at 56 centimeters tall and has a 10-wheel drive. Oh and here’s the good part – builder Spacerunner built this one for play, not just display.
An electric power maintenance company in Xiangyang, China is using drones to burn trash off high-voltage lines. Plastic bags and other debris often gets stuck on the high voltage lines, and it isn’t quite safe to send a human to fix that problem. Enter the fire breathing octocopter that burns the crap out of all that crap. We suspect engineers managing these drones would be quite eager to give a demonstration of their skills, or thoroughly clean every inch of the lines. There are a couple more pics, but unfortunately no video of the drone in action.
Simone Giertz sees herself as a robotics enthusiast, non-engineer and expert in crummy robots. We’ll say she has earned those credentials with the machines she works with. The present scenario is a uArm robot armed with a lipstick.
Millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of civilization has brought humanity at a critical point: the stage of giant robot battles. We’ve been waiting for giant robots to go into an all-out battle for decades now. It seems the battle will happen next year, when the MegaBot Mark II of USA takes on Kuratas from Japan.
Kodomoroid is Japan’s latest newscaster, who is quite different from the hundreds of newscaster the country has seen before her. Kodomoroid is an Android developed under the guidance of Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro. If that name rings a bell, that’s because the Professor has developed some of the most talked about robots in recent years.