Keepon

Keepon is a robot designed for use by therapists to help children with social developmental disorders such as Autism. It is designed to interact with children by maintain eye contact and providing affirmative visual cues such as nodding or dancing. The simple design presents a friendly non-threatening face which helps make the child feel more comfortable.

Compared too many robots these days Keepon is pretty simple. It uses 4 motors located in the base to move and has a microphone in the nose and a camera in each eye. It can automatically follow people gaze and dance to a beat or be controlled remotely by a therapist for more complex interaction.

In case you’re wondering a commercial version of Keepon is going to be available soon at http://wowstuff.co.uk./

NASA’s Six Legged Robot

Athlete is a six wheeled/legged robot being developed by NASA for use on the Moon or Mars. This robot has the ability to move quickly across smooth terrain by rolling or move over rough terrain by walking. It is still sable even if one of the limbs is not on the ground which gives it the ability to operate tools designed to fit in a special attachment on each limb. Athlete is just a prototype in the testing phase but NASA hopes it will be ready for a mission by 2015.

A second generation Athlete prototype was built in 2009 and has the ability to split into two independent 3 limb vehicles. This is a feature which makes loading and unload cargo more simple.

The video is of the original athlete prototype.

The Final Frontier

Space exploration relies heavily on robotics. At this point anything further away than the moon is strictly the domain of the robots and even when that changes the robots will still be a crucial component to the success of manned space exploration.

The Mars Science Laboratory, scheduled to launch in the fall of this year, is a neat example of what robotics can do. The primary goal of this mission is to assess the habitability of the planet. The following video is a cool animation done by NASA that shows the landing procedure along with some of the capabilities of the robot.

I realize this is an extremely brief look at robotics in space but I hope to be able to go more in depth for future posts.

Video Post

YouTube Videos used in this post

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRW7TDUpMqo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G59zTXVHHU&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPTd8XDZOEk&NR=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e82e-3MDkF8

RoboCup

RoboCup is a soccer tournament played by fully autonomous robots. There are several different categories including a humanoid category and tournaments are played in multiple countries all around the world each year. The Robocup first began in the 1990s to help promote research in the field of robotics.

The following video shows some clips from a game between robots in the kid size humanoid category.

This next video is robots in the midsize category (non-humanoid). This one is a little long but you really only need to watch the first few minutes to get the idea.

A more specific long range goal of the project is described on the RoboCup website. It is to have a team of humanoid robots that can defeat the winner of the most recent world cup. As you can see from the videos, technology has a long ways to go before that’s going to happen.

Phantom Traffic Jams

Here’s an interesting phenomenon that robotic cars could help prevent.

You’ve probably all experienced something like this before while driving. Basically you’re driving along on a crowded highway when suddenly traffic slows way down for just a minute or two and then speeds back up again. The video doesn’t go into much detail about how these things form but the basic reason is that most vehicles can slow down faster than they can speed up so if a car slows down just a little then several cars behind it need to slow down before the first car can speed up again. This builds up until cars are momentarily coming to nearly a complete stop and you end up with a mini traffic jam moving backwards along the road.

Robot Platoons

SARTRE- Safe Road Trains for the Environment

SARTRE is a project currently under way in Europe with the goal of developing a system where autonomous vehicles could follow a lead car with a professional driver. The technology itself already exists and works pretty well but the goal of the project is to make the system usable on public roads.

The idea is that there would be a lead vehicle with a professional driver and a string of autonomous vehicles behind which are designed to follow the lead vehicle. The vehicles in the line would be able to wirelessly communicate with each other and have a variety of sensors to maintain the proper distance from the vehicle in front. This formation is referred to in the project as a platoon. If a driver outside of the platoon wanted to join they would simply push a button and relinquish control of their vehicle at which point the car would take over and automatically fall into line. Likewise if a driver needed to exit they would simply press a button, the car would leave the line and the driver would take back control of the vehicle.

This video gives a bit more detailed explanation of the project and demonstrates the technology

There are some significant advantages to this system such as improved gas mileage and the chance for drivers to take a break from driving. However, there are still many social, legal and logistical issues that need to be addressed before something like this would be feasible for public roads.