I could totally use one of these in the kitchen. Although it appears that the robot's ability to properly cut stuff in equal sizes still requires some improvements, I'm pretty convinced that he still has better developed culinary skills than me. Related article here.
A friend of mine with an awesome taste in both music and visuals just shared this piece of perfection on my Facebook wall. =) The clip totally blew my mind, mainly due to the brilliant effect of the right combination of audio and visuals. The track is called "Fear" by µ-Ziq. I completely love it. This is the fist time I hear the name of this musician, and now I'm surely going to get my hands on his albums.
The video, seems to be a part of the process of building a robot that can simulate emotional responses among other things. I have a feeling that I've come across this team's work before... I have to dig it out of my archives. It's pretty fascinating work.
October 29th is a very special day. It's ASIMO's birthday! Yes, ASIMO turned 10 years old a few days ago! Below is an awesome video by Honda, showing a timeline of the development of ASIMO.
It's hard to believe that ASIMO has been around for 10 years already! In the first 7-8 years, the improvements and new capabilities that were added to ASIMO were rather frequent and pretty impressive. However I'm afraid that I haven't read anything on the ASIMO website in the past couple of years to really WOW me! And now with some serious competitors [like NASA's R2], I think ASIMO has some catching up to do! So happy birthday ASIMO, and whatever you're doing, hurry it up! =P
You can read about ASIMO's birthday here, and here's a story released by Honda about development of ASIMO.
"Dennis Hong, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of Virginia Tech's Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory, or RoMeLa, has created robots with the most unusual shapes and sizes -- from strange multi-legged robots to amoeba-like robots with no legs at all. Now he's unveiling a new robot with a more conventional shape: a full-sized humanoid robot called CHARLI, or Cognitive Humanoid Autonomous Robot with Learning Intelligence. The robot is 5-foot tall (1.52 meter), untethered and autonomous, capable of walking and gesturing. But its biggest innovation is that it does not use rotational joints."
Here's another serious competitor for ASIMO. I just came across this article on IEEE Spectrum and was pretty amazed by how natural some of this robot's moves are. And it actually looks pretty neat too! The wrist + finger movements / control impressed me the most.
Well this is just amazing! The possibilities of what can be done with this type of robot are infinite…
Apparently the blob design is about a year old… they have improved designs now that are a bit different, going towards the ability to include sensors… some are palms sized. This blew my mind….
“We have put together a video of our Milestone 2 run, which we completed this past Monday, June 1, 2009. This particular run had our PR2 alpha robot navigate through eight doors, and plug its power cord into nine outlets. In this video, you can see the various challenges our robot faced, such as a crowded office environment and the abrupt appearance of a human obstacle. We nearly sabotaged the run early on. Folks around the office were eager to track the progress of the robot, so many people ran their own monitoring programs on the PR2. This caused an increase in CPU load, starving the navigation software. Nonetheless, the robot was able to continue with the run, albeit more slowly and cautiously.”
Earlier I had posted a few lines in regards to ASIMO's conduction of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra performing "Impossible Dream". Today I received an email from a good friend of mine notifying me that the video for the performance has just been released and it's currently available on blip.tv. So, here it is, and it's profoundly cute. =D Enjoy!
Well apparently his majesty the royal cuteness Honda's ASIMO robot is planning on mesmerizing the audience by conducting the Detroit Symphony Orchestra performing "Impossible Dream". This is going to be the opening for cellist Yo-Yo Ma's performance. Read the whole story here. Cool ha? =) I have been tracking the improvements and basically the process of "growing up" of this little creature from the start, as he's pretty much the "Dream Come True" of Robotics enthusiasts such as myself. And I even had him as the topic for the papers for a couple of my engineering design related courses. Now I wonder if the videos for this performance are going to show up on YouTube, cause I have to say, I so badly want to see this! =D
Also, look what I just dugg up! The article just amazes me, check it out! :)
"It's a bird. It's a plane. Or it might turn out to be a little like both. Researchers are aiming to find ways to enable aircraft to change shape during flight to improve performance or efficiency. The University of Dayton project is funded by a $580,000 defense contract to further the development of "morphing" aircraft..."
OH....MY...GOODNESS....Just have a look @ this! The cutest little Robot ever! Pretty natural moves too. Very impressive indeed! "We've all been waiting to finally own a True Walking Humanoid Robot, Kyosho of Japan will release MANOI, the "Ready-Made" Robot (that's right; no assembly required) for about $1600. Wait til you see him Stand on One Leg and Do the "Wing Wave".....you'll want one too!!" And yeah, I DO want one too! :P read more | digg story
This weblog is a
collection of my random thoughts. It's as simple as that. What I write here
is for my friends, or anyone else who might find it worth reading. This is
not a tech blog, a science blog, a lyrics blog or...although you might find
either one of those topics in here "randomly". I appreciate comments very much, so
if you have any thoughts about something that you read here please drop me a
line and let me know. So...after all this, welcome to my weblog, thanks for
visiting and enjoy your stay! =)