Robots with real muscles
A robotic fish powered by real muscles could boost artifical limbs
When Hugh Herr put his robotic fish into its tank, it swam off looking surprisingly lifelike. But a few minutes later, it was flagging-and eventually came to a complete stop. It wasn’t faulty: it just needed a break. The reason? Herr’s robot is the first one to be powered by real muscles.
Researchers have known for centuries that they can make muscles contract in the lab: in 1786, Luigi Galvani discovered that electricity made a dissected frog’s leg twitch. But until now, no one has ever tried to harness the phenomenon to power a machine.
So Herr and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Biomechatronics group built themselves a robotic fish. Inside it, a microprocessor sends electric signals to frog muscles on either side of the fish, making them contract. Tendons on the muscles are sewn to the nose and tail so the “fish” wiggles and swims in response to the signals. The muscles get their energy from the glucose solution the fish is swimming in (see video at www-personal.umich.edu/~bobden/biomechatronic_devices.html).
One of Herr’s aims is to power prosthetic limbs with real muscles. Artificial limbs tend to be much stiffer than real ones and can’t adapt to different surfaces, so they behave the same way whether you are walking on cement or sand. […]

Sega humanoid robot can walk, ‘talk’ Sega humanoid robot can walk, ‘talk’
Sega Corp. subsidiary Sega Toys will begin selling in May a humanoid robot that is able to walk, dance and “communicate” with people through facial expressions, body language and messages that appear on monitors.
The device, to be named BOT, will be the first humanoid toy robot to be marketed commercially, the company said.
BOT will be able to imitate a variety of emotions — including joy, despair, anger and happiness — through facial expressions and body movements.
The robot will also be able to display on a monitor messages that have been sent to the owner over a mobile phone, it said.[…]

Plastique Man
par Benjamin Cherrière
mis en ligne le 16 février 2001
Une équipe de scientifiques américains a mis au point un nouveau plastique capable de se réparer automatiquement. De la peau artificielle aux missions spatiales, les applications s’annoncent nombreuses.
Le plastique est-il un matériau d’avenir ? Oui semble croire l’équipe du professeur White, de l’Université de Delaware (Etats-Unis), qui a mis au point, et partiellement testé, un polymère capable de compenser sa propre usure et de se réparer en cas de fissure ou d’éraflure. Ce tour de force part d’un idée relativement simple (voir animation ci-dessous): l’intégration dans le plastique de capsules remplies d’une part d’agents de renforcement (fibres de carbone, haschisch ou Kevlar), et d’autre part d’une résine (ester de vinyle ou époxyde). Lorsque le plastique est abîmé, les capsules éclatent, libérant ainsi les agents de renforcement et la résine. Ceux-ci colmatent les brèches et réparent alors le matériau endommagé en se polymérisant au contact d’un catalyseur incorporé au plastique.
Un principe applicable au verre et la céramique […]

Geek.com Geek News – Robots that can kill Robots that can kill
posted 5:04pm EST Thu Aug 17 2000
NEWS
The Thailand Research Fund unveiled five robots in Bangkok, including one “roboguard.” The roboguard is equipped with a camera and sensors for movement and heat–it is also armed. The roboguard “can be programmed to shoot automatically or wait for a fire order delivered with a password from anywhere through the Internet.”
Suggested uses for the robot include guarding museums or other places where items of high value are kept.
Read more at the Bangkok Post.

Geek.com Geek News – Flo the robo-nurse Flo the robo-nurse
posted 4:50pm EST Fri Nov 03 2000
NEWS
Robotic nurses could save the U.S. $100 billion dollars in medical and retirement costs caused by incorrectly taken medication. That’s just one of the reasons that Professor Sebastian Thrun, director of the Robot Learning Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, and his students created Flo, a five-foot tall robot that should help improve the lives of elderly or infirm people living at home.
Built with $1.4 million in funding from the National Science Foundation, Flo is designed to help health care personnel (doctors, nurses, etc.), not replace them. The primary purpose of the “nurse-bot” is to remind its “patients” when to take their medicine, but it has many other functions as well. Flo can alert others if the patient falls; it has handles so that it can be used as a movement aid; its built-in TV screen and camera enable remote communication with healthcare providers; and it can send and retrieve e-mail and info from the Web. Flo also has voice-recognition software and “the rudiments of a personality.” […]

Robots making robots, with some help.(Brief Article)
Author/s: P.W.
Issue: Sept 16, 2000
To remind themselves how much better their final products could be, robot designers need only look in the mirror. Yet the exquisite biological machines they’ll see there emerge from a blind self-replication process, called evolution, and not from a deliberate design effort. In the latter, an engineer devises a robot for welding metal or baking cookies, for instance.
Betting what works for life may also work for artificial life, researchers in Massachusetts have demonstrated the first robotic system that designs and builds robotic offspring from scratch with minimal human intervention.
“The idea that a robotic system can make another robot is not self-reproduction, but it’s a step along the way,” says Jordan Pollack of Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. He and Hod Lipson, also of Brandeis, describe their automated robot maker in the Aug. 31 NATURE.
Last year, Pollack and another colleague set a computer to designing simple structures by a hit-or-miss process that mimics evolution (SN: 9/4/99, p. 156). After many generations, the researchers used Lego blocks to build the computer’s designs.[…]

Welcome to Battlebots.com :: Meet the Robots :: Robot Stats

Battlebot: The future of sports?
By Patricia Jacobus
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
February 15, 2001, 1:50 p.m. PT
Battlebot, billed as the next smash-hit geek sport, has launched a Web site featuring animation robots designed to, um, kick each other’s bots.
The Web site seems ideal for the geek, macho crowd that can’t afford to build giant steel machines with kill saws, pulverizers or ramrod spears. Instead, with a few clicks of the mouse, enthusiasts of the sport can paste together a virtual robot and engage in virtual combat.
“It’s crazy how popular the sport is,” said Deb McCain, spokeswoman for Iguana Studios, a New York-based Web design company that helped build the Battlebot site.
A key component of the virtual combat element involves an emerging animation technology called Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), which is under recommendation by the World Wide Web Consortium to become a standard in online graphic designs.
According to backers of the standard, vector graphics are more flexible than other available animation technology, able to make computer images fit into any screen–from cell phone displays to monitors. SVG renders more easily because it is written in pure XML (Extensible Markup Language), a programming language that makes it as simple as tapping a computer key to exchange large amounts of information over the Web. Vector graphics can then easily move through tight bandwidth connections that typically choke on bulky bulky files, such as animation.
SVG competes directly with Macromedia’s Flash, which even designers at Iguana acknowledge has a big head start. The Battlebot project is the first commercial use of the technology, which is still in a “beta,” or testing, phase.
[…]The sport attracts mostly a crowd of engineers, special effects experts and mechanics who build robots weighing as much as 400 pounds that then are either reduced to tiny pieces of scrap metal after combat or emerge victorious.

Free Newsroom EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
MOBILE ROBOT SALES EXPECTED TO REACH $17 BILLION BY 2005
February 6, 2001
ActivMedia Research, LLC (www.ActivMediaResearch.com) – Today Mobile Robotics are where personal computers were in the early 1980s, poised for proliferation, with more than 1600% growth in units and nearly 2500% growth in dollars expected over the next five years. Sales are expected to soar from $665 million in 2000 to more than $17 billion in the same time frame. Technologies are such that decades of labor in artificial intelligence, sensing, navigation, communications and response are beginning to bear fruit in the form of practical mobile robots.

Scientific American: Technology and Business: Enter Robots, Slowly : September 1999 ENTER ROBOTS, SLOWLY
Faster computing means some technological
hurdles are falling
The autonomous robots of science fiction have thus far failed to whir into everyday life: they are too clumsy and expensive for the home, hobbyists aside, and can be tolerated only for the most repetitive tasks in industry. But major development projects are making progress in some of the most difficult areas, thanks to cheaper computing and radio links. “We will begin to see robots more often,” says roboticist Takeo Kanade of Carnegie Mellon University.