The "California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR)" is testing a new kind of robot, that should be useful not only for the army. They follow a very unique design, are not much bigger then a grenade, can be moved by remote-control, are silent like a whisper and can record or transmit movies and pictures on its own.
The design approach is very unique, because the robot IS only one axis with two wheels, that has all the core functionality attached to the axis. The robot is turned on by pulling a pin. This should make the robot even good to handle on situations, when soldiers are wearing gloves. The lack of an on/off switch will also benefit in such situations, when the robot is falling, what could hit the off-button incidentally. The robot can be controlled by a handheld device from remote, that has a build in monitor. It provides actually pictures from the robot-cam.
The robot is developed by ReconRobotics and was made for military purpose. The scenarios are quite exotic, Popular Mechanics write about the possible usage:
Even if the drone is spotted, and immediately stomped to death, a quick peek could reveal what kinds of weapons are present, and what condition the hostages are in. ReconRobotics also sells a command monitoring kit, which consists of an additional antenna and software that allows the footage to be viewed and recorded on a laptop. "You could throw it in, and do a quick 360 of the room," says Bignall. " So even if all you get is 30 seconds of footage, you can go back and review it frame-by-frame.
If you ask me, this sounds like pure Science Fiction that even tops James Bond and games like "Impossible Mission". Popular Mechanics continues:
The Recon Scout is inexpensive when it comes to robots—it costs $6000, or $9000 with an IR camera—and is built to survive a 30 ft drop onto concrete. ReconRobotics has also tested other options, like dropping the robot from a low-flying unmanned aerial vehicle, and launching it from the same kind of compressed-air guns used to fire tear-gas canisters.
You will definitely also check out this NASA-robot, that follows the same design of axis-control. It is extremely useful and flexible (see the video below).
Look at this fascinating technique some clever Japanese engineers developed to deconstruct a skyscraper high building. They just carry away the house from the bottom to the top! First the walls are removed, that are not statically loaded. The columns, that hold the weight of the building then are sloooowwly put down into the ground, this is the critical part I guess, until the next floor is ready to "go".
The poor building looks very unhappy. It seems like the thing is going on and on and on, like a good game of Tetris. Now I don't want to hear anyone saying, that industrial-built houses are not a party of its own. Even they can mature in dignity. If this would be a toy, there would be no problem in re-using the building-parts that are now "free" again, but I suppose architecture always needs fresh material for constructing new houses.
Are you ready for some of the most unusual research? British scientists set up a spider-robot, that only exercise is to shock and traumatize bees. The researches had explored the effect, that traumatic experiences have on bumble bees.
Shock-Robot "Spider in Disguise"
The "spider in disguise" machine, that you can see on the picture, was used to attract bumble bees (smells good, looks flowery). When the came too near to the machine, the two robotic-arms hit together and gave the bee some really shocking event and set them in panic. After some pretty good shocks the bumble bees began to avoid the spider-machine.
The researchers were more interested in the after-effects of the shock-therapy. They came up with the result, that traumatized bees were changing their collection habits. The were generally slower that their colleges without the stress exposed to. The bees were acting nervous and distracted and learned, that some robot-spiders in disguise could lurk anywhere...
Please don't build such machines!! I guess this thing was only made once for research purposes. Read the whole story at Science News.
I just came across this pictures on Flickr. That monstrous spider has a weight of 37 tons. How big it is, you can tell from the picture itself. Who made and installed this crazy heavy thing and why?
The spider was made by a French artist group, called La Machine. This is some kind of technology driven live-theater. It seems, that the spider was installed and driven due culture celebration day in Liverpool. More information is available at the British La Machine or Liverpool08 Website.
Festo, the air and pneumatics specialists from Germany, came up with a really simple, but yet effective idea. The design is closed connected to a jellyfish. In the mid is hoovering a balloon, filled with fine helium-gas. The tentacles, made of a thin and light material, make them shift and floating in the air, with peristaltic motion we know from underwater living. Once again a very impressive showcase from Festo! Did they visit the Wilhelma for inspiration?
PS: Incredible, how close we can get now to this fiction.
Robovox is a large, eight meter high public sound- and robotinstallation. You can send text-messages to the two large robots. They will read, or better speak, your text messages. Just to remember: 8 meter high robots! This is really impressing.
The robots are on tour all mostly within European metropolitan area,making station at Rotterdam, Berlin, Helsinki, Barcelona, Paris, New York, Ljubljana.
Listen to the robotvoice!
Martin B. Bricelj want to "give people a voice, that usually gets lost in the sounds of the mass". The places Bricelj choose have also "social or even political connotation" in his words.
The SMS send to the robots are processed and than spoken out loud by the robots. It is a public monument, but also sound design for public squares. The robot voice is at the same time beeing streamed into the internet. You can head over to the website and plug into the soundstream of the actual robots, or just click play in the black box above. The soundtrack is also available, as well as a book and DVD with essays, documentation and research work.
Robovox was initiated by media artist Martin B. Bricelj. The use of SMS to interact with gigantic objects reminds me on the legendary public art installation of Blinkenlights from the German Chaos Computer Club some years ago. While Blinkenlights was more some "proof-of-concept", aimed at lange scale pleasure (at least in my eyes), the Robovox has another connotation - of course, not only by the picture of robots, that marks a new era about to come.
The Pink Tentacle blog sometimes really got interesting content. Today I read this article about floodgates, with many interesting pictures, taken by Japanese photographer Sato Jun Ichi. He documented the architecture of floodgates over the last 10 and more years.
This weblog is dedicated to fresh and alternate views on robotics. We will focus especially in music robots, toy robots, play and game and robots as well as the culture of robots. We are the the first robot-blog from Germany - and maybe from Europe - that write regularly on this topic! This blog is made by the same people around the Digital Tools Magazine. We will have some nice surprises later this year, so stay tuned!
