Boing Boing » robot

Hexapod robot vehicle

David Pescovitz — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:10:24 +0000

Matt Denton of Hampshire, UK, built a huge hexapod walking machine that he operates by joysticks inside the cockpit. It took him four years and cost "hundreds of thousands of pounds" to make. Its top speed is one mph and, as you might expect, isn't particularly efficient. "It's not about miles to the gallon, it's about gallons to the mile," Denton told the BBC News.

Hugging robot

David Pescovitz — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 00:21:14 +0000

Today at Institute for the Future's Ten Year Forecast conference, my friend Kal Spelletich's "Huggerer" pneumatic robot is delivering free hugs. Here is a video of Kal demonstrating the machine. It's very satisfying.

Parrot drives robotic bird buggy

David Pescovitz — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 16:40:12 +0000

University of Florida grad student Andrew Gray built the Bird Buggy for his parrot to drive around the house. "When it's time to put the bird away, Bird Buggy is able to dock itself to a base station utilizing a web camera," Gray says. (Thanks, Sean Ness!)

Meet the random shopper: Amazon gifts bought at a machine's whim

Leigh Alexander — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 16:55:28 +0000

Workers fulfull orders at an Amazon warehouse in Rugeley, England. REUTERS/Phil Noble

What would a bot buy from Amazon, if given life—and a gift card loaded with credit? Noam Chomsky's Cartesian Linguistics, apparently.

It's hard to believe that'd be a random choice, but it is, coming from a creature engineered for randomness by a man fascinated with randomness -- and consumerism. My friend Darius Kazemi, Boston-based developer extraordinaire, has a long-held interest in randomness. He's made the Twitter account @metaphorminute, designed to tweet a random metaphor every couple minutes, and OutSlide, which generates a random set of slides based on phrase-oriented Google image results.

With a background primarily in games, he's always been drawn to roguelikes and other games where random generation is a factor in the experience; he's attracted to the idea of "abdicating design decisions to a computer."

For example, he recently noticed an apparently-random area of Manhattan where real estate seems particularly expensive; for some reason, trading computers have superior latency there, leading financial firms to buy up real estate all to gain space for a couple of extra machines and the efficiency thereof. The whim of a machine caused an unpredictable spike in the value of a certain spot on the landscape.

"I like randomness because it's telling you straight up that there's a computer making this decision, and it's completely alien," Kazemi tells me over the phone. "It's based off no criteria that you'd ever use in your own life."

In the recent year he and his spouse have bought a house, and with it comes increased thought on the conscientious couple's part to ideas about consumerism, "things." Kazemi noticed how the occasional sudden arrival of back-ordered Amazon products he'd long since forgotten about ordering feels somehow more exciting, "like a gift you bought yourself," and wondered what it would feel like to design a program that buys you things seemingly at random?

The bot's purpose, in Kazemi's words, is largely to "fill [his] life with crap," to see if somehow those purchases feel more or less meaningful than something he would have conscientiously chosen himself; a way, if you will, of exploring his attachment to that "crap."

Thus Random Shopper was born, complete with controls that keep it from buying anything too expensive or too physically large (spouse Courtney was "supportive," Kazemi says, but "was also like, 'I don't want skis showing up at the house.'"). Random Shopper has its own Amazon account, and its budget is limited to a set amount on a gift card. For now, Kazemi's restricted its categories to CDs, DVDs and paperback books -- that keeps the size issue under control, and limits purchases to stuff that's easily digitized, consumable and can be given away or donated, "as opposed to, like, a plug for a device that I don't own," he explains.

The bot shops using a random word plucked from the Wordnik API. Since Kazemi is able to run simulations on the bot up to the point of actual purchase, he plans to experiment with other categories, like housewares, just to see what kinds of things the bot would send.

"It's like having a martian as a personal shopper," he reflects.

The first time he turned on the bot, Kazemi eagerly awaited his first shipment, which he knew would come the following week. "When I saw the Chomsky book, I laughed," he says. "My AI just sent me a Chomsky book; that's hilarious, because Chomsky did a lot of work that was instrumental in the early formulation of AI."

The second gift: A fingerprint-logo black CD case that simply read "Ákos Rózmann" on the front, a name Kazemi had never heard. "The first track is this really abrasive noise, and it sounds like there's something wrong with the CD, and I was going, 'well, either this is some very avant-garde music, or I got a defective CD...' by the second track, I actually really liked it, and I was smiling ear to ear," he enthuses. "It was like, 'my bot sent me an awesome present.'"

Personifying bots is easy and comes naturally, Kazemi reflects. When it comes to his @metaphorminute bot, "I certainly consider it to be like a child. Not a child I'm particularly attached to, and if it died, I wouldn't cry. But maybe to the extent your pet goldfish is like a child, and you are responsible for it," he says. Once, @metaphorminute accidentally used foul language, tasking the parent with teaching it how to talk politely. "I do sort of casually refer to them like you'd refer to a child -- 'one of my bots did the cutest thing today!'"

Since that initial purchase, Random Shopper has sent along The Oxford History of World Cinema, 1995 sci-fi film Screamers, and something called the Covenant Discipleship Parents' Handbook. And has drawn some criticism, too, of the developer's leisure to spend real money on a bot that always runs the very real risk of essentially wasting money.In a blog post Kazemi says he recognizes the validity of that criticism, but likens it to the cost artists invest in supplies or research.

And there is an element of very conscious subversion to Random Shopper: "I like the idea of jamming Amazon's recommendations slightly, by having a consumer that doesn't conform to any statistical models," he says. "It's a tiny subversion, but I like that idea. I have a friend who was obsessed with putting nonsensical information in his Facebook profile just to throw off their predictive algorithms a bit. It's kind of like that."

Theoretically, if a mass of people changed all their Facebook data to nonsense, or set random shopper armies loose on Amazon, it'd break these services' growing ability to know us through data, to target and market to people with increasingly-unnerving, ever more personalized aptitude.

"Something else that's interesting to me is that within randomness, there's the idea of apophenia -- the human tendency to find patterns where there are none," Kazemi notes, pointing to how people once saw gods in the patterns of stars, or see deities in stains and mottles. "It'll be interesting to see how my relationship to this stuff evolves."

"Mostly it comes down to my weird sense of humor," he adds. "It's not that technically challenging to do this stuff."

Plush robot bear-pillow fights sleep apnea with face-tickles

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 16:21:28 +0000

Waseda University's Kabe Lab exhibited Jukusui-kun, a robotic bear, at the International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo earlier this month. Jukusui-kun is a medical appliance intended for people who have sleep apnea, a sleep disorder typified by loud snoring, which can have grave health effects on its sufferers. Jukusui-kun is a plush bear that you use as a pillow, which receives blood-oxygen readings from a monitor on the sleeper's hand. When oxygen levels drop (people with apnea stop breathing for long periods -- the snore is a kind of gasp for air), the bear's robot arm reaches around and tickles its user's face, so that the user rolls onto his side, where breathing is less labored.

Dr Kabe’s Jukusuri-Kun works through the person asleep wearing a similarly cute pulse-oxygen meter attached to the hand which sends readings of the amount of oxygen in the blood to a terminal running a program with the persons vital statistics pre-programmed in. To eliminate the intrusion of wires preventing a good sleep the team also developed a cordless technology which uses the human bodies natural conductive properties to communicate with a conductive sheet that lies under the bed sheet. The pillow itself also houses a microphone which analyses the decibel level of the snorer. When the oxygen level decreases in the patient resulting in the snore level increasing it triggers the bear-pillow’s hand to move towards the sleepers face. Gently brushing the face causes the person to then turn from lying on their back to moving onto their side, a more conducive postion for a sound, snoreless nights sleep.

Robotic Bear Helps Quieten Snorers (via Red Ferret)

Custom, giant junkbots made from old car and truck parts

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:48:00 +0000

Marco sez, "My elementary and middle school friend Tom Samui from Switzerland makes these custom sculptures out of recycled car and motorcycle parts."

He and his team have been perfecting these sculptures over the last ten years. Once a month they go to a junk yard and cart away a truckload of old car and motorcycle parts. The pieces are cleaned and sorted by type; nothing is thrown away. All pieces are welded together, polished and varnished with special anti-rust lacquer. It takes about 400 hours of work to complete a large sculpture. The details and the quality of the work can be seen especially on the deer and the American Indian on the horse by clicking on the images (below).
Whether you have a drawing, a photo, a model, an idea; he can make almost any object in any size between 3 feet (1 meter) and 26 feet (8 meters). If the sculpture is smaller than 3 feet (1 meter) the minimum order is 20 pieces. The larger pieces can be taken apart into up to 10 pieces and can be transported to almost anywhere in the world. Production time for custom pieces is two to three months.

CUSTOM SCULPTURES

3D printed exploratory spiders

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 15:48:07 +0000

Fraunhofer's 3D printed exploration spiders are intended for use "as an exploratory tool in environments that are too hazardous for humans, or too difficult to get to." They use hydraulic bellows to execute advanced maneuvers, including jumping:

With its long extremities, the spider has a range of ways to get around. Some models can even jump. This is possible using hydraulically operated bellows drives that serve as joints and keep limbs mobile. With no muscles to stretch their legs, these creatures build up high levels of body pressure that they then use to pump fluid into their limbs. Shooting fluid into the legs extends them. “We took this mobility principle and applied it to our bionic, computer-controlled lightweight robot. Its eight legs and body are also fitted with elastic drive bellows that operate pneumatically to bend and extend its artificial limbs,“ explains Dipl.-Ing. Ralf Becker, a scientist at IPA. The components required for locomotion, such as the control unit, valves and compressor pump, are located in the robot‘s body; the body can also carry various measuring devices and sensors, depending on the application at hand. Hinges interoperate with the bellows drives so that the legs can move forward and turn as needed. Diagonally opposed members move simultaneously, too. Bending the front pairs of legs pulls the robotic spider‘s body along, while stretching the rear extremities pushes it.

High-tech spider for hazardous missions (via JWZ)

Junkbot flying saucer

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 19:17:04 +0000

From the Boing Boing Flickr Pool: a glorious junkbot called the "Scout Ship for Landfill Art project" from CyberCraft Robots.

Scout Ship for Landfill Art project - Industrial and Found Object assemblage sculpture from CyberCraft Robots