Fake Google Driverless Car

F.A.T. played a practical joke on Manhattan residents recently by creating a fake Google driverless / autonomous car and “autonomously” roaming the streets. They displayed terrible driving skills (even staged some accidents), and acted as offensively as they could. See the very funny resulting video below.

If you want to make your own, they even shared the instructions on how to print your own “LieDar” (a fake Lidar sensor that gives the car the distinctive autonomous look) using a 3D printer or a 3D printing service.

Via Nerdcore.

Ecovacs Robots

We are happy to announce the availability of the Ecovacs product line at RobotShop. This innovative manufacturer currently produces three different robots: the Atmobot, the Deebot and the WinBot.

Atmobot is an air-purifying robot that roams the house seeking pollutants in the air and eliminating them. This is a very unique robot and the only one of its kind now available on the market. You can see it in action in the video below.

Deebot is a robot vacuum cleaner with a twist; It vacuums the floors just like many other robots do, but has a very handy feature: its docking station can automatically empty its dustbin and the same station doubles as a hand-held vacuum cleaner. This means that with this system, you will not need to empty your robot vacuum as often as with other models. Also, you can use the hand-held vacuum to finish cleaning of other surfaces which the robot cannot reach. See an in-depth presentation of the robot below.

Winbot is a window and glass cleaning robot. It uses a suction system to stick to glass surfaces, which makes it very versatile and capable of cleaning many types of windows and glass panes. The video below shows this handy robot in action

We hope you are as excited as we are about these awesome robots. Order them now and let the robots take care of your home!

Liam’s Robohand

Richard Van As, a master carpenter from Johannesburg, South Africa, decided to make a set of mechanical fingers. He’d lost four of the fingers on his right hand in an unfortunate work accident. As a tradesman, having a disabled hand is a big professional detriment, so he decided that he would use the tools available to him to remedy his situation. As the project evolved, it became Robohand, an open-source initiative to help those lacking our most precious tools as humans, our hands. One of the most prominent tools he uses, and that made it possible to create these prostheses in an affordable way is a MakerBot Replicator 2.

See the inspiring and touching video below and don’t be afraid to shed a tear or two, we certainly did.

Need your own robohand but do not have a 3D printer, feel free to submit your files to our 3D Printing Service.

Via Make Blog.

RoboBee

The Wyss Institute at Harvard just unveiled the smallest robot capable of flight. The “RoboBee” weighs less than a gram and can steer, hover and take off by flapping its wings more than 120 time per second. As shown in the video below, it’s quite stable and maneuvers well using its electric muscles to flap its wings.

If you are wondering what useful tasks these tiny robots could do (besides spying on the neighbors), they are intended to assist real bees in pollination efforts, as distributed environmental sensors, and as scouts in a search-and-rescue operations.

What would you do if you saw a tiny robot flying around you? Leave a comment with your answer.

Hovis Genie Specifications

Dongbu Robotics released the Hovis Genie, a new humanoid robot. This platform is built on the Hovis Eco biped platform but the legs have been replaced by a holonomic omniwheel drive system and an additional smart device holder in the chest. The resulting robot is very stable, versatile and has lots of possibilities for interactivity and advanced development. See the video demo below for more information.

The Hovis Genie is now available for ordering at RobotShop. Make sure you order yours soon because we predict this platform will be very popular.

UAV Proposal by Fresno Aerial Photography

Nothing says “I love you” better than a robot, right? That’s exactly what Jason thought when he proposed to his girlfriend Christina. Did she say “Yes!”?. Watch the video below to find out.

We believe there are many cheesy ways of proposing but we are particularly fond of the ones which use robots. Have you ever used robots to wins somebody’s heart? Which robot would you like to see in your wedding proposal? Share your ideas and experiences in the comments.

Via Chris Geiger Photography.

Petman tries on its new clothes

PETMAN, the biped humanoid from Boston Dynamics, recently got to do its job: to test military clothing and equipment. As seen in the video below, the robot was given some clothes and equipment to test… and it did just that. It is very interesting to see the robot walk and move effortlessly.

What do you think of this kind of progress in robotics? What does the sight of a full sized humanoid robot dressed in military clothing bring to mind? Impending doom? The robopocalypse? Perhaps instead you may see it as the dawn of a new age where robots can assist us in almost everything we do? Leave a comment with your thoughts.

Via IEEE Spectrum.

Cubiebot, Filmmaker Robot

Cubiebot, a little robot made from hobbyist robot parts and cardboard is directing and filming its own documentary. As a matter of fact, many of these filmmaker robots are on the loose interviewing humans about their relationships with other robots. As shown in the video below, these cute robots capture the attention of the participants and invite them to open up on questions that would otherwise be embarrassing to tell to a human. Also, as a disclaimer, this openness leads participants to use some strong language and allows the robot to get into some otherwise forbidden places. So, watch the video at your own risk.

If you encountered one of these little robot, what would you say to it? How much would you be willing to reveal? Leave a comment with your answers below.

Via Wired.

Mantis Giant Hexapod

We recently discovered “Mantis”, a 2.8m tall, two ton hexapod vehicle created by Micromagic Systems. The project took four years to create, and as you can see in the video below, the result is rather impressive.

We know you want to have this robot. but what would you do with it? World domination? Scare children? Leave a comment with your answers.

Via Singularity Hub.

2013 Global Cloud Robotics Hackathon Participants Map

If you hover the interactive map, you can see the teams names, their projects, and even their Twitter names where they keep the world updated about their progress. For your convenience, we gathered all that information here:

1. Project: A robot that is following voice commands for basic instructions such as moving in the said direction.
2. Project: Robotic autonomous mapping of an area; with robots working together using the MyRobots cloud. During the mapping process, the robots will interact with any humans they encounter.
3. @RobotShop Team: RobotShop. Project: Monitoring a Roomba charging.
4. Team: iconcells. Project: Having robot for home stay senior to detect if they accidentally fall
5. @iqbalmohomed Team: This little piggy. Project: This year, my team has access to a 3D printer. Our idea is to print out the chassis of the robot, and hook it up with an Arduino and motors.
6. Team: OdinSky-Od. Project: To use a variety of smartphone apps such as; “find my phone,” “monitor my kids,” “monitor my home,” “google earth,” “google maps,” etc… My Robot will be a Smartphone Guru …”
7. @nihar_pradhan Team: Robo NXT iGen. Project: Our idea is simple and less hard working.
8. Team: Corruptedlink. Project: Key hunter Hunts down keys (or any object) fitted with a locator. After logging multiple finds it will use the data to guess where the keys are.
9. Team: RISING RHINO. Project: GPS BASED AUTONOMOUS AGRICULTURE ROBOT
10. Team: Mr.Face Productions. Project: The idea of this program is to have a solar powered mobile jelly bean dispenser! (Project might change in the future) If you would like to join our team and live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, just let us know
11. Team: none. Project: UAV
12. @DigitalGawd Team: Future of Robotics. Project: Unsure yet, my six year old daughter loves robotics, this will be a joint project between myself and her.
13. @robotsblog Team: RobotsBlog.net. Project: Will work with the new Lego Mindstorms EV3 and see what this amazing new robot can do!
14. Team: ONE. Project: Surveillance robot
15. Team: Angry FIsh. Project: Our project revolves around monitoring your pet cat or dog when you away from home. We intend to build a moving robot platform that can flow your pet around the house, monitor its eating, and sleeping habits. Furthermore the platform can play rudimentary games with the pet. All the meanwhile the robot will be relaying vital stats for your pet back to the owner. Stats such as eating times, activity times, sleep times etc.
16. @epkolli Team: sharkbots. Project: Control the motors with an Android phone through the cloud myrobots.com
17. @chrispbarlow Team: Telemetrons. Project: Remote Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) over cloud services.
18. Team: PZero. Project: A robot that mops the kitchen floor that leaves zero dust, hair, and oil.
19. @sailindaze Team: They Might be Giants. Project: Small mobile robot to monitor pet activity.
20. @RoboticApp Team: The RoboticApp Team. Project: Our solution will feature a speech interface to interact with a robot (Roomba, Create or Mindstorms NXT), a remote control to activate the robot actuators and read its sensors, a server to periodically monitor the robot sensors and feed the data to the MyRobots dashboard, and alerts triggered using the MyRobots alerts capabilities.
21. @jeffreyarcand Team: Human Hamster Wheel. Project: Add a new remote monitoring interface to the existing Human Hamster Wheel at the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa, Ontario. http://youtu.be/NjZ4cBqJLGk
22. @RobotGrrl Team: P(A|B). Project: Mystery
23. @hferreira Team: ROAZ. Project: An autonomous surface vehicle
24. @arusaette32 Team: janakpur. Project: to make doctors works with cloud talking to treat patient
25. Team: ICEBOT. Project: network cooperated robots.
26. @celiberto Team: FEIteam. Project: The idea is using heuristic to speed up the robotic applications
27. @robotfanatic Team: Robot Fanatics of Utah. Project: We plan to use the cloud to monitor the status of our custom made robotic lawnmower (just barely in the process of being built). The robot mower will attempt to mow a section of grass. It will relay its position to the cloud through a combination of GPS and accelerometer data. If it encounters an obstacle, the mowbot will report the location of the obstacle. The mowbot will also report the amount of fuel and estimated distance that it has traveled. Software interfaced with the cloud will track the amount/location of lawn that has been mowed and plot the location of obstacles found.
28. @noresiduals Team: wannasipofflipflop?. Project: Breeze powered iPhone charger
29. @chpesa Team: RoboSamurai. Project: Our idea is to develop an application in which a robot serves as a training coach that monitors when humans do excercise. Robo coach will share human activity information to the cloud, so other (cheerleaders) robots can know how well the person is doing and encourage them to train more by generating clapping motion.

As you can see, the projects are very diverse and interesting, we are looking forward to see how they progress. You can follow the project updates and the live video update for the event on the Hackathon site.

Stay tuned for more updates! In the meantime, which one is your favorite team? What would you do with a connected robot? Leave a comment with your thoughts below.