Robotshop announced their worldwide exclusivity partnership with Kinova and unveiled JACO, Kinova’s Advanced Manipulator Arm.

JACO is a very powerful and versatile robotic arm capable of reaching just short of one meter (90 cm), and lifting a payload of up-to 1.5 kg. The robotic arm is made of carbon fibre and uses harmonic-gear-motors to move silently and smoothly. The robot’s six degrees-of-freedom can rotate continually and endlessly.

Just like human fingers, JACO’s fingers are soft and flexible and can adapt to many gripping situation, from firmly holding a glass of water to delicately picking up a flower.

Although you will need to disburse $50 000 to get this beauty and it might seem a bit expensive, it is half the price of the direct competition.

Via RobotShop Blog.

I’m pleased to bring GoRobotics an exclusive interview with Angelica Lim of Kyoto University. When I first started writing here at GoRobotics, one of my goals that I stated was to bring more compelling academic research to the general public and enthusiasts because behind lots of jargon and hidden in some grad student’s lab somewhere is a robot waiting for it’s chance in the spotlight.

Let’s get right into things with Angelica.

How did you end up a roboticist? Was it a childhood dream?

I had no idea I wanted to be a roboticist when I was a kid. It started when I was on exchange in France, doing a year of Computer Science classes at the University of Nice. One of our projects was to pick amongst research topics proposed by faculty members, and “Build a Data Server for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV)” was one of them. I ended up choosing that on a whim, and our team did a pretty good job coding it up in C++ under her specs. I got called back the next year to help integrate it with a real “live” AUV for a competition in England, and I was hooked. I liked it so much that I put together the robotics team back home in Canada. That was my second robotics competition – hopefully not my last!

How did you end up in Japan working on robots?
The main reason I wanted to come to Japan was simply because the hardware is much more advanced and easy to acquire. Full-size humanoid research platforms have been out in Japan for almost a decade. Only now are companies like Willow Garage starting to gain traction in North America.

On a more personal level, I also felt like my research options would be limited in North America. In the US, robotics research is heavily funded by the military, and therefore it seemed to me, at least that my research would have to conform to very serious and grave goals in order to gain funding. In Japan, robotics applications sound less like “Big Dog” and more like “RIBA Nurse Robot” and “Fan Dancing Robots” . I prefer the Japanese outlook on a future with robots. Does that make sense?

More after the jump …

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The M3-Neony and M3-Synchy were developed as baby bots aimed at testing machine learning software, and specifically to take a look at fine motor skill development. The hardware on this adorable little bot are some typical cameras, a microphone, gyro, accelerometer, and tactile sensors.

I heard about the M3–neony and M3-synchy through this Engadget article but I was disappointed the coverage was so scant. When I began blogging for GoRobotics, I mentioned briefly my loved for HCI, and in particular human-robot interaction – naturally, this article inspired me enough for a second article today. But, as I was excited reading about it, it looks like the article only mentions briefly the research goals of the bots. There is, however, a lot of information about what was used to make them for you gearheads out there. I’m going to comb to find the Japanese lab site if I can, in the meantime here is what’s available so far:

This article at Plastic Pals seems to have more detailed specs on these two robots. The article is long, but features more detailed specs on the bot:

[...] it is 50cm (19.6″) tall, weighs about 3.5kg (7.7 lbs) – about the size of a newborn.  A pair of CMOS cameras for sight and microphones for hearing, as well as gyro and accelerometer sensors, and tactile sensors provide various feedback. The robot has a total of 22 degrees of freedom, powered by high torque (41kg/cm) servo motors sold by Osaka-based robotics company Vstone.

The main focus is on facial expressions and arm gestures, so it is an upper body robot only, with 17 DOF (2 eyes x3, neck x3, waist x2, 2 arms x3), measuring 30cm (12″) tall and weighing 2.5kg (5.5 lbs). The head is equipped with a single wide-angle lens CCD camera, two microphones, a speaker, and 15 LEDs which cause the robot to blush bright red.  Combined with object recognition, speech recognition, and speech synthesis, the robot will be able to communicate in a variety of ways.  The chest and arms appear to be based on Vstone’s Robovie-X hobby robot kit.

If anyone finds out more about what kind of tactile sensors are involved, I’d love to hear about it. Tactile sensors aren’t something I hear about a lot and I’d love to put together an article on what’s out there.

You can catch a video here, and do check out the Plastic Pals article – they have a great gallery of these baby bots.

Today I have an interesting tidbit for those of you on LinkedIn ! There is now a LinkedIn group for hobby roboteers! Now I have even more of a reason to finally get on LinkedIn – we’ll see how much the temptation drives me.

The meat of today’s article is MIT’s MeBot.

MIT's MeBot

MIT has a pretty established humanoid robotics lab, meaning they’re at the forefront of our latent dreams to one day have cyborgs and robots walk the streets with our fellow man. (Call it whimsy, call it crazy, but I’m looking forward to an increasing number of robots in society. ) Anybody interested in robotics already knows of the legacy that MIT has for it’s robotics development, including Kismet – a rather impressive early attempt at robot-human social interaction (you can find more about Kismet here), and Cog – another human-robot interaction experiment that followed the reasoning that Cog should be able to learn from interacting with humans (more information about Cog here). MeBot comes to us from the Personal Robotics Lab.

Telerobotics is the area of robotics development concerned with – you probably guessed it – remote-control robots. The overarching idea of the field is that work needs to be done at a distance in some situations in life, and telerobotics is here to aim to answer those challenges.

The robot was presented at the Human-Robot Interaction conference in Osaka, Japan. Putting an OQO atop for a head plus some gesturing arms into the mix, it adds depth to the notion that you could really be there, and with a decent range of motion, rolling down the halls of MIT. Remotely. Via a robot.

The proposal here is that this mode allows the user to be more engaged through the movement of the head and arms. The head tracks  the face of of the user so that it can ‘look around’. The arms are moved by a set of hand-operated controls.

The “Gulper AUV” is an underwater vehicle that is programmed to look for information of use to the scientific community.

Gulper AUV Sub-Aquatic Robot

The group explains that it has ‘trained’ the robot to retrieve the highest-quality information back to them.

“We tell it, ‘here’s the range of tasks that we want you to perform’, and it goes off and assesses what is happening in the ocean, making decisions about how much of the range it will cover to get back the data we want.” says Dr Maughan of MBARI.

The Gulper AUV is used to help scientists keep tabs on various algae. In particular, these scientists are keeping watch for algae blooms that could means problems for the ecosystem.

It used to be the case that a ship would be sent out for a whole day every few weeks to retrieve the kind of information that the Gulper AUV can nab in one of its trips. They just take it out to the harbor, and away it goes on its mission. Around twenty-four hours later, it comes back, they hoist it away, and analyze the results.

The biggest flag to go off in my mind is that this must require some interesting exploration and path planning algorithms to deal with an undersea environment. Taking a look at MBARI’s website, the Gulper AUV is equipped with four sonar that operate simultaneously to provide a fantastic map of the sea floor in high resolution.

The multibeam sonar produces high-resolution bathymetry (analogous to topography on land), the sidescan sonars produce imagery based on the intensity of the sound energy’s reflections, and the subbottom profiler penetrates sediments on the seafloor, allowing the detection of layers within the sediments, faults, and depth to the basement rock. All components are rated to 6000 m depth. The vehicle is launched on programmed missions and runs on its own battery power until it returns to the ship, as programmed, for recovery – MBARI AUV Mapping Page

Head over to the article at BBC to hear an audio snippet about the Gulper AUV. it’s about halfway down the page. If you think that’s cool, then you’d also better head over to the AUV’s home page at MBARI to check out the technical goods.