Mr. Future

Robot Watch has a great article on a new Robo-One competition in Japan, to be held September 6th in Kawasaki’s Azeria “underground city.”

The competition’s goal is to have your robot “Buy things [in] the underground city”, which sounds fantastically sci-fi, post-apocalyptic chic. To accomplish this the robots may use both tele-operational control and autonomous behavior.

In the five minute qualifying rounds, robots were sent around with a shopping basket. Their mission: picking up 3 eggs and a small (robot-sized) t-shirt, placing them in the basket, and returning to their operators.

Needless to say, egg manipulation is extra-challenging for robot hands, and Robot Watch has some excellent video footage of robot-splattering trial and error.

Link (English machine-translated link here.)

An episode of Computer Chronicles (1983-2002) about the Tsukuba Expo 85 has some fantastic segments about mid-80s robotic visions of the future.

At 10:57 We get a good long look at Waseda University’s Wabot 2 playing the organ, with great commentary about robots and society from the late Professor Ichiro Kato.

And at 18:32, there’s a love scene from German designer / futurist Luigi Colani’s Robot Theater. A few years back I saw the robot actors on display at Nagoya’s Robot Museum. Seeing them in motion here just made my morning.

Of course there are other good clips of the Expo’s mag-lev monorail, France’s proto-web MiniTel, and Sony’s first Jumbo-Tron.Colan

Don’t worry, the robot is watching the kids.

“Communciation Robot” is the new Kid’s Club president at the Aeon Mall in Fukuoka, Japan, and is seeking John Connor “recruits”. Aside from promotional and mall-guide duties, “Communication Robot” uses a “QR-Code” reader and official Kid’s Club membership badges to keep track of the Kid’s Club members he talks to, remembering their names, and birthdays.

“Communciation Robot” is based on a new tmsuk platform, similar to the RIDC, and speaks, has the ability to communicate via cell phone and text message, and has a video projector mounted in his left eye. And if I were five years old and living in Fukuoka, he would be my new best friend.

Link (with some great pics)

A timeless story of a boy and his robot, it watches like a Godzilla movie crossed with the 60’s television version of Batman. Great campy fun. A man in a giant robot costume slugs it out with rubbery monsters while stomping all over a scale model of Tokyo. A 12 year old boy joins a secret organization of world defending spies, foiling alien overlord plots and villainous beatnik henchmen. What is not to love?

In this week’s episode, Giant Robot takes on one of the goofiest looking alien robots in sci-fi history, Nucleon, the “Magic Globe”. Enjoy.

Osaka Museum of Creative Industries was host to a number of culinary robot wonders, but best among them had to be Toyo Riki’s Takoyaki-bot.  A rare treat in the states, Takoyaki is an intimidating but delicious junkfood of choice for Tokyo street food carts.

The robot chef prepared each octopus-ball fritter individually from scratch, mixing, pouring, turning, adding more batter at just the right moment. Finally it arranged the takoyaki on a plate, basting each one with sauce, and shaking on a bit of seaweed and fish flakes for good measure.

RobotWatch has a film of the robot in action here.

Link (via LiveScience)

For the next few weeks, I’ll be posting episodes Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot; quite possibly the greatest television show ever made in the history of the entire world.

A timeless story of a boy and his robot, it watches like a Godzilla movie crossed with the 60’s television version of Batman. Great campy fun. A man in a giant robot costume slugs it out with rubbery monsters while stomping all over a scale model of Tokyo. A 12 year old boy joins a secret organization of world defending spies, foiling alien overlord plots and villainous beatnik henchmen. What is not to love?

Growing up, this brilliantly/poorly dubbed 60s Japanese TV masterpiece was the absolute high point of my after-school formative years. Did I mention the giant robot? There’s a giant robot.

Bandai Japan just announced a terrific looking animatronic PC-Pal, based on the Tachikoma robot spiders from the Ghost in the Shell anime series.

The Tachikoma will connect to your PC via USB, and coupled with some custom Bandai software will move, talk, play games, record messages, play music and read your email aloud.

It looks like it will be a Japan market/language product only, and will retail for $114 this coming February. I wonder if they used any of Robo Garage’s Tachikoma work in their design?

“Voice Memo” and Minigame Software Pictured Above

Link (via Tokyo Mango)

What if countries described robotics technology in the same manner as, say, the space race?

If they did, the USA would realize that they now have a serious robot frog gap.
Researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed a mighty robot frog named Mowgli, capable of jumping more than 19 inches onto a standard office chair.

Just the sort of chair that a sitting government official, or nuclear scientist might use…

Robotic frogs aside, what other technology milestones will we have in a worldwide robotics race?

Link (via The Raw Feed)

With a launch date just a few weeks away, Tomy is prepping its media-blitz for the I-Sobot. They’ve staked out the official site, and have apparently set up a (regrettable) mySpace page.

Somewhere between Tokyo and LA, the little fellow changed color from Asimo/Moonbase-Alpha White to Ninja/Military-Hardware Black. I’m not quite sure that says about our marketing demographic, but you can bet your bottom quatloo that we’ve gone and sent away for ours anyway.

The US version of I-Sobot is (finally!) available for pre-order here at Amazon, for the modest sum of $299.

Link (to the official site)
Link (To our previous I-Sobot coverage)

Japanese robotics company Tmsuk has formed an alliance with Microsoft to bring Microsoft Robotics Studio extensions to their range of consumer and commercial robots.

Tmsuk is probably best known for their Banryu ( Guard Dragon ) security robot, though they build everything from giant robot rescue machines to electric baby-sitters.

If nothing else, the partnership deeply underscores the advantages of having common development libraries for robotics projects.

Yoichi Takamoto, the Tmsuk president, said: “Right now, we cannot adopt one technology used in robot A to robot B. If Microsoft software comes to be used by many developers, then technological advances in robotics will dramatically accelerate.”

Microsoft is not alone in building common robotics development environments and code libraries. Later this week, we’ll be taking a look at some of the open-source alternatives to Microsoft Robotics Studio.

Link - to the Times Online coverage.
(via Artificial Intelligence and Robotics)