Mr. Future

Bot Junkie has a few minutes of the Disney / Thinkways Toys folks showing off the upcoming Ultimate WALL -E robot. It’s really kind of brilliant, having a toy robot that imitates a robot, making it a very natural match for motion and expression of the original character. The footage is a little dark, grainy, and exactly the sort of thing I could watch all day.

Link

Ira Gobler sent this fantastic pic and link to the Space-Age playground of our dreams this morning.

Best of the lot is Giganta, the playground automaton that converts imprisoned children into sliding arm-launched projectiles. Which is presumably what the catalog manufacturer means by “A Robot That Automatically Produces Fun.”

Wow. I want to go play in the giant mechanical brain. I’ve seen a few of the rocket-slides back in the day, but never a Giganta. Has anyone seen one of these in the wild?

Link

Ultimate Wall-E, a dreamy little $189 toy robot will be on the market this around-about the June launch of the robo-tactular Disney/Pixar Wall-E movie.

He’ll have 10 motors, an infra-red remote for programming movement and behaviors, and be equipped with a nice sensor compliment including sound, obstacle, and touch detection.

There will also be a number of smaller Wall-E toys, including the iDance Wall-E mp3 speaker toy. These toys and more will debut at the Bay Area Maker Fair in just a few days. Initiate lunch-money-saving-protocol 43.

Update!: A few new details via MakeZine.com:

“An innovative touch programming system lets kids direct WALL·E simply
by making patterns on the remote’s touch pad. With voice activation and
a follow-me mode, WALL·E can follow the sound of a human voice and
detect someone entering a room.”

“The Ultimate WALL·E is also MP3 compatible and features built-in speakers. USB cables and rechargeable batteries are included.”

Link (via Gearlog)

Mr. Future’s secret identity revealed!

As part of my ( beloved ) day job, I invent electronic toys for Atomocom.  We just had a bang-up great Toy Fair ‘08 showing, and to make a good week even better, New York Magazine just ran a small Toy Fair aftermath/artifact blurb on yours truly. 

( Now back to our regularly scheduled future-centric programming. )

Link

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)

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)

Taiwan-based GeStream is taking a shot at the Guinness World Record for “smallest humanoid robot in production,” though I’m not sure Tomy’s iSobot, current reigning champ, is losing sleep over it.

GeStream’s yet unnamed mini-bot, shown in the bizarrely edited demonstration film below, stands 5.9 inches tall, just under iSobot’s 6.5 inch crown. It is small, controlled via infra-red, and targeted for sale in a sub-$200 kit.

Maybe it’s the jerky franken-pushups, maybe it’s the gold spray-paint, but somehow it seems to lack the polish, charm (and development budget) of the gleefully anticipated Tomy robot.

Australian artist Ashley Wood, beloved for breathing new life into Tank Girl, is producing a limited edition wooden robot (Bertie?) drawn from his brilliantly named “Zombies vs Robots” 2-issue mini-series comic.

They’re a little grittier than the Take-G wooden robots from earlier this summer, but who could possibly say no to a tiny wooden robot with a bazooka?

Link to more photos. (via NotCot)

So you love your Lego Mindstorms set, and built many a brilliant contraption. But the gang at the malt shop robotics club just won’t take you seriously when everything you’ve invented is made out of plastic bricks. What’s the next step?

You might want to give CMU’s Terk/Qwerk platform a shot. Developed as springboard for robotics and AI education, Qwerk is the all-singing, all-dancing hardware brain they’ve designed a slew of tools and projects around. It sports a 200 MHz Arm9 processor running Linux 2.6, Ethernet, WiFi, Webcam video support,4 2-amp motor controllers, 16 servo controllers, 16 digital I/Os, a cup holder, a built-in audio player, a Xilinx FPGA, and … more.

But all that hardware would be no jolly good without the wisdom to use it, so CMU has set up a half-dozen project “recipes” to help get you get your feet wet. Their (free) software tools range from a web-cam based remote control and robotic “dance-moves” recorder to a Java development environment and extensions for using the Microsoft Robotics Studio.

Though it doesn’t come with bricks, cogs and wheels, for only $350 Qwerk looks like a steal.

TeRK Link and Qwerk Link

(via KurzweilAI.net )