robot

Overheard: American market soft on robots

If iRobot had made a 4-foot-tall Roomba with a face and a hand to hold a vacuum hose, the company wouldn’t have sold more than ten units. Lance Ulanoff, Why can’t American consumers handle the future that robotics is willing to offer?

Contest: Degrees of freedom

How many degrees of freedom (DOFs) does the flute-playing robot from Waseda University have?

Leave your answer in the comments and I’ll send somebody with the right answer a TechTarget shirt. Check back Friday, November 9 to see if you won. There’s no real reason for doing this contest. I just have shirts and thought it would be fun. :-]

Overheard: Six degrees of freedom

Typical industrial robots feature a 6-axis configuration, or six degrees of freedom. Toyota’s trumpet-playing robot has 29 degrees of freedom.

The robot’s right hand has three DOFs to manipulate the trumpet. It has a Pentium III processor as the main CPU and a Linux RT/OS. Toyota has already developed nearly 100 robot-related patented technologies and plans to commercialize humanoid robots by 2010.

Overheard: It’s very cool — military transport

Watch what happens when the guy kicks this thing.

BigDog, as this robot is known, is powered by a gasoline engine. That’s the buzzing you hear on the video. It’s got an on-board computer that controls locomotion and uses sensors for joint position, joint force, ground contact and ground load. It’s got a laser gyroscope for balance and a stereo vision system so it can see where it’s going. Inside it’s got more sensors to monitor BigDog’s hydraulic pressure, oil temperature, engine temperature, rpm, battery charge etc. So far, the robot has successfully trotted at 3.3 mph, climbed a 35 degree slope and carried a 120 lb load. It’s being developed by Boston Dynamics with funding from DARPA.

Overheard: Robot goats will save the planet

Forget about how old you are. Which one would you rather throw your trash into? The Big Belly municipal trash compacter that looks like a FedEx box, or the robot goat?

I’d rather feed the goat. So would the folks in Spokan, Washington. So would the people in Tokyo.

Spokane’s Riverfront Park garbage Goat was created by artist Paula Turnbull. You put litter in front of the goat’s mouth, and a vacuum sucks the trash in and compacts it. The metal goat appears to eat the litter, making grumbling noises and providing entertainment while you keep the environment green. Spokane’s had their goat since 1974.

Edogawa Kyotei took the idea one step further. Get it? FUR-ther.

Ok, I apologize. I will grow up. Right now.

Here’s the story: Edogawa Kyotei is a race course for hydroplane speedboats. It’s a popular tourist attraction in Tokyo. The drivers are professional and the crowd bets on the winners. It’s similar to horse racing in the United States.

If you’ve ever been to Saratoga for the races in August, you know that the grandstands and grounds are covered with losing tickets. People watch the race, check their ticket when its over, jump up and down if they win, or throw their ticket on the ground if they lose. It’s the same at Edogawa Kyotei.

So the managers at Edogawa Kyotei brought in a robot goat to encourage the crowd to keep the park clean.

The genius part is not that they added fur to their robot.

The genius part is that they started a viral marketing campaign to spread the message that feeding the goat a losing ticket — any losing ticket — would improve the person’s luck on future bets. They added more fun to the fun and got a cleaner park.

Sure beats the threat of a $100 littering fine.