Swiss robot wants some time with you

At first glance, QB1 appears to be a simple screen mounted onto a black arm and box. But it comes to life through human interaction, for now in the form of a sort of personal DJ service.

(Credit: OZWE)

SAN FRANCISCO--When Swiss developers designed the QB1 robot, they weren't going for human-like looks or cute puppydog mannerisms.

Instead, they're hoping QB1 will hook people in on a more meaningful level--by providing a handy music-suggestion service--and thus giving the robot continuous exposure to data stemming from real human interaction.

Artificial intelligence "systems need to learn in the real world, from real people. You cannot program them with knowledge from the real world," said Frederic Kaplan, CEO and co-founder of QB1 developer OZWE.

The QB1 was showcased to the public last weekend at Swissnex, an annex of the Consulate General of Switzerland here that's dedicated to bridging knowledge in science, education, art, and innovation between Switzerland and North America.

QB1 is what Kaplan calls a "robotic object"; people interact with it through gestures. In its first application, QB1 is loaded with a kind of disc jockey feature because that invites people to spend time with it.

Kaplan got this idea out of his experience working for 10 years with Sony's world famous dog-like AI robot, Aibo.

"What was frustrating was that nobody was interacting with it long-term. There are so many objects in your house, so why interact with an object that is only for pleasure?" he said. And as Aibo needed time with humans to learn, this was a fundamental problem.

"The limit for AI is not computing power, it's getting experience," Kaplan said. So QB1 tries to steal your time doing something useful, playing your music. The AI system incorporated into QB1 has about five different strategies to intelligently predict what music you want to listen to at the moment.

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Originally posted at News - Cutting Edge

Artist's tricked-out 'cybugs' creating a buzz

(Credit: Mike Libby)

For insect-phobes, the only thing scarier than a big, hairy tarantula would be a big, hairy tarantula tricked out with brass gears and looking like it had crawled straight out of a sci-fi horror fest. But rest assured, this spider won't bite--or crawl over your face ...

Here comes the Wedding Robot

(Credit: LittleIsland)

The Wedding Robot can be custom-made to look like a family member.

(Credit: LittleIsland)

This has shades of Cabbage Patch and Chucky going for it. LittleIsland's Wedding Robot, mainly supposed to be used in place of a welcome board at weddings, just gives me the spooks since ...

Video: Giant Japanese beetle robot

The "Kabutom MX-03" can be remote-controlled or piloted from the cockpit (visible on the left side), and is capable of carrying passengers inside its shell. It was designed and built by a man in Ibaraki, Japan, over the last 11 years.

You can also check out the design blog featuring ...

Originally posted at Software, Interrupted

Reader-assisting biblio-bot on the right page

(Credit: Nishizawa Electronic Measuring Instruments)

The blog you're about to read is a page-turner. No, really, it is. It's about the Book Time, a hands-free machine out of Japan that automatically turns pages for you. At first glance, this might seem like yet another gadget for the lazy. ...

Honda walking-assist gear steps on U.S. soil

I've still been sneezing like crazy and the pollen robots are nowhere to be found in the States. However, if you have other physical conditions, such as difficulty carrying yourself, hope may have arrived.

Honda's walking-assist devices--photos

Honda announced Tuesday that it will demonstrate its prototype walking assist devices for the first time in the U.S. The demonstrations will take place at the 2009 Society of Automotive Engineers World Congress in Detroit from April 20 to 23. Prior to the Detroit event, Honda will demonstrate the devices for select media in New York.

These walking-assist devices are designed to support walking for the elderly and people with weakened leg muscles. The demonstrations are part of Honda's real-world tests to evaluate the products' effectiveness.

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Wearable bot said to make you stronger

(Credit: Cyberdyne)

This is about the closest thing to a Superman suit we've seen. Put it on, say its creators, and the motorized Hybrid Assistive Limb can "expand and improve physical capability" up to tenfold in activities such as walking, standing, and climbing stairs.

Through a sensor attached to the skin, "HAL" captures faint biosignals on the skin's surface that result from messages sent from the brain to muscles when a person attempts to move. A computer analyzes how much power the wearer intends to generate, then calculates the amount of torque needed to put limbs into action.

(Credit: Cyberdyne)

Especially noteworthy here is that the suit responds to intended motion, rather than actual motion.

"This is what we call a 'voluntary control system' that provides movement interpreting the wearer's intention from the biosignals in advance of the actual movement," explains Japan's Cyberdyne, which will soon begin manufacturing the cybernetic suits for about $4,200 apiece, possibly making it the first such wearable device aimed at civilians.

The company was formed by Sankai Yoshiyuki, a professor at the University of Tsukuba who is heading up research on HAL, which he says has the advantages of both robot and cyborg. Yoshiyuki says he was inspired by reading Isaac Asimov's "I Robot" as a child.

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Honda thinks up mind-controlled robots

A video of the robot mind control system shows a user being shown a card with a picture of a hand on it. After pondering his hand, the command from the user's brain is then transferred to Asimo, which acknowledges the request by raising its robotic limb. Thankfully, ...

Hay fever bots warn public about pollen

A chart on Weather News' site details the pollen threat around Japan, with a picture of the round robot that can help detect it.

(Credit: Weather News)

Allergies are probably the most obvious way nature tells you it doesn't want you around. I know this love/hate relationship ...

Check out CNET's iPhone OS 3.0 live blog

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

CNET News Apple reporter Tom Krazit and CNET Reviews editor Kent German are both at Apple's iPhone OS 3.0 event at company headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., right now. They're live-blogging the announcements as they happen, so head over here now. The event begins ...

The DIY droid you're drooling for

Droidle, droidle, droidle, I made you out of a garbage can.

(Credit: Frenk Janse/bit-tech.net)

You know what's cool? Modding your computer case. What's cooler than cool? Modding your computer case to look like R2-D2. Yeah, that's right. A real life-size R2-D2.

Frenk Janse, the creator ...

Japan's latest supermodel--a robot

The new Japanese humanoid robot HRP-4C displays a range of emotions (good luck discerning what they are) during a press conference in suburban Tokyo this week. Naturally, plenty of paparazzi were on hand.

(Credit: AFP Photo/Yoshikazu Tsuno)

She doesn't have the grace of a Cindy Crawford or Elle MacPherson (yet), but a few struts on the catwalk may help HRP-4C loosen up and hit her stride. The walking, talking girlbot will be getting practice soon, as she's set to make her catwalk debut at a Tokyo fashion show next week.

Scientists from Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology reportedly designed the 5-foot (ish), dark-haired creation to look like an average Japanese woman between the ages of 19 and 29. Unlike the average Japanese woman, however, HRP-4C has 30 motors in her body that allow her to walk and move its arms (somewhat loudly and awkwardly, if the video below is any indication) and 8 facial motors for blinking, smiling, and expressing emotions akin to anger and surprise.

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Wii mower takes the yawn out of lawn mowing

I know Wii remotes have already been used to control coil guns and extremely unsettling black widow spiders, but now you can actually have fun mowing the lawn.

A group of highly domesticated scientists at the University of Southern Denmark decided the world needed to be spared from the pain of shortening grass until the next unseasonal downpour. So they created a lawn mower controlled by a Wii remote.

An early prototype designed to make mowing easier.

(Credit: CC Vespar Avenue/Flickr)

They've called it Casmobot. And just when I thought this name might have an allusion to something vaguely Viking, I was disabused by the explanation that the "Casmo" part stands for Computer Assisted Slope Mowing.

The design is quite simple. The Wiimote is connected by a little Bluetooth to a computer and a bunch of robotics in the machine.

Depending on how much fun you want to have, you can either keep tilting your Wiimote to direct the mower or you can just guide it around the perimeter of an area and it will automatically cut all the grass inside.

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Originally posted at Technically Incorrect

Awww, eerie CB2 child-bot is growing up

If a child ever had skin as ashen as this kid, it would end up in the emergency room. Fortunately, this is not a real tyke, but a "Child Robot With Biomimetic Body" (CB2 for short) that's meant to mimic its living counterparts and teach lessons about child development.

Photos: Raising CB2, the child robot

The kid-bot, which comes to us from a team at Japan's Osaka University, is equipped with 51 air-powered motors and 197 tactile sensors under the soft, light gray silicone skin covering its body.

CB2 measures about 4 feet, 3 inches tall and weighs 73 pounds, which size-wise would put it in the third or fourth grade. However, it was designed to function as a 1- to 2-year-old.

Since the eerie-looking bot first terrified the blogosphere in 2007, it has resurfaced as a more advanced creature.

Its creators report that CB2 is slowly developing social skills by recording human's facial expressions via eye cameras, matching them with physical sensations, and then clustering them into basic categories (sad, happy, etc.) on its circuit boards. ...

Robo-scientist makes gene discovery--on its own

Adam (shown in background) may not look like its two colleagues in the white coats, but it's starting to act like them.

(Credit: Aberystwyth University)

Earlier this week, we told you about a robot that could be controlled by human thought alone. Now comes news of a bot that doesn't need to bother with any human thought at all, thank you very much. It's a "robot scientist" that researchers believe to be the first machine to independently come up with new scientific findings. Aptly, the bot is named Adam.

While we've become accustomed to robots built to repeat a given task many times over, scientists at Aberystwyth University in Wales and the U.K's University of Cambridge designed Adam to take a more human approach to scientific inquiry. And while it may not win the Nobel Prize for physics just yet, Adam appears to be doing impressively well for a young scientist, carrying out scientific research automatically, without the need for further human intervention.

As reported in the latest issue of the journal Science, Adam autonomously hypothesized that certain genes in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae code for enzymes that catalyze some of the microorganism's biochemical reactions. The yeast is noteworthy, as scientists use it to model more complex life systems.

Adam then devised experiments to test its prediction, ran the experiments using laboratory robotics, interpreted the results, and used those findings to revise its original hypothesis and test it out further. The researchers used their own separate experiments to confirm that Adam's hypotheses were both novel and correct--all the while probably wondering how soon they'd become obsolete.

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The 404 302: Where Wilson is walking on sunshine

Justin calls Wilson out for being happy with his life, so they decide to name the show after the popular '80s song Walking on Sunshine by Katrina and the Waves. Meanwhile, Justin hates his life because New York City ruined his evening. Stay tuned for that story on today's The 404.

Jeff talks about a dangerous e-mail chain letter about entering your PIN number in reverse to call the police during a robbery. Too bad, it ain't true. You might just get stabbed in the stomach if you try this one. Speaking of your health, you can help stop the spread of the flu this year with Twitter. We also suggest not licking the subway poles, but hey--to each his own.

Also, Apple quietly introduces data tethering to the iPhone OS 3.0. Apparently, it takes a little minor hacking, but you'll be able to tether your iPhone 3G to your computer over USB. Bluetooth support is a few more hacks away. Hopefully, you don't take down the entire AT&T network when you BitTorrent the latest "Battlestar Galactica" over your iPhone 3G connection.

Microsoft releases the latest version of Internet Explorer 8 for download. The tech community gives a collective yawn (except for IT managers), while we get creeped out by a Japanese robot model.

Finally, our tagline contest is coming to an end, and before we decide on an official winner, we'd like you to chime in by taking our poll. Click here or look up and to your left. Jonathan Coulton had to reschedule but will make his appearance in the coming weeks, so hold onto your horses. Be sure to support our very own Natali Del Conte's Smackdown for Charity!

EPISODE 302

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Originally posted at the 404