prosthetic knowledge

BRAVE ROBOTICS 

A remote control 1/12 scale transformer car / robot. Movement is available in both car and robot forms and can fire missiles from it’s arms. These things have been seen before in Japanese hobbyist robot battles, but this one has a wifi camera fitted in it’s front. Here is a video of it in action:

You can find out more about it at the project’s website here (in both Japanese and English)

DARPA’s Pet-Proto Robot Navigates Obstacles 

Darpa inspires Metal Gear Solid, Metal Gear Solid becomes closer to reality:

In this video, the Pet-Proto, a predecessor to DARPA’s Atlas robot, is confronted with obstacles similar to those robots might face in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC). To maneuver over and around the obstacles, the robot exercises capabilities including autonomous decision-making, dismounted mobility and dexterity. The DARPA Robotics Challenge will test these and other capabilities in a series of tasks that will simulate conditions in a dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environment. Teams participating in Tracks B and C of the DRC will compete for access to a modified version of the Atlas robot for use in the 2013 and 2014 live disaster-response challenge events. For more information on the DRC, please see: http://go.usa.gov/VfA.

PaR-PaR 

A programming language devised to control robotic biology science equipment - via Berkeley Lab:

Teaching a robot a new trick is a challenge. You can’t reward it with treats and it doesn’t respond to approval or disappointment in your voice. For researchers in the biological sciences, however, the future training of robots has been made much easier thanks to a new program called “PaR-PaR.”

Nathan Hillson, a biochemist at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), led the development of PaR-PaR, which stands for Programming a Robot. PaR-PaR is a simple high-level, biology-friendly, robot-programming language that allows researchers to make better use of liquid-handling robots and thereby make possible experiments that otherwise might not have been considered.

“The syntax and compiler for PaR-PaR are based on computer science principles and a deep understanding of biological workflows,” Hillson says. “After minimal training, a biologist should be able to independently write complicated protocols for a robot within an hour. With the adoption of PaR-PaR as a standard cross-platform language, hand-written or software-generated robotic protocols could easily be shared across laboratories.”

More Here

True Skin 

Short film with a Cyperpunk aesthetic, in a world where augmented technology is the norm:

TRUE SKIN from H1 on Vimeo.

True Skin – A sci-fi short set in the not too distant future where augmentation is the way of life. For Kaye, still a natural, augmenting will help him keep pace in this now hyper-paced world. However, after acquiring an off-market prototype, Kaye quickly finds himself fighting not only for his own humanity, but something much larger.

More at N1ON here | Via Beyond the Beyond

Chris Cunningham: jaqapparatus 

NOWNESS have put together a short video on Chris Cunningham, with some brief background of his work and his new project, ‘jaqapparatus’, an audio-video performance with robotic arms, lasers and projections.

For “jaqapparatus1”, his first installation unveiled last month at the Audi City London high-tech concept store—a shadowy, sci-fi set involving two laser-firing robots locked in what seemed like a brutal mating ritual-cum-war—Cunningham cast two Talos motion-controlled camera rigs as his anthropomorphized protagonists. “Mounted on the robots heads are powerful lasers which they use to attack, repel and communicate with each other,” explains Cunningham, “a kind of duel, a surreal mating display which sees each machine trying to dominate the other.”

Embedded below is the video, or you can watch it at NOWNESS here

Chris Cunningham: jaqapparatus1 on Nowness.com.

Chinese Robo Noodle Chef 

Cuts noodles which ‘are as good as a human chef’, looks menacing - via ZoominUK (video embedded below):

A Chinese restaurateur in Beijing has invented a robot chef to make sliced noodles. The robotic noodle expert is taking China’s noodle bars by storm.

Source

EDIT: chakapanchakapan has informed me of a piece he put together for MOTHERBOARD about the contraption [Link]

Chrome Web Lab: Sketchbots 

Cloud Art?

Google teams up with the Science Museum, London with five experiments connecting your computer with installations - with Sketchbots, you can upload a photo of yourself and it will be drawn by a robot on sand and watch it performed via live webcam. Here is a video:

You can try it out for yourself here

Nimbus MkIII - Pareidolic Robot 

Design project by Neil Usher that identifies faces in clouds:

Robots are designed to perform precise and repetitive operations with relentless efficiency, performing the tasks we find too laborious or  dangerous. However, could these robots be deployed to improve the efficiency of our leisure time by performing tasks we enjoy? Could intelligent machines bird watch for us or look for four-leaf clovers? Could they optimise our pastimes, searching for patterns and spectacle in nature that would be imperceptible or too time-consuming for us to find for ourselves? 

Link

Vaudeville 

DIY Japanese full-size mecha robot project controllable by smartphone and Kinect. Via Plastic Pals: 

Suidobashi Heavy Industry (an impressive name for what is in reality a small group of dedicated giant robot afficionados), is in the process of building the first 3.8 meter (12 ft 5 inch) tall, 4,500 kg (4.9 ton) single-occupant mecha.  The ambitious group is made up of Kogoro Kurata (production), Wataru Yoshizaki (control circuitry), and Yusuke Kitani.  They’ve opted for V-SIDO software to handle the mecha’s master-slave controls (developed by Asura Engineering), and plan to have the mecha, named Vaudeville, fully operational by the end of this year.

According to the official website:

Vaudeville has the AE “V-Sido”, the control system of the computer technology is watched by all world with interest. Not only operating by boarding the pilot’s seat, but also enabling you to control and interact Vaudeville with Kinect*. Moreover, without taking a professional training such as a combat plane, people can operate it easily. Furthermore, you can control Vaudeville via the mobile 3G Internet access.

Here is a video of the machine demonstrating it’s controls:

The project is not complete, but you can find more information at the official website here

The example source image is a portion of van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet. via illillill

Pixel Robots

Description

Pixel Robots harken back to the olden days of video game sprites in the era of the Apple ][, MS-DOS, font-based graphics and monochrome monitors. They are algorithmically generated in the millions by combinatorial methods. The algorithm is explained in more detail below.

More stuff to check out here