In 1950, former Royal Air Force officer Tony Sale built a 6-foot-tall humanoid robot, one of Britain's first, from the scraps of a crashed bomber. After spending 45 years stored in a garage, it's walking just fine.
Tony Sale is now 79, but he built his first robot, George, in 1940 when he was just 12 years old. As he grew so did George—subsequent versions of the robot grew taller and more complex, adding a moving jaw to simulate speech and a radio remote control.
Sale joined the air force in 1949, teaching pilots how to use radar at the RAF Debden base in Essex England. During this time he constructed his largest and most sophisticated George to date, building the robot out of aluminium and duralumin from a Wellington bomber that crashed near the base. It was six feet tall and used two motorcycle batteries that allowed to walk, turn its head, move its arms, and sit down.
Though six-foot George gained some attention in the press, computers at the time weren't advanced enough to make him an "intelligent" robot, Sale explains and eventually George was packed away in his creator's garage. Until recently:
I dug him out of the garage where he had been standing for 45 years...I had a fair bit of confidence he would work again and luckily I was right. I put some oil on the bearings and added a couple of new lithium batteries in his legs, switched him on and away he went. It was a lovely moment.
Awwww! What a nice robot reanimation story. Now Sale's donating George to the The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, which Sale himself helped found. A much nicer home for a historic robot than a garage, I'd say. [DailyMail]
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2010.11.25 11:50:56 AM
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landcrawler robot wobbles but it won’t fall down
This funny lookin’ fella weighs just 27 pounds, has 12 legs, and can carry you around on its back if you let it.
The Land Crawler xTreme robot offers its master a ride on top of its square platform top, provided you don’t weigh more than 175 pounds. As it ambles around, it definitely doesn’t look like the smoothest or speediest way to get around the place, but it sure has got plenty of style doing it.
Funny thing is the maker of the robot says he made the Land Crawler eXtreme as a toy for his 2-year old son because he told him that he wanted to ride on a robot. Why couldn’t we all have dads who were that handy with robotics?
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2010.11.25 11:53:39 AM
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kinect hacked to control pr2 robot by willow garage
Hacks of the Microsoft Kinect are just flooding in now that the device is in the hands of geeks everywhere. I bet Microsoft never thought people would be using the Kinect for anything other than gaming as it was intended.
A new Kinect hack surfaced from Willow Garage. This is the company behind that crazy expensive PR2 robot that is used for research into human-robot interfaces. The guys over at Willow Garage took the Kinect and hacked it to allow motion control of their PR2 robot.
This sounds like the tech the little boy used in the horrible remake of Lost in Space with Joey in the lead. The hack is very cool though, and Willow Garage is working on hacking two of the devices to give 3D input for gestures.
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2010.11.30 11:04:03 AM
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Darwin-op open source robot kit ready for you to give it life
Head DOWN! The DARwIN-OP robotics platform has a head like Sputnik, mostly spherical but pointy in parts. The open source robotics kit has been spied in a new version that has open software and hardware along with an open platform for some all open robotic lovin’. I want one; it looks cool in a robot bipedal bunny sort of way.
The robot kit is developed by RoMeLa at Virginia Tech with help by Purdue University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Robotis Co. The line of bots have been in development since 2004. The open source design is intended to encourage geeks to toy with the hardware and software to create their own mods. There are numerous software implementations for the kit with C++, Python, LabVIEW, MATLAB, and more.
CAD files are available publically for the design and construction of the bot. The thing is rumored to cost about $8,000 (USD) to build which is about half the price of competitive products on the market. The bot is 17.9″ tall, weighs 2.8kg, and has 20 degrees of freedom. Its controller is an Atom Z530 processor with 1GB of RAM, 4GB of storage, and it can run Linux, XP, or Windows 7.
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2010.12.02 11:30:07 AM
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strawberry picking robot wants to gently handle your berries --- 日本機器人農夫
Leave it to the Japanese to create yet another specialized robot to do a job that previously only a human could do.
Developed by Japan’s National Agricultural and Food Research Organization [JP] this award winning robot [JP] can delicately pluck individual strawberries from the vine. Not only is it gentle enough to snip the stalks of the berries and drop them into a padded crate, but it’s smart enough to detect the color of the perfectly ripe berry and only pluck those. By using a pair of cameras, it’s able to detect the precise position of each berry in three dimensions, then uses special software to only select berries that are at least 80% red.
As you can see from the video clip, the robot currently can only handle strawberries, but could be modified to harvest other sorts of fruits or veggies if so desired. The robot is currently being field-tested by farmers to see if it could be more efficient than human berry picking. Early signs are that at a rate of one berry every 9 seconds, the robots could help reduce harvesting times by about 40%.
Looks like the berry pickers’ union is going to have a beef sometime soon.
What happens when you outfit a robot with a pair of prosthetic blades and fourteen artificial, pneumatic-powered muscles? You end up with a bipedal humanoid who researchers hope will have the ability to run like a sprinter.
Simply referred to as Athlete, it is the pet project of Japanese researcher Ryuma Niiyama, who began working on the mecha-sprinter while completing his PhD at the University of Tokyo (he's since moved onto post-doctorate work at MIT). According to IEEE, Athlete has seven muscles in each leg, and each of those muscles has anywhere from one to six actuators, providing enough air power to replicate our own muscle system. In addition, the robot is outfitted with touch sensors on each foot, and an inertial metering system to help it stay upright.
Currently, Niiyama and his team are busy trying to teach the robot how to run, which involves analyzing the timing and patterns in which human muscle sets contract and relax. Right now, Athlete can only cover about three steps (at 1.2 meters/sec) before collapsing, which, BTW, is up there with the Big Dog on the creepiness scale. Niiyama hopes to get Athlete out on a real track someday. [IEEE]
What happens when you outfit a robot with a pair of prosthetic blades and fourteen artificial, pneumatic-powered muscles? You end up with a bipedal humanoid who researchers hope will have the ability to 
Simply referred to as Athlete, it is the pet project of Japanese researcher 
