Droid Builders Net

I met Jed Berk and his wicked Blubber Bots at the Reboot 2007 conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. Had good fun interactig with them via bluetooth and touch. It’s amazing how quickly you begin to relate to these machines as “living” entities.

According to creator Jed Berk (who will also help save your pet from drowning), Blubber Bots, or ALAVs (Autonomous Lighter than Air Vehicles) just want to party with you, and maybe eat a little something while they’re at it. These helium filled fliers contain SunSPOT CPUs, which control the bots and allow them to respond to various stimuli such as movement, sound, light and heat. The floating blobs are also able to interact via “conversations” with cell phone signals, follow “food”, and can bellow to one another using high frequency vibration. Best of all, these odd little fellows can be yours to own for $100; just make sure you have enough time and energy to care for them — like sea monkies.

• Blubber Bots float, feed, and make friends – Engadget

I am extremely excited to break even more good news today; Pleo pre-orders started today!!

After quickly converting the dollar price to danish kroner (DKK) I immediate went to order it, BAM!!! I was hit by a brick in the head, when reading this:

We ship to addresses in the United States.

Oh no!! Pleo is hatching but he can’t swim yet, thus it would not be safe to make him swim that long way across the ocean to Europe. Now once again, ill go to sleep crying for six months.. But stay put Pleo, I’ll be waiting by the beach when you finally arrive!

UPDATE: I got this response from Ugobe support, not much — but something;

“At this time, UGOBE is only taking pre-orders for addresses in the United States. UGOBE’s distributor for Denmark is Top Toy. Please contact them for information on ordering Pleo in your country.”

• PleoWorld

Good news robotics freaks! Today NASA JPL released a version of their robotics framework for the public.

CLARAty is the Coupled Layer Architecture for Robotic Autonomy. The first release of its software, version 0.10-beta, is now available publicly at http://claraty.jpl.nasa.gov.

CLARAty is an integrated framework for reusable robotic software. It defines interfaces for common robotic functionality and integrates multiple implementations of any given functionality. Examples of such capabilities include pose estimation, navigation, locomotion and planning. In addition to supporting multiple algorithms, it provides adaptations to multiple robotic platforms. CLARAty development was primarily funded by the Mars Technology Program and it serves as the integration environment for the program’s rover technology developments.

With this release, a total of 44 CLARAty modules (~100K lines of code) are now available under the JPL Open Source License. This release is intended to share with the robotics community some of the core robotic modules which were jointly developed with NASA Ames Research Center, Carnegie Mellon, and University of Minnesota. This first release represents about 10% of all CLARAty modules and 30% of the generic modules planned for future release.

Primary functionality in these modules includes math infrastructure, rotation matrices with Euler angles, quaternions, and coordinate transformations (interoperable homogeneous and quaternion transforms). It also includes the coordinate frame infrastructure that connect transformations and mechanisms with moving parts. Additionally, you will find mechanism models for wheeled, legged and hybrid vehicles. Other modules include device and device group infrastructure with support for generic digital and analog I/O, cameras, and motors. Several modules in this release provide vision infrastructure for images, color images, camera models, 3D point cloud, and surface normal image representations.

• CLARAty  Website
• NASA JPL Press Release

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–Junior, the robot Volkswagen, passed its basic driver’s test here Thursday.Now comes the hard part: a race on mock city streets that will raise the bar for artificial intelligence in the 21st century.

A team of officials from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) visited a parking lot here next to Google headquarters to test Stanford University’s autonomous passenger car, Junior, in what was its first big qualifying test for the upcoming Urban Challenge, DARPA’s third Grand Challenge competition for driverless vehicles.

DARPA will make so-called “site visits” this summer to evaluate all 53 prospective Urban Challenge contestants, homing in on whether the robots can perform basic driving skills, including navigating a four-way stop with live traffic, passing a stationary car and executing a U-turn.

“It’s a steep ladder to get up to the Urban Challenge. What you saw today was the first rung of the ladder,” Norm Whitaker, program manager for DARPA, said to a crowd of people following a two-and-a-half-hour test of Stanford Racing Team’s Junior.

Read the full article:

• Stanford robot passes driving test | CNET News.com

“What do you get when you combine a robot and a chair? The Hubo FX-1 chairbot, of course. In what is perhaps my favorite robot design yet, this giant chair with legs looks like it came out of some ridiculous 80′s sci-fi movie or something, but it’s very, very real. HUBO FX-1 is two meters in height, and weighs 150 kg. The person sitting can control the robot easily using the built in joystick. Each ankle has a 3-axis force/torque sensor which measures the normal force and 2 moments. Each foot has an inclination sensor which measures the angle of the slope. Also, the rate gyro and the inclination sensor of the body allow the device to stabilize itself.”

•  Slashdot | Chairbot Walks You Around While You Sit

“The New York Times is running an interesting article about how human memory works and the theorized adaptive nature of forgetfulness”.

From the article,

“Whether drawing a mental blank on a new A.T.M. password, a favorite recipe or an old boyfriend, people have ample opportunity every day to curse their own forgetfulness. But forgetting is also a blessing, and researchers reported on Sunday that the ability to block certain memories reduces the demands on the brain when it is trying to recall something important. The study, appearing in the journal Nature Neuroscience, is the first to record visual images of people’s brains as they suppress distracting memories. The more efficiently that study participants were tuning out irrelevant words during a word-memorization test, the sharper the drop in activity in areas of their brains involved in recollection. Accurate remembering became easier, in terms of the energy required.”

• Slashdot | Forgetting May be Part of the Remembering Process

“Computer scientists at the University of Southern California USC have developed DEFACTO, a training program which uses artificial intelligence AI to help firefighters practice simulated emergency situations. The system is currently used by the Los Angeles Fire Department. DEFACTO has committees of AI agents which can create disaster scenarios with images and maps seen in 3-D by the trainees. The software agents also evaluate the trainees answers and help them to take better decisions. As said one LAFD captain, You can see if youre heading toward a mistake much more quickly. Read more for additional details about this AI project and a photo of a LAFD Fire Captain using the system.”

• Slashdot | Using AI to Train Firefighters