Rambles at starchamber.com

I’m going to give you a quick lesson in the difference between Japanese and US robot research. Or how about this: I’ll just show you two pictures, and you see if you can spot the difference. There, on the left, that’s a Japanese robot. And on the right there, that’s a US robot. They are [...]

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I’m a sucker for the robot videos on BotJunkie, and this soft deformable robot is no exception. It’s fun to see how a blob bot can be made to work, but I’m especially impressed with the video itself. I love the pencil animation at the beginning. Back in the original desktop publishing revolution, it took [...]

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I regularly read the robot-oriented BotJunkie blog. Evan Ackerman, the Bot-Junkie-in-Chief, covers everything from military flying robots to frivolous toy robots. There’s a lot of research these days into robots that show emotion, and I was struck by the difference in approaches used by different teams. Here is the creepy and uncanny Albert Einstein emoting [...]

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This little YouTube movie looks to me like it belongs in the exposition part of a science fiction movie. For some reason, it made me think of the Mr. DNA video in Jurassic Park. The images are so surreal and the voiceover is so oleaginous that it seems like fiction. But no, it’s not fiction. [...]

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I’ve started following the BotJunkie blog for fun stories and videos about robots. It reminds me how close I came to a career in robotics. I like the blog’s tag line: “From the folks who brought you OhGizmo.com, BotJunkie obsessively chronicles Man’s inevitable descent into cybernetic slavery.” BotJunkie has plenty of weird stuff like snake-like [...]

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Last week I went to the Media Lab’s h2.0 conference at MIT. “h2.0″ stands for human 2.0; the conference centered on the surprisingly close relationship between using technology to cope with human disabilities and using technology to augment human capabilities. That is to say, people with disabilities are leading the way on human augmentation of [...]

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Read this story and you may well conclude a robot uprising is right around the corner. Carl Zimmer’s recent post Evolving Robotspeak describes robotics research done by social evolution researcher Laurent Keller in Switzerland. Plenty of folks have used genetic algorithms to “breed” robots, but this is the first time I’ve heard of someone using [...]

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We’re definitely entering a new realm with robotics. Before robotic motion was always painfully awkward and stilted, not something you would ever mistake for the smooth motion of an animal. But these days you can find plenty of examples of remarkably fluid “un-robotic” behavior. Things will progress very rapidly from here. The YouTube video below [...]

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I’ve been amazed to see how quickly web video has transitioned from novelty to mainstream. So often now interesting links come along with video. Here’s the latest, an electric pack mule. When I read that Boston Dynamics had made a stable robot quadruped, I was intrigued enough to follow the link and look at the [...]

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Could you beat the EAP? At the recent artificial arm-wrestling contest, you almost certainly would have. EAP stands for electroactive polymer, also known as artificial muscle, and earlier this month, the best artificial arms wrestled with a human opponent and lost decisively. (Note: the human opponent was a girl!) We always hear about artificial intelligence, [...]

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