I Heart Robots

On Saturday I'm hoping to go see some robots with my friend Chris, and so I wanted to get into the robot spirit. Since today is Valentine's day, I thought I would introduce you to 5 robots that I love.



This is QRIO. Right now he and his other QRIO friends are just dancing (it's all preprogrammed--not very robotic at all), but apparently he can do much much more. He can throw things, identify objects and faces, move his little fingers, protect his face from danger, right himself when he's about to fall down, and stack blocks. Intended as a little robot entertainer, the QRIO project was tragically dumped by Sony over a year ago, but rumor has it that Toyota might be picking it back up.





This is ACM-R5, an amphibious snake robot created by the Hirose Fukushima Robotics Labs in Japan. Watching it move is just amazing. The different segments are all semi-autonomous, and have a system of communicating with one another that lets them count how far down they are from the head so that they can be replaced without needing reprogramming.





This is the Toyota Partner Robot, one of the robots at the Robotopia Rising show. It plays the freaking trumpet. Having spent 4 or so years of fruitlessly trying to learn the oboe, I'm blown away by this. I wonder how it would stack up on a chair test?





This is the Cornell Healing Robot, a robot that can teach itself to walk as well as develop new ways of walking to adapt to injuries. I once bought a little cockroach robot for ten dollars that responded to any and all stimuli with "turn 45 degrees to the right," and I remember being frustrated with how stupid my robot was as I watched it wiggle in endless circles next to a simple obstacle.

This robot has no preconceived notion of how its parts are put together, and so it tries out randomly generated models of what it might look like until it gets the results it expects. According to Chronicle Online, the robot never really settles on one model for forever and always. Instead it allows all the models it tried recently to continuously compete for the role of which one best describes the robot's past experiences. Sound suspiciously like the way we think?





This is Domo. Designed to help the elderly with chores, Domo is another adapting robot. It uses a couple of different strategies to figure out the size and shape of objects so it can put them on shelves, and it also responds to human commands. Probably the best thing about Domo is the pseudo-sentient naive eye contact it makes with its human master before carrying out a task.

I've seen a video of Domo trying to make a drink, too, but considering the robot identifies the bottle by shaking it upside down, never unscrews the cap, and doesn't actually make a drink, I'm not really sure if that's a one of its more reliable features. Domo isn't really intended to ever hit the market, but the research that went into creating it should contribute to making better helper robots for our glorious, creepy robot-assisted future.