Just a few days after I posted a YouTube video of some b-roll of Honda’s ASIMO conducting the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Honda has gone live with their very own YouTube channel. There’s some interesting stuff on there, including this video of ASIMO showing off at the Kennedy Space Center:

I guess it’s pretty obvious that the people who program ASIMO aren’t the most creative when it comes to dance moves. You’d think that at the very least, he’d be able to do an amazing robot, but so far he can’t hold a candle to this guy.

[ ASIMO ]

Smell that? It’s the scent of oil, fried speed controllers, and battery acid. And it means that RoboGames is now only a month away. The world’s largest open robot competition will be taking place at the Ft. Mason Center in San Francisco from June 13-15 (Friday through Sunday). Did I mention it’s the world’s LARGEST open robot competition? There will be 70 (!) events, including combat robots from 150 grams up to 340 pounds, autonomous combat, soccer, hockey, sumo, navigation, fire fighting… The list goes on.

Tickets are only $20 for adults and $15 for kids, per day, with discounts for all three days (and for the military). If there is any way you can possibly get there, get there. Trust me, it’s gonna be awesome.

[ RoboGames 2008 ]

He may not be doing the job he was designed for down in Los Angeles, but this (lifesize?) animatronic Wall-E robot is wandering around anyway, doing what he does best: being cute and charming. Take a look:

[Direct Link to Vid]

Apparently, these Wall-Es are being purpose-built for Disney parks, and there will be one of them on each coast (Disneyland and Disney World). They’re rumored to be showing up before the release of the movie. Too bad we consumers get stuck with the Ultimate Wall-E and not one of these awesome bots.

VIA [ io9 ]

It’s not too often (yet) that a group of humans takes orders from a robot. But if we’re going to obey one, it may as well be one developed and owned by a major corporation. Last night, Honda’s ASIMO directed the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in a performance of “Impossible Dream,” and it managed not to kill anyone or fall over:

Don’t get too excited, though… Although there’s no specific information, I’m reasonably certain that ASIMO isn’t doing anything dynamically. The routine doesn’t look completely preprogrammed, but you can bet that there are a whole heap of people backstage pushing buttons. The performance was to open a fundraiser concert featuring Yo-Yo Ma, and Honda donated over $1 million to set up a music education fund for Detroit public schools. See? Robot are our friends. Just don’t play a wrong note, or ASIMO will kick you in the nuts.

[ Press Release ]

Alright, with everything that’s been going on with Pleo in the last week, it’s high time for a disgustingly cute Pleo video. And we’ve got one for you… Here’s Pleo exploring Sea World; make sure to stick around until at least two minutes in:

This particular Pleo is named Pixie, and it seems like she’s something of an ambassador. Her humans take her around to places like Sea World where apparently she becomes a bigger attraction than the “real” animals, even for the animals themselves:

“One of the trainers slapped the window and once a dolphin came over she pointed to Pleo a few times. Once the dolphin indicated it saw it and came down to Pleo’s level, she blew her whistle. They can hear the whistle through the thick glass. And blowing the whistle told the dolphin, “Yes, that is what I wanted you to do! Good job!” From that point on, it was ALL the dolphins. They were not asked or told to stay around, wave their flippers/tail, open their mouths, etc. They stayed around because they wanted to.”

Say it with me now: “awwwwww!!!”

[ PleoWorld ] VIA [ Engadget ]

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine commented that Eve, Wall-E’s girlfriend, looked kinda like an iPod. I didn’t agree, not so much because I couldn’t see the resemblance, but mostly because I didn’t want to admit that Apple may have some subtle influence over the design of a major character in a Pixar movie. Turns out I was dead wrong, and Apple’s influence over Eve wasn’t even particularly subtle, reports Fortune Magazine. Here are some excerpts from the article:

“I wanted Eve to be high-end technology - no expense spared - and I wanted it to be seamless and for the technology to be sort of hidden and subcutaneous,” Andrew Stanton, Wall-E’s director, told Fortune. “The more I started describing it, the more I realized I was pretty much describing the Apple playbook for design.”

A call from Stanton to Jobs in 2005 resulted in Johnny Ive, Apple’s behind-the-scenes design guru, driving across the San Francisco Bay to Pixar’s converted warehouse headquarters to spend a day consulting on the Eve prototype. Stanton said that it was a “lovefest” with Ive, but that the notoriously tight-lipped design wizard offered few specific modifications. “Apple is so proprietary and so secretive that he couldn’t even really allude to where the future of technology was going,” says Stanton. “The most he could do is nod his head to the things we said we wanted to do.”

I’m honestly not sure whether this should matter at all, but it kinda does, to me anyway. It’s not exactly product placement, but at the same time, it’s a little unsettling that Pixar, to some extent, is looking to Apple to help them define what is futuristic rather than trusting what (until now?) has been a wonderful imagination and vision of their own.

[ Fortune ] VIA [ The Pixar Blog ]

Over the weekend, I stopped by RoboExoticUS, a cocktail robotics festival with Austrian origins and a thriving and mostly functional contingent here in San Francisco. Why cocktail robotics? Besides the obvious (robots + booze = awesome), RoboExotica is billed as “an index for the integration of technological achievements in everyday life, and as a means of documenting the creation of new interfaces for man-machine interaction, a priori dedicated to hedonism.” So, yeah, how about let’s just stick with the robots + booze = awesome, shall we?

The robot in the pic above is Chapek, designed by David Calkins. Chapek is generally proficient at mixing drinks (choose one of four) and insulting humans, although he has an unfortunate tendency to damage himself with (appropriately enough) screwdrivers… Needless to say, orange juice and circuit boards don’t mix.

One bot that worked all too well was El Borracho Espanol, designed by Simone Davalos. It mixed Spanish Coffee, which apparently is best served on fire, so the robot incorporates a giant flamethrower that manages to make the cup blisteringly hot without in fact raising the temperature of the beverage. Oh, and it lights people and furniture on fire too, since the flamethrower doesn’t always shut itself off.

My two favorite bots, after the jump. (Read more…)

We’ve written about the X-47B UCAS a few times here on BotJunkie, but for some reason, we haven’t been able to manage the same level of access as the Discovery channel. Sigh. At least we can enjoy the videos that they produce:

Part 2, after the jump. (Read more…)

The video we took at Maker Faire of a rather graphic encounter between a Ugobe Pleo and a ComBot has made its rounds of the internet, and as you might expect, the response has been somewhat mixed. I have to admit, I can’t really watch it myself, it’s pretty disturbing, especially since it goes on for a long, long time. Pleo is just too cute and friendly for that sort of thing, and I don’t even own one. People who DO own Pleos have been getting seriously upset, and Ugobe has taken notice. I’d like to restate unambiguously for the record that the Pleo in the video was an unsolicited donation by the Ugobe people at Maker Faire, but it now looks like that despite the wave of publicity it provided, Ugobe at large wasn’t particularly pleased with what happened… ugobeSarah posted this response on the PleoWorld Forum:

Hey all,

The folks that were behind this stunt did it without authorization or approval. It seems the prankster spirit overcame them, and FYI, there was quite a ruckus here in the office about it today. Many people were shocked and appalled, including the UGOBE reps at our Maker Faire booth!

We ourselves make emotional bonds with Pleo too!

Thanks for your concern! It is perhaps a small consolation to know that the Pleo destroyed was a factory prototype?

It won’t happen again under our watch!

I’m finding this whole situation pretty fascinating. When it comes right down to it, what’s the difference between the Pleo in the video and the ComBot that destroyed it? They’re both robots that can’t think or feel in the broader sense; they just execute commands based on external stimuli. Sure, Pleo looks cute and all. But more importantly, Pleo is sophisticated enough to get humans to suspend (to some extent) their disbelief in the fact that Pleo is made of servos, circuit boards, and lines and lines of code. We (yes, I’m one of those people) can get emotionally attached to this completely artificial life form and get upset on principle when one of them is needlessly and violently destroyed. It’s not just the emotional attachment, either: it’s the subsequent reminder that underneath Pleo’s cute exterior and adorable personality lie something incomprehensible and alien.

So, keep your skin on, Pleo. Maintain the illusion, because I want to believe that you’re alive.

[ PleoWorld ]

Sylvain Calinon, who we’ve featured on BotJunkie before (twice, in fact), sent us an email talking about some new work from the Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory at EPFL. They’ve been working on robot (controlled with a Wiimote) that can be interactively taught to perform tasks. In this case, the robot is taught to prepare an omelette, which is way WAY more impressive than it sounds. Check it out:

Teaching a robot in this manner can obviously be frustrating at times, but research like this is critical for practical home robotics. Relying on custom programming just isn’t versatile enough for the tasks that robots are going to be asked to do, and interactive (and adaptive!) learning is, after all, how we humans teach ourselves and each other. Ideally, a future iteration of this robot would simply be able to watch you perform a task, and interpolate how to do it itself, or even how to provide meaningful assistance. And even more ideally, they’ll be just as spunky as this little guy.

[ LASA @ EPFL ] (Thanks, Sylvain C.)