weirdmachines

The uncanny valley is a concept invented by Mori explaining the connection between the similarity between a robot and a human and the comfort or familiarity of the experience.

James Portnow and Daniel Floyd explain the uncanny valley in this excellent video and make some suggestions of how it can be related to modern computer games.

Another step to become a Cyborg has been introduced by the Japanese company Honda this week. The system helps people walking or crouching by taking away some of the stress from the muscles. It is still in the prototype phase but should soon come on the market in Japan. It is targeted at elderly people or workers with a job that involves a lot of walking or crouching (e.g. in a factory).

And here is the video, how to walk like Asimo, …weird…fits this blog then.

This huge spider appeared last night at a building in Liverpool. People suffering from Arachnophobia should better stay at home for a few weeks, since this machine will walk the city soon for an exhibit. “La Princess” has been built by French company “La Machine”, weighs 37 tons and is 15 meters long.
Apparently, it is controlled by 12 people, but you never know…

Professor Ng and his students have developed a technique to teach model helicopters acrobatic flight manoevers by “watching” an expert pilot fly. The news can already be found here. Watching does not mean that the helicopter flies after his teacher, but that the remote control information together with motion data of the helicopter is recorded and then used as learning data for a computer steering the autonomous heli. Cool stuff.

Cool hack, but maybe it would be more fun as a multiplayer game.

Hilarious! When you thought mankind was doomed after the previous post, watch this.

The makers of Rhex, Boston Dynamics, have released a new video of their Big Dog. It’s amazing how lifelike and adaptive this robot can walk. Why couldn’t a non-military project come up with this?

WowWee is going to release several new robots: A FemiSapien who is in line with their popular home toy robot RoboSapien, but hopefully displays less neandertalian behaviour such as burping and farting. It will be interesting to find out if FemiSapien is also designed deliberately for hardware hacking. The other new robot from WowWee is a TriBot with holonomic wheels. This seems as a step back compared with the legged RoboSapien, but will allow for fast omnidirectional movements.

Rumours say that Sony will come out with a new version of the Aibo robot dog. The robot comes together with Sony’s Playstation 3, and will be a real-world extension of a virtual avatar that can be steered and controlled with the Playstation. I don’t think this is completely implausible, since connecting virtual and real world was the key to the success of Nintendo’s Wii. However, steering the new Aibo with a standard Playstation controller cross might not be that fun.

The rumour has been spread in the latest edition of the Stuff Magazine.

Most people are familiar with the -science fiction- idea of emotionally expressive robots. The best example is probably Marvin, the depressed robot from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide through the Galaxy. Having emotionally expressive computers or other emotionally expressive every-day devices is a new idea.
RoCo, the world’s first expressive computer invented by Cynthia Breazeal and Rosalind Picard, has a monitor for a head and a simple LCD screen for a face. The screen has two degrees of freedom and a camera to observe the user. A film of RoCo in action can be found here.
It is, however, not sufficient to show just any emotion. The device has to be adaptive to the user’s mood and needs. A depressive computer can make the most enthusiastic person unmotivated, and an always happy computer (best negative example: Microsoft’s little helper) makes you even angrier if you already are.