Thursday, August 6, 2009

Saturday, August 1, 2009

Electron Eyes

One of the challenges when working with electronics is that you can't see the electrons you are trying to control. An oscilloscope is a device which monitors electronic signals and displays a visual representation so you can can see what your circuit is doing. Many electronic hobbyists and students avoid buying an oscilloscope because they are known to be big, expensive and complicated. The Parallax Oscilloscope uses the power of your desktop or notebook computer to provide all the 'scope features you need for typical robotics debugging at an amazingly affordable price under $140. Like most Parallax products this oscilloscope is surprisingly easy to use considering its power. If you want some help getting started, order the Understanding Signals course which includes the oscilloscope, a great textbook and experiment parts.

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Boe-Bot Sale $149.99 (Serial Version)

Boe-Bot is one of our best selling robot kits because it provides everything you need to get started in robotics including parts, software and books. We have a limited supply of serial and USB Boe-Bots available at a great special price. Act now. This special won't last long.

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Ethernet I/O Module

Now in stock! The new EtherIO24 gives you the capability to distribute digital control equipment anywhere you can reach with an Ethernet cable or wireless network. Since the EtherIO24 uses industry standard connections and protocols you can use almost any PC, workstation or network host as a controller for robotic or industrial automation applications. The EtherIO24 is supported by a family of peripheral I/O boards that make connections a snap.

If your applications don't need the power of Ethernet we also offer a family of USB modules to provide similar capabilities within the range of industry standard USB cabling.

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Become a Robotics Genius

123 Robotics Experiments for the Evil Genius by Myke Predko is a great tutorial and reference book for readers who want to learn about real robotics without getting bogged down in theory or math. The book covers a broad range of robotics topics including mechanical constructions, motors, electronics and programming using the Parallax Basic stamp. The book uses a hands-on approach so that you can begin building right away as you read the book. Most topics are covered in 2 or three pages that includes a short "plain English" explanation of the technology followed by detailed building and debugging instructions. The book is a great cover-to-cover read for beginners and a handy reference for more advanced builders.

The book covers so much ground that collecting all the parts needed for the experiments can be a major challenge. To make that job easier, we have assembled
parts kits to accompany the book.

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Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Science Video

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The Future Of Robots
Computer Scientists Program Robots To Play Soccer, Communicate With Bees

July 1, 2008 — Engineers built humanoid robots that can recognize objects by color by processing information from a camera mounted on the robot's head. The robots are programmed to play soccer, with the intention of creating a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots able to compete against a championship human team by 2050. They have also designed tiny robots to mimic the communicative "waggle dance" of bees.

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A world of robots may seem like something out of a movie, but it could be closer to reality than you think. Engineers have created robotic soccer players, bees and even a spider that will send chills up your spine just like the real thing.

They're big ... they're strong ... they're fast! Your favorite big screen robots may become a reality.

"The idea of the robot is that it can walk, it can see things because it has a video camera on top," Raul Rojas, Ph.D., professor of artificial intelligence at Freie University in Berlin, Germany, told Ivanhoe.

Using the camera mounted on her head, Lola recognizes objects by color. The information from the camera is then processed in this microchip, which activates different motors.

"And using this camera it can locate objects on the floor for example a red ball, go after the ball and try to score a goal," Dr. Rojas said. A robot with a few tricks up her sleeve.

German engineers have also created a bee robot. Covered with wax so it's not stung by others, it mimics the 'waggle' dance -- a figure eight pattern for communicating the location of food and water.

"Later what we want to prove is that the robot can send the bees in any decided direction using the waggle dance," Dr. Rojas said.

Robots like this could one day become high-tech surveillance tools that secretly fly and record data ... and a robot you probably won't want to see walking around anytime soon? The spider-bot.

ABOUT ROBOTICS: Robots are made of roughly the same components as human beings: a body structure with moveable joints; a muscle system outfitted with motors and actuators to move that body structure; a sensory system to collect information from the surrounding environment; a power source to activate the body; and a computer "brain" system to process sensory information and tell the muscles what to do. Robots are manmade machines intended to replicate human and animal behavior. Roboticists can combine these basic elements with other technological innovations to create some very complex robotic systems. There are plenty of robots doing manual work on factory assembly lines, but while those machines can manipulate objects, they do the same thing, along the same path, every time. Other robots are designed to play soccer, or to drive vehicles without human input.

ABOUT A.I.: Robots and computer networks are always evolving intelligent consciousness in popular science fiction. But while modern scientists have made great strides in building computers that can mimic logical thought, they still haven't cracked the code of human emotion and consciousness. There are two prevailing schools of thought on artificial intelligence. Proponents of "strong AI" consider that all human thought can be broken down into a set of mathematical operations. They expect that they will one day be able to replicate the human mind and create a robot capable of both thinking and feeling, with a sense of self -- the stuff of classic science fiction. Think of the robot Number Five from the 80s movie Short Circuit, who suddenly realized, frightened, that he could be "disassembled" by the scientists who made him. "Weak AI" proponents expect that human thought and emotion can only be simulated by computers. A computer might seem intelligent, but it is not aware of what it is doing, with no sense of self or consciousness.

Scientists make robots more human

ROBOTS TAKE REALISM TO NEW LEVEL

David Hanson's robots can creep people out. Their heads are so lifelike, their skin so textured and realistic, that Candy Sidner, a competing roboticist, called his Albert Einstein robot "spookily cool ... a giant step forward."

Hanson, who started his career as an artist and spent time working in Disney's Imagineering Lab, said he flirts with being too realistic for comfort. His work, he said, "poses an identity challenge to the human being."

"If you make it perfectly realistic, you trigger this body-snatcher fear in some people," he said. "Making realistic robots is going to polarize the market, if you will. You will have some people who love it and some people who will really be disturbed."

Hanson's robotics company in Dallas is the flip side of an industry focused on making robots more human on the inside. Hanson makes "conversational character robots." They are mostly human-looking heads using a skin-like material that he invented called Frubber. They are battery-powered, walk and are expressive, but from the neck down they don't look human at all.

The issue of being too human-looking is called "uncanny valley" syndrome, and Hanson embraces it with the passion and line-crossing of an avant-garde artist, which he also is.

Hanson made a robot head modeled on his own, but it wasn't for use as a robot. It was part of an art show where he made his self-portrait robot a "large homeless robot figure in a box." The idea was to go out of the "comfort zone" of science, he said.

But Hanson is also a businessman who is designing entertainment robots for the home. He hopes to have two-foot robots with human-looking heads that are more cartoonish than uncannily accurate that can dance, make eye contact, talk and recognize your face. The idea is to price them at $3,000 and get them on the market in about a year.

"It would be very much like Astro Boy in the old TV series," Hanson said.

By Seth Borenstein, The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — George the robot is playing hide-and-seek with scientist Alan Schultz. George whirrs and hides behind a post until he's found.

Then a bit later, he hunts for and finds Schultz hiding.

If that sounds childish, consider that Schultz is working his way up to teaching the robot to play Capture the Flag.

What's so impressive about robots playing children's games?

For a robot to actually find a place to hide, and then hunt for its human playmate is a new level of human interaction. The machine must take cues from people and behave accordingly.

This is the beginning of a real robot revolution: giving robots some humanity.

"Robots in the human environment, to me that's the final frontier," said Cynthia Breazeal, robotic life group director at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The human environment is as complex as it gets; it pushes the envelope."

'NOVA SCIENCE NOW': Learn more about Breazeal and her robot work from the PBS show

Robotics is moving from software and gears operating remotely — Mars, the bottom of the ocean or assembly lines — to finally working with, beside and even on people.

"Robots have to understand people as people," Breazeal said. "Right now, the average robot understands people like a chair: It's something to go around."

The researchers who are injecting humanity into robotics are creating robots that can connect with humans in a more "thoughtful" way. They are building robot receptionists and robot physical therapists. They are finishing work on Huggable, a teddy bear robot line that will help monitor the mental and physical health of sick children for only a few thousand dollars apiece. Robots are coaxing autistic kids out of their shells. And there's a cute penguin robot, Mel, that makes eye contact with people and nods when they talk.

The places we will first see these robots are in the most human-oriented fields — those that require special care in dealing with the elderly, young and disabled.

That's why George's game is important. As a machine, George is not a breakthrough. He's an off-the-shelf robot reprogrammed at the Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence, which Schultz directs.

George moves with a bulky red wheel base and binoculars that gaze around the room below a computer screen with an animated face — complete with blinking blue eyes. What's different is the way he interacts with people.

"George, go hide," Schultz orders the robot in a cluttered room at the naval research lab. George's "head" rotates around several times. Computer codes zip by on the monitor as George is thinking.

Finally, George announces in a mechanical, definitely non-human voice: "I will hide now."

He ducks behind some boxes and declares: "I made it to the goal."

Schultz finds George easily. George has a harder time spotting Schultz, but eventually succeeds.

For a child, this is nothing, but for a robot this should lead to a lot.

"We have only scratched the surface," said Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab director who won the Defense Department's Grand Challenge for a self-driving robot car through the desert last year. He predicted that 10 years from now robots will roam the health care system and that in our homes, multi-armed robots will be doing the cleaning. "There will be a lot of personalized devices," he says.

That's a big switch. The latest commercial home robots — the $280 vacuuming iRobot Roomba, with more than 2 million of the disc-shaped devices sold, and its floor-cleaning cousins — are designed to work best when people leave the room. But the promise of robots for scientists is represented by Rosie, the vacuuming robot of "The Jetsons" cartoon series, who dutifully works as Jane blithely walks by.

"If Rosie is going to be around and in your face, it would be good if the interaction is natural and easy," says Rod Brooks, director of MIT's artificial intelligence lab.

So after spending decades tinkering with wiring, some roboticists — a usually male and techno-geek-heavy field — did the unthinkable. They put aside their hardware and software, and studied how humans think, work together and communicate so they could apply that to robots.

The new field of human-robot interaction was born. Unlike the rest of robotics, many of its leaders are women. It has social scientists, language specialists, medical doctors and even ethicists who wonder if putting robots into places like nursing homes is the right thing to do.

That's a big change from 50 years ago, when the field of artificial intelligence was created at a forum at Dartmouth University. The experts focused on puzzles and chess and skipped over concepts such as perception, a sense of where you are, what's around you and how to interact.

"They all thought perception was easy — a 2-year-old could do that — but smart people play chess," said Brooks, co-founder of iRobot Corp. "They all missed it and Hollywood missed it. The stuff a 2-year-old could do, that's the hard stuff."

One preschooler-type skill, the ability to take someone else's perspective, "turned out to be a very important capability that we needed on our robots so that they could really work comfortably with humans," said Schultz.

Thus, Schultz hopes in the next year or so to have a robot that could, like an old-time movie detective working a case, tail a person walking through the naval research lab campus unseen.

Similarly, researchers are working on teaching language-reasoning — not just dumping a dictionary in the robot's database — gestures and eye contact so robots can understand the many ways people communicate. At NASA, astronauts are working with Schultz and a spacewalking-prototype called Robonaut to make machines understand when an astronaut points to something and says "there."

We as humans understand that, but getting robots to put those clues together is proving to be a big leap, he said. And then there are subtle clues that humans pick up without even knowing it, such as nods and eye contact.

Research scientist Candy Sidner at the Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab in Cambridge, Mass., found that people respond better to more animated robots — those that nod, move and point. So she developed Mel, a pointing, nodding penguin robot. You nod at Mel, Mel nods back.

"It's absolutely very compelling. People tell me, 'I like Mel because he's really kind of cute,'" Sidner said.

How should a robot look? There's debate on that. On one extreme are the stroke-therapy robots of MIT scientists Neville Hogan and Hermano Igo Krebs. Those look like exercise machines with video game screens. They guide the arms and legs of paralyzed stroke patients through physical therapy, and the patients don't even realize they are robots.

On the other end of the spectrum are David Hanson of Dallas and Osaka University's professor Hiroshi Ishiguro whose robots look creepily human. Ishiguro's robot Geminoid looks just like Ishiguro.

Such uncanny resemblances have led roboticists to coin the term "uncanny valley" syndrome. It suggests that people respond better to robots the closer they resemble humans — up to a point. If the resemblance is too good, people "are weirded out," Sidner said. At that point, acceptance plummets. That's why Sidner prefers her penguin robot.

Sherry Turkle at MIT worries about robots that seem too human.

"We're cheap dates," she says. "If an entity makes eye contact with you, if an entity reaches toward you in friendship, we believe there is somebody there ... But that doesn't mean that there is. That just means that our Darwinian buttons are being pushed."

Turkle, who directs the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, fears people will be subconsciously tricked into giving robots more credit than they deserve. Her point is that when you are sick, hurt, or elderly, "you really do want a person," not a robot.

Unfortunately, there's a shortage of people working in nursing homes and caring for old people and the disabled, said Maja Mataric, director of the University of Southern California's Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems. The average stroke victim gets 39 minutes of active exercise a day when six hours a day is needed, she said, so robots can free up the few nurses for more nurturing activities.

Mataric adjusts her robots' personalities to fit the needs of stroke patients — nurturing buddy or goal-pushing coach.

And in the case of low-functioning autistic children, they actually seem to relate better to robots than humans, Mataric said. "You'll see a child smile that has never smiled before. No one knows why it happens."

The scientists trying to engineer robots to work with humans are learning more than they expected. They have a new appreciation for our own unique abilities.

Said Deb Roy, director of MIT's Cognitive Machines Group: "It's not until you try to build a machine that does the same task (that people do) ... that you realize how incredibly hard it is."

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Saturday, August 1, 2009

Electron Eyes

Boe-Bot Sale $149.99 (Serial Version)

Ethernet I/O Module

Become a Robotics Genius

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Science Video

The Future Of Robots
Computer Scientists Program Robots To Play Soccer, Communicate With Bees

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Thursday, August 6, 2009

Saturday, August 1, 2009

Electron Eyes

Boe-Bot Sale $149.99 (Serial Version)

Ethernet I/O Module

Become a Robotics Genius

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Science Video

The Future Of Robots Computer Scientists Program Robots To Play Soccer, Communicate With Bees

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The Future Of Robots
Computer Scientists Program Robots To Play Soccer, Communicate With Bees