Would you like to watch Curiosity pile up sand behind its wheels as it struggles up a slope, this video is about as close as you're likely to get, at least until Curiosity actually lands on Mars. For more, check out the JPLnews channel on YouTube.

A two-armed robot, called Mahoro, jointly developed by Japan's National Institute of Advanced Science and Technology (AIST) and Yaskawa Electric Corporation, and marketed by Nikkyo Technos, Co., Ltd., already being used in labs at pharmaceutical companies and universities, is both faster and more precise than veteran laboratory technicians performing the same repetitive tasks. Using the robot to handle hazardous materials also reduces risk to laboratory personnel. DigInfo TV has more detail.

Direct from their website...

To celebrate their 25th year in business the Boca Bearing Company is giving away over $20,000 in cash and prizes as part of their 2012 Boca Bearing Innovation Contest. Winners will be chosen based on a video submission of their innovative mechanical project that utilizes ball bearings, roller bearings, linear bearings or any form of full ceramic or ceramic hybrid bearings anywhere in the application.

One finalist will be chosen by the voting public each month in 2012 to win an iPad2 ($500 value each). The Grand Prize winner and two Runner Ups will be chosen by Boca Bearings from the monthly finalists. The two Runner Up Finalists will each win their own 3D Printer from Makerbot Industries ($2500 value each). The Grand Prize winner will receive a check for $10,000.

The Boca Bearing Company believes in supporting those individuals or companies with a focus on Art, Science, Technology, Engineering & Math. These are the creative people that push the limits of new technology and will be the drivers of our future economy.

The first video in this playlist is a presentation given last year at the announcement of the event. The rest were taken at the event itself, and show the nature of the competition as well as something of the level of sophistication of the competitors.

Professor Mary-Anne Williams came to robotics through RoboCup. Her background began in computer science, from which she moved to AI, with a primary interest in knowledge representation and reasoning, having done some work in belief revision (how to update a knowledge base when you receive new or contradictory information). In 2001, she attended the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), with which RoboCup was co-located, and was captivated by the Sony AIBO (then used as players in RoboCup soccer). She was also impressed with how much progress there'd been since the first RobotCup, a few years earlier. Returning to Australia, she wanted to see her belief revision algorithms running on a robot, thinking they might improve performance. However, the only way to get an AIBO in 2001 was to actually start a soccer team, so that's what she did. That team placed third the following year and won the competition in 2004. Ms. Williams is a Research Professor at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), Australia. She is also Director of the Innovation and Enterprise Research Laboratory (a.k.a. The Magic Lab), which has come under the umbrella of Quantum Computation & Intelligent Systems at UTS. Her work focuses on cognitive models of decision making and behaviour in complex and dynamic environments, including applications in mobile robotics. In this interview, she talks about her work, her involvement with the International Conference in Social Robotics and the PR2 robot.

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SoftWear Automation, the latest in a string of ventures founded by Steve Dickerson - a retired Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Professor Emeritus at Georgia Institute of Technology - and nurtured by Georgia Tech's startup accelerator, the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), has been awarded a contract for $1.25 Million, by DARPA, to develop automated sewing work-cells, that the company hopes will reinvigorate the domestic garment industry and DARPA hopes will shorten the time from requisition to delivery while lowering costs, as well as reducing reliance on foreign suppliers. (The Department of Defense currently spends about $4 Billion per year on uniforms.) Part of that $1.25 Million will go to Georgia Tech, which is expected to provide considerable support for the development of the technology. The idea for SoftWear Automation began when, in 2007, Professor Dickerson was asked to participate in a seminar on the future of robotics. Danger Room provides perspective, and Gizmag has both more detail and a small gallery of conceptual hardware prototypes.

Tovbot's Shimi made its first public appearance two days ago at Google I/O, where not just one but three Shimis performed in perfect coordination. Tovbot was formed earlier this year by a group of robot researchers and entrepreneurs hailing from Georgia Tech, IDC in Israel, and MIT Media Lab. [Their] goal is to foster a new paradigm of personal robots - robots that don't just clean your floors or your pool, but also interact with you on a personal, almost human level. According to a news item on Georgia Tech's website, Shimi, a musical companion developed by Georgia Tech’s Center for Music Technology, recommends songs, dances to the beat and keeps the music pumping based on listener feedback. Automaton has more detail.

This year's Field Robot Event (FRE 2012) began today and runs through Saturday. I will bring together what reports I am able to find once the dust settles, but meanwhile you can view videos from past years' events by entering "Field Robot Event" in YouTube's search field.

This video is a performance piece incorporating a troupe of 16 quadrotors. It's a very nice way to spend a few minutes.

Researchers at the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering have succeeded in making an artificial fingertip outperform humans in identifying a range of textures. That fingertip, the BioTac® from SynTouch LLC, is a molded elastomeric sleeve with a fingerprint-like pattern on the outside and sensors on the inside, filled with a conductive fluid. What the USC researchers have done is to develop algorithms for interpreting the data produced by the fingertip and for optimizing the movement of the robotic arm or hand on which it is mounted to most efficiently produce useful data. Their findings have been published in Frontiers in Neurorobotics. SynTouch LLC, founded in 2008, is a start-up technology business that develops and manufactures tactile sensors for mechatronic systems. BioTac® sensors are available as an evaluation kit, and also as kits for the BarrettHand and the Shadow hand.

This will be the 10th edition of the Field Robot Event. Organized by Fontys University of Applied Sciences and Wageningen UR (University & Research), it will be held in Venlo, The Netherlands, on the grounds of Floriade 2012.

(PDF of slides from above presentation video about the 2012 Field Robot Event)

In this episode Robots Podcast talks with Dario Floreano about his new role as director of the Swiss National Center of Competence for Research (NCCR) in Robotics which brings together leading experts in the field working at Swiss institutions, including EPFL, ETH Zurich, the University of Zurich, and Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA). NCCR Robotics was launched in December 2010 and will run for up to twelve years. The center aims to develop human­-oriented robots that assist people in their daily lives and improve their quality of life. Their research is currently organized into five projects that they hope will result in new design principles, approaches, and technologies required for the conception and design of human-oriented robots, the materials and components they are made of, and the control methods that enable them to interface and operate with humans. Floreano also shares the latest developments from his Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at EPFL, including flying robots that physically interact with their environment (see previous post) and soft “cells” that can assemble in air.

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Researchers at EPFL, in Switzerland, have developed an aerial system which absorbs the energy of low-speed collisions, rights itself, and resumes flying.

Japanese company DOUBLE Research and Development has developed a three-fingered robotic hand using a single pressure sensor and a single actuator. The linkage through which the fingers are attached to their mount automatically equalizes the pressure applied by each.

Researchers at the Exertion Games Lab at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia have created a robot to support you while exercising. Joggobot is a modified version of the popular AR Drone quadrocopter platform developed by French company Parrot. The robot will track a marker pattern printed on your t-shirt and fly ahead of you when you go out for a run. The researchers describe Joggobot as an "exertion game". They believe that jogging is play - we are not jogging to get from A to B, but for the experience of jogging - and point out that jogging with a physical device that reacts to its environment and, similar to a human jogger, has a limited amount of energy for exercise creates a very different interaction experience than pure audio-visual stimuli such as aerobic videos. They hope that the robot can improve the jogging experience and enhance our understanding of why we jog (and hence why we do not jog enough).

Researchers at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University in the U.S. and the Instituto Superiore di Sanitá in Italy have created a robotic zebrafish that can mix with real zebrafish and influence their behavior. The robot visually resembles an actual zebrafish. It is roughly 15 centimetres long and spray-painted with the zebrafish' characteristic blue stripe pattern. To influence fish behavior, the researchers controlled the robot's tail motion to mimic that of real fish. This new research builds on past projects for mixed robot-animal societies which has tackled chickens and cockroaches. Such mixed societies add a powerful new experimental option to the toolbox of behavioral biologists to understand social interactions between animals, which are usually very difficult to understand by observation alone.

A CSH Lab news release says neuroscientists at the Brain Architecture Project have reached an important milestone. They've released the first installment of the 500 terabytes of data from the whole-brain wiring diagram of a mouse brain. The data is in the form of gigapixel whole-brain slice images. It's possible browse through the brain to the desired 20 micron-thick slice, then view the image, zooming it the level of individual neurons. Most importantly, the image data is being released in an open science initiative, freely available for anyone to view and use in their research. The technical approach used was developed by Partha P. Mitra.

"The pragmatic approach Mitra advocated and which is realized in this first data release, is to image whole mouse brains in a semi-automated, quality-controlled process using light microscopy and injected neural tracers (both viruses and classically used tracer substances). While the basic methodology has been available for some time, systematically applying it to a grid of locations spanning the entire brain, and digitizing and re-assembling the resulting collection of brains, is a new approach made feasible by the rapidly falling costs of computer storage."

For more details see the Mouse Brain Architecture Project Technical White Paper. This is just the first step in the overall brain architecture project. After the mouse brain, there's the Human Brain Architecture project which has the potential to do for the human brain what the human genome project did for our genes.

There's a cool Robotics Trends article on robotics researchers studying how mosquitoes survive flying through rain when every raindrop is 50 times the mass of the mosquito. The idea is to make micro air vehicles that sturdy. The Swirling Brain tells us robot lifeguards are on the way. Nootrix did a post recently in which they speculate about using ROS with the new LEAP gesture sensor. IEEE Spectrum published an interesting piece about educational robotics in Africa. And Slate posted an essay by Dale Dougherty on how we could improve education in the US by replacing standardized testing with a program of teaching kids to do real things, like building robots and rockets. NASA, well known for building robots and rockets, let us know they're ready with their new autonomous robot competition in which teams have built planetery rover style sample return robots. Know any other robot news, gossip, or amazing facts we should report? Send 'em our way please. And don't forget to follow us on twitter.

Robert J. Wood (see also), Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and a Core Member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, and previously mention here in connection with a novel fabrication technique developed by his group at the Harvard Microrobotics Lab, has been awarded an Alan T. Waterman Award. He appears in the above video in an interview format with the interviewer's questions edited out.

Professor Maarja Kruusmaa received her PhD. in Computer Engineering from Chalmers Univeristy of Technology (Gothenburg, Sweden) in 2002. She was appointed head of the Tallinn University of Technology (TUT) Center for Biorobotics in 2008. Her work there includes the Robotic Fish LOcomotion and SEnsing (FILOSE) project, which is the main subject of the first half of her conversation with interviewer Per Sjoborg. Following that she is joined by Diana Saarva, COO of Fits.me a company which produces robotic mannequins that adjust themselves to match the proportions of individual clothing customers, making it possible for them to remotely view how particular garments will look on them. Professor Kruusmaa has served as the R&D Director for Fits.me since 2009.

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