This week's edition of Best Robot Photos of the Week is a special holiday collection of Christmas robots submitted by our readers. We also received one holiday photo made by Hanukkah nanobots. No one posted photos of Kwanzaa bots or Festivus droids this year. Whatever your preferred winter holiday, just remember that Axial Tilt is the reason for the season and enjoy our these photos of holiday robots. Want to see your robot photo here? Post it to flickr and add it to the robots.net flickr group. If you're not a flickr member yet, it's free and easy to sign up. Read on to see the best robot photos of the week!

Yet another brain mapping project has announced some pretty amazing new findings. Researchers at UC Berkeley's Gallant Lab have succeeded in decoding the semantic mapping space in which the brain stores all the information we take in. They've mapped the space both as abstract, multi-dimensional graphics and they've mapped the actual locations where the information nodes are stored in the physical brain. They've learned all sorts of new things about how the brain categorizes things. For example, one semantic dimension (abbreviated PC) of our brain space categorizes things by whether they move - cars, motorcycles, people vs buildings, cities, and the sky. Another dimension distinguishes between things involved in social interaction (people, verbs, furniture) and things involved in less interactive outdoor activities (geological formations, animals, vehicles). They've identified four semantic dimensions so far but believe with higher resolution scans and more work, many more will be revealed.

"Across the cortex, semantic representation is organized along smooth gradients that seem to be distributed systematically. Functional areas defined using classical contrast methods are merely peaks or nodal points within these broad semantic gradients. Furthermore, cortical maps based on the group semantic space are significantly smoother than expected by chance. These results suggest that semantic representation is analogous to retinotopic representation, in which many smooth gradients of visual eccentricity and angle selectivity tile the cortex (Engel, Glover, & Wandell, 1997; Hansen, Kay, & Gallant, 2007). Unlike retinotopy, however, the relevant dimensions of the space underlying semantic representation are not known a priori, and so must be derived empirically"

The mapping of the semantic space onto the brain reveals that as much as 20% of the brain, including parts of the somatosensory and frontal cortices, is devoted to storing these highly organized semantic maps. Less surprisingly, the maps confirm the location of previously established specialized areas. Information about humans, for example, overlaps the fusiform face area (FFA) of the brain which is known to be involved in face recognition. For more see the paper "A continuous semantic space describes the representation of thousands of object and action categories across the human brain" (PDF format). The paper will be in Neuron Vol 76, Iss 6. If you're using a browser such as Google's Chrome that supports WebGL graphics, you can explore an interactive version of the researcher's semantic brain map. And read on to see examples of the semantic space mapped onto the physical brain as well as a short video describing the research.

For the past two weeks the Boston Dynamics LS3 (Legged Squad Support System) robot has been undergoing field tests in the woods of central Virginia with personnel from the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab. DARPA issued a news release with video of LS3 following a marine through real world terrain and responding to voice commands. The four legged robot is designed to carry up to 400 lbs of gear anywhere a squad can go. The robot is semi-autonomous and designed to look out for itself and while keeping up with the marines. The tests seem to have positive results, Lt. Col. Joseph Hitt of DARPA reports:

"This was the first time DARPA and MCWL were able to get LS3 out on the testing grounds together to simulate military-relevant training conditions. The robot’s performance in the field expanded on our expectations, demonstrating, for example, how voice commands and 'follow the leader' capability would enhance the robot’s ability to interact with warfighters. We were able to put the robot through difficult natural terrain and test its ability to right itself with minimal interaction from humans.”

Read on to see the video, which includes shots of the robot following a soldier through the woods and being intentionally forced into situations where it will stumble. At times the robot has to run to keep up, while climbing hills, slogging through mud, and following a soldier through a maze of shipping containers.

Berkeley Lab reports the creation of a powerful microscale actuator that can deliver three orders of magnitude greater force per weight than human muscles. The tiny actuators are only about 100 microns in size and made from vanadium dioxide. They could potentially replace less-powerful piezoelectric actuators, which are complicated to make and require toxic materials. From the abstract of the researcher's report:

Here we demonstrate a set of microactuators fabricated by a simple microfabrication process, showing simultaneously high performance by these metrics, operated on the structural phase transition in vanadium dioxide responding to diverse stimuli of heat, electric current, and light. In both ambient and aqueous conditions, the actuators bend with exceedingly high displacement-to-length ratios up to 1 in the sub-100 μm length scale, work densities over 0.63 J/cm3, and at frequencies up to 6 kHz. The functionalities of actuation can be further enriched with integrated designs of planar as well as three-dimensional geometries. Combining the superior performance, high durability, diversity in responsive stimuli, versatile working environments, and microscale manufacturability, these actuators offer potential applications in microelectromechanical systems, microfluidics, robotics, drug delivery, and artificial muscles.

More details can be found in the paper, Giant-Amplitude, High-Work Density Microactuators with Phase Transition Activated Nanolayer Bimorphs (PDF format) and the Physical Review Letters report, "Decoupling of Structural and Electronic Phase Transition in VO₂" (PDF format). Additional information can be found on the Berkeley Lab's Wu Group webpage. To see some cool video of the microactuators actuating, read on.

Jan Scheuermann was diagnosed with spinocerebellar degeneration in 1996. As the connection between her brain and muscles degenerated, she lost any ability to move. In 2011 she saw a video of a UPMC research study that interfaced a robot arm to the brain of Tim Hemmes, another quadriplegic. She called immediately and said, "sign me up!" On Monday, UPMC issued a news release with her results.

Before three months had passed, she also could flex the wrist back and forth, move it from side to side and rotate it clockwise and counter-clockwise, as well as grip objects, adding up to what scientists call 7D control. In a study task called the Action Research Arm Test, Ms. Scheuermann guided the arm from a position four inches above a table to pick up blocks and tubes of different sizes, a ball and a stone and put them down on a nearby tray. She also picked up cones from one base to restack them on another a foot away, another task requiring grasping, transporting and positioning of objects with precision.

Two 96 channel intracortical microelectrodes were implanted to provide the brain-computer interface with the 7 DoF robot arm. More technical details can found in the paper, "High performance neuroprosthetic control by an individual with tetraplegia" (pay-walled) and in the NIH Study description. See also the UPMC photo gallery. Jan herself was less interested in the technical details than in the pleasure of being able to move a limb for the first time in eight years. And she had a goal in mind. "I’m going to feed myself chocolate before this is over," she said when the study started. Read on to see the video of her eating chocolate.

Every week we post a collection of the best robot photos submitted by our readers to our robots.net flickr group. Why? Because everyone likes to see cool new robots! This week's collection includes several well-known robots such as the Asimo, iCub, Nao and even a miraculous appearance of Crow T Robot. There's a blurrycam photo of a mysterious legged planetary robot prototype. Plus a few art robots too! Want to see your robot here? Post it to flickr and add it to the robots.net flickr group. It's easy! If you're not already a flickr member, it's free and easy to sign up. Read on to see the best robot photos of the week!

In Robots Podcast episode 119, reporter Per talks with Ian Bernstein about the hugely successful Sphero robot and the company he co-founded, Orbotix. A hardware tinkerer from a young age, Bernstein became involved with BEAM Robot Games. First attending New Mexico Tech then Colorado State University, he decided to start his own company after the options available at a career fair all bored him. In 2010, realizing the technology in smart phones far surpassed that being used in most consumer robots and wondering why those phones couldn't be used to control robots, he and cofounder Adam Wilson participated in an intensive, three-month program sponsored by startup accelerator TechStars, which helped them define and design their product, and helped them establish contacts through which they were able to find funding and a production facility they could work with. Sphero, the result of this process, is not just a product by a platform with its own growing ecosystem.

Read On | Tune In

First up this week, Pololu Robotics is having another sale, this one in honor of 12/12/12 and running through the end of the month. Lots of cool bargains from 12% to 50% off, so check it out! Casey let us know about his ATOMS Express Toys kickstarter campaign, a set of modular robotics actuators and sensors for LEGOs. Even cooler is an IndieGogo campaign for a palm-sized UAV based on a dragonfly and developed by robotics researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In less fun robot news, NYU student Josh Begley is tweeting every US Drone strike since 2002 and observers have noticed a distriburbing trend toward "double tap" strikes - that's a second strike on the same target shortly after the first to kill emergency responders. This is usually considered a war crime or terrorist act. After last month's story on the Human Rights Watch group's concern about autonomous killer robots, the DoD issued a new directive that says any autonomous robots "shall be designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force" but denied any connection to the HRW report. Back to fun stuff, The Swirling Brain tipped us off to a Gizmodo story with video showing a "phallic UAV get all grabby with its scary six-foot arm". He also sent stories on a creepy Biomimetic robot with muscles and bones. Know any other robot news, gossip, or amazing facts we should report? Send 'em our way please. Don't forget to follow us on twitter and Facebook. And now you can add us to your Google+ circles too.

MIT posted an article on the MIT Marine Robotic Team which serves as a good introduction to the group if you're not familiar with them. The team works on gliders, rafts, ROVs, AUVs, and other marine robots. The group is introducing future engineers to marine engineering and collaborates with other MIT groups such as the Society for Women Engineers and Keys to Empowerment Youth. A recent project allowed them to travel to Ketchikan, Alaska:

During their time in Alaska, the team also worked with middle school students and teachers by helping with a program called SeaGlide. The goal of SeaGlide is to introduce students to underwater vehicles and teach them how to create mini-gliders using water bottles and an arduino.

The article details the experiences of Jackie Sly, Adrian Tanner, and other team members as they focus on developing autonomous glider robots that will be used to detect oil plumes and ocean currents. For more details see the MIT article about the team.

There's a new Robot iPad app out for robot fans. It was designed by the folks at IEEE Spectrum magazine and should appeal to anyone who's interested in robots. It's got lots of photos and video of cool robots that even kids will enjoy watching. There are also interviews with well-known roboticists that older, geekier iPad users may enjoy. Erico Guizzo, the robotics editor of IEEE Spectrum magazine writes:

I've been following your stories on robots.net for a long time, even before I started writing about robots at IEEE! Just wanted to let you know about an iPad app we're launching today, featuring 126 robots from 19 countries, with 360-degree views, interactive animations, hundreds of photos and videos, and more.

Rodney Brooks also gives the app his seal approval, saying it's a "state-of-the-art app with an incredible collection of robots including many of my old, dear friends". You can't beat that recommendation. It's almost enough to make me want to buy an Apple product. Ha, just kidding! Maybe an Android version is in the works? You can grab the Robots app from itunes for just $1.99 right now if you want to try it out. Read on to see some video of the Robots app in action.

It just wouldn't be Christmas without our annual top 10 list of the best Christmas gifts in the world for your favorite robot geek. Our three founding editors, steve, Rog-a-Matic, and The Swirling Brain spend most of the year on their in-depth analysis of robot gifting trends; processing mountains of statistical data and comparing thousands of robot components, all to present you with the most complete and accurate list of the best possible robot-related gifts. Or at least that's what they'd like you to think. Actually the selection process involves some late night Googling and a cup of really hot tea (the brownian motion used to prime the robot gift improbability generator). Anyway, our regular readers know how it works by now. A list of the ten best robot gifts we can think of for 2012, in ascending order of predicted roboticist desirability. Read on to see the list!

Every week we post a collection of the best robot photos submitted by our readers to our robots.net flickr group. Why? Because everyone likes to see cool new robots! This week's collection includes a fleet of quadcopters at Max Plank Institute, MIT's now retired Kismet robot, some art bots, movie bots, and a vintage robot or two. Want to see your robot here? Post it to flickr and add it to the robots.net flickr group. It's easy! If you're not already a flickr member, it's free and easy to sign up. Read on to see the best robot photos of the week!

Alan Turing, who probably got there first no matter how exotic your approach to artificial intelligence, once had the idea of "unorganized machines". He was thinking of possible ways that the initial neural networks might form a newborn baby's brain. One of his ideas was a collection of initially random logic gates that cold self-organize or be trained for particular tasks over time. He saw this as a possible approach to realize intelligent machines. We could implement such an idea today in hardware or software but what about using chemistry? This is exactly what researchers at the Unconventional Computing Group at the University of the West of England are doing. As described in their recent paper, "Toward Turing's A-Type Unorganized Machines in an Unconventional Substrate: A Dynamic Representation in Compartmentalised Excitable Chemical Media" (PFD format):

Collision-based computing exploits the interaction of moving elements and their mutual effects upon each other’s movement wherein the presence or absence of elements at a given point in space and time can be interpreted as computation. Collision-based computing is here envisaged within recurrent networks of BZ vesicles, i.e., based upon the movement and interaction of waves of excitation within and across vesicle membranes ... A-type unorganised machines can therefore be envisaged within networks of BZ vesicles using the three-vesicle construct for the NAND gate nodes, together with chains of vesicles to form the connections between them.

The BZ (Belousov Zhabotinsky) medium is a chemical concoction of sulphuric acid, sodium bromated, cyclohexadione, and a few other chemicals, the result is pictured above. Think of it as a collection of bubbles that form something like neural networks where the signals are waves passing through the points where the bubbles touch, forming logic gates and other types of circuits. Researchers have described lots of common logic components including AND, NAND, NOR XOR, inverters, adders, and more. They've formed memory circuits and other more complex circuits. An interesting overview of the logic gates can be found in a set of slides from the talk, Neural Isomorphisms of Adaptive Belousov Zhabotinsky Encapsulated Vesicles (PFD format). So who knows, instead of robots with positronic brains, we may end up with robots who have chemicals sloshing around in their heads! (and does BZ remind anyone else of the Mathmos from Barbarella?)

Time for our weekly roundup of robots stories you've sent us. Tim Smith reminded us that ROS, the open source robot operating system, celebrated a five year anniversary last month. Robotics Business Review posted an update on Kevin Warwick, the well-known professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading. CMU's Robotics Institute has launched a new robot news website called Robot Radar which will feature experts putting mainstream media robot news into perspective. Mainstream media like The New Yorker, who asked in a recent article whether your driversless car should drive off the road and kill you to save a busload of children. A recent MIT study discovered the unsurprising fact that flying a teleoperated drone mostly consists of long periods of boredom. The The Swirling Brain told us about a new SyFy show which will feature humanoid boxing "robots" (well, robot-looking kinetic sculptures or something anyway). He also pointed out an interest new Honda robot called Hearbo that is designed to interpret ambient sound much like humans, listening for voices or other recognizable sounds and pinpointing them in space. Know any other robot news, gossip, or amazing facts we should report? Send 'em our way please. Don't forget to follow us on twitter and Facebook. And now you can add us to your Google+ circles too.

We've reported on a lot of large-scale brain simulations in the past including a partial mouse brain, a rat neocortex and (maybe) a cat brain. None of those simulation actually did anything. Their goal was to simulate the neural network but nothing more. SPAUN is something different. The name stands for Semantic Pointer Architecture: Unified Network. The SPAUN simulation is described in the recently published paper, SPAUN: A Perception-Cognition-Action Model Using Spiking Neurons (PDF format). One of the authors, Chris Eliasmith, has a book coming out soon that details the Semantic Pointer Architecture (SPA) in more detail and describes its basis in the Neural Engineering Framework (NEF). From the paper:

We present a large-scale cognitive neural model called Spaun (Semantic Pointer Architecture: Unified Network), and show simulation results on 6 tasks (digit recognition, tracing from memory, serial working memory, question answering, addition by counting, and symbolic pattern completion). The model consists of 2.3 million spiking neurons whose neural properties, organization, and connectivity match that of the mammalian brain. Input consists of images of handwritten and typed numbers and symbols, and output is the motion of a 2 degree-of-freedom arm that writes the model’s responses. Tasks can be presented in any order, with no “rewiring” of the brain for each task. Instead, the model is capable of internal cognitive control (via the basal ganglia), selectively routing information throughout the brain and recruiting different cortical components as needed for each task.

As with any model, it's not as cool as the real thing. In SPAUN's case, the model doesn't learn synaptic connection wegiths, those were derived by the researchers. The SPAUN simulation has only a single fixed "eye" and a single two-jointed arm. Further, SPAUN can only perform tasks related to series or lists of numbers. Still SPAUN is an entire working neural system that includes visual perception, cognition, and motor action, which represents a useful advance in the field of brain simulation. Continued work on this type of model will undoubtedly shed more light on human cognition as well as robotics and AI. And you knew we couldn't stop with just a description of something this cool, so read on to see some videos of SPAUN actually doing its thing.

Thomas Bräunl is Professor at the University of Western Australia and leader of the Robotics & Automation Lab. He tells us about the first MAGIC Challenge (Multi Autonomous Ground-Robotics International Challenge) that took place in 2010 in Adelaide, South Australia.

Read On | Tune In

A National Science Foundation news release profiles research being done at BEACON, an NSF center for the study of evolution in action. The "in action" part is the key to their work, as noted in the news release:

Evolution is not just something from the past. It also happens in real time. Bacteria mutate and resist antibiotics. Viruses reinvent themselves and elude new medications. Animals adapt their behavior in response to a changing planet. "It's not that what we're doing won't shed light on evolution over millions of years, but we also are able to study things we can actually observe with our eyes," says Erik Goodman. "We are looking at evolution in the real world."

Robots and AI software that use evolutionary algorithms play a key role in helping researchers to understand and duplicate what they see happening in nature. As they learn about evolution and computational biology, the researchers are also making some interesting advances in robot software itself, as in the work they've done in evolving robot behavior and evolution of cooperation in artficial systems. Their website is full of articles that will be of interest to roboticists and AI developers and includes plenty of introductory level topics like Evolution 101: Neuroevolution. Part of the NFS funding also goes to working with high school students and university students. Read on to see a video interview in which BEACON's principle researcher talks about his long term artificial evolution project. While not directly related to the robotics aspect, this work led to his interest in digital organisms and computation biology at BEACON.

It's been a few years since we posted an update on the DARPA Programmable Matter program. They've been funding a project at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms. The result is the Milli-Motein, a self-folding chain of one centimeter robotic modules based on proteins and powered by newly the invented Electropermanent Wobble Stepper Motor. The resulting 4 segment long prototype can transform from a straight line into any desired shape in 5 seconds. According to the researchers at MIT:

"The Milli-Motein is functional as programmable matter, able to reconfigure itself into several shapes on command. As far as we know, it is the highest-resolution chain-type programmable matter system built to date."

At present the Milli-Moteins can barely lift their own weight. So they are still a long way from Transformers or liquid metal Terminators but they still show some amazing potential. Just compare today's news to our story on DARPA's 2009 Programmable Matter milestone. You can learn more about the Milli-Motein project from the original research paper, Programmable Assembly with Universally Foldable Strings (Moteins) (PDF format) and from the more recent paper describing in great detail the Milli-Motein hardware and functionality, The Milli-Motein: A Self-Folding Chain of Programmable Matter with a One Centimeter Module Pitch (PDF format). Read on to see video of the Milli-Moteins in action as well graphics of the Wobble Motor design and an exploded diagram of a single Motein.

Every week we post a collection of the best robot photos submitted by our readers to our robots.net flickr group. Why? Because everyone likes to see cool new robots! This week's collection includes, coincidentally, several alcohol related robots. There's a drunk graffiti robot, a Taiwan Beer display robot, even a collection of flasks bearing robot artwork. There's also the usual assortment of walking, flying, and rolling robots, both real and artistic. Want to see your robot here? Post it to flickr and add it to the robots.net flickr group. It's easy! If you're not already a flickr member, it's free and easy to sign up. Read on to see the best robot photos of the week!

Bernard Froment sent us info about MOSAIC, his collaborative open hardware project to develop service robots. Speaking of service robots, Shannon let us know that the 2013 International Robotics Summit (Innorobo) for service robotics is coming up March 19-21 in Lyon, France. We noticed a tutorial on PID control for robots using an Arduino (it looks to be in Portuguese but that's what Google translate is for). The Open Hardware news site, FreeIO.org mentioned an interesting interview with Catarina Mota. Roboter Soong told us about the company he co-founded, Makeblock, which makes components for robot construction. Remember those killer robots we were talking about earlier this week? One of the X-47B prototypes was hoisted onto a Navy aircraft carrier for its first carrier take off and landing trials. NASA, meanwhile, has been busy reconsidering the advantages of analog vs digital electronics and produced an analog microchip that can perform Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) calculations super fast using only a few transistors where the equivalent digital circuit would require thousands; this could revolutionize onboard processing for space probes. The Swirling Brain sent a link to Toshiba's newest robot, which is designed to enter radioactive nuclear power plants that are too hot for humans. Know any other robot news, gossip, or amazing facts we should report? Send 'em our way please. Don't forget to follow us on twitter and Facebook. And now you can add us to your Google+ circles too.