Common Paradox Tech Blog

Lego biped robots are a dime a dozen, even while some look pretty sweet. This one is special: It’s the first walking Lego robot. And, unlike your usual feet-dragging toy robots, it actually walks by raising its feet.

This is definitely not easy to do with Lego or any other material. Maybe this guy should start thinking about building a Big Dog. [Flickr via Brothers Brick]

Kojiro here is the work of Tokyo’s JSK Robotics Laboratory. With his 60 degrees of motion, provided by a network of Super Effective! artificial muscles and tendons, he’ll utterly destroy Asimo in the inevitable slow-motion robot battle in their future.

I say slow motion because, I mean, look at this thing. He’s getting more hand holding help than grandpa at the retirement home. Hell, even grandpa doesn’t need someone fiddling with an original PlayStation controller and a UI to get him to perform basic tasks. Like turning at the waist (see video).

Geezer speed aside, it’s the musculature that’s the takeaway here. Modeled after human muscles, bones, tendons and ligaments, the system is incredibly flexible for a robot, and its 60 degrees of motion bests the aforementioned Asimo by a good 26 degrees. It’s also lighter than your traditional humanoid robot, which designers content will make it more friendly when humans have to interact with it.

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Mental note: Lighter materials also mean one can chuck it farther, perhaps off a cliff, should “more friendly” actually be “more deadly” if and when it goes haywire. [IEEE Spectrum via Engadget]

We’ve come across plenty of robots that were controlled by phones before, but usually those phones were being controlled by human hands. Some California hackers, however, are building bots that put Android to work for their robo-brainpower.

Their first creation, the TruckBot, uses a HTC G1 as a brain and has a chassis that they made for $30 in parts. It’s not too advanced yet—it can use the phone’s compass to head in a particular direction—but they’re working on incorporating the bot more fully with the phone and the Android software. Some ideas they’re kicking around that wouldn’t be possible with a dinky Arduino brain: face and voice recognition and location awareness.

If you’re interested in putting together a Cellbot of your own—can you even conceive of a cooler dock for your Android phone?—the team’s development blog has some more information. The possibilities here are manifold; mad scientists, feel free to share your Android-bot schemes in the comments. [Wired]

Image credit Miran Pavic / Wired.com

Enterprising hobbyists Tim Heath and Ryan Hickman have created cellbots — with names like Tankbot and Truckbot — that are simply robots powered by Android devices.

With just $30, an Android device, and a little creativity the pair were able to create the cellbots which process commands via telnet on PCs. The bots can move around in specified directions thanks to the built-in compass functionally on certain Android phones.

While actual robot activity is minimal, the focus of the project was to utilize Android phones as the brains of the robots. The pair hope to expand robot functionality and make the most of Android’s software. Wired speculates that:

“This means they could utilize every hardware and software component of an Android phone, programming the bot to avoid obstacles, recognize faces and voices, pinpoint its location and go places.”

Heath and Hickman have documented the entire project on their cellbots website, which means that with the right know-how you too could create your own Android-powered robot.

Watch a video of the robots with Android intelligence below:

Reviews: Android

Tags: android, cellbots, robots

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Though it seems like the weather’s warming up now, think back to February when Mother Nature was piling on the snow with callous indifference. Feel that bitter cold on your face, that strain in your lower back. Now meet RoboPlow.

This is the idea that every geek has had, but the guys at IdeaLaboratories were just fed up enough to actually see it through. The RoboPlow sports a 50″ blade, six wheel drive, and a bad attitude when it comes to all things snow.

In fact, watching this formidable machine slice its way through snowbanks, I’m wondering if the RoboPlow isn’t a little too powerful, if we didn’t let this arms race with Mother Nature push us to create a technology that should never have been created. Watching this video and seeing the RoboPlow barrel down the driveway, I felt a nervous feeling in the pit of my stomach that it was just going to keep going into the street, plowing straight on through the traffic.

RoboPlow, like RoboCop before him, has a singular directive. In this case it’s to annihilate snow. But I’m sure somewhere in one of those RoboCop sequels there was a lesson to be learned about the dangers of giving robots too much power.

I really makes you wonder: in a post-snowpocalyptic world, will the RoboPlows have any reason not to plow us? [Reddit]

Hey you! Be all that you can be! Help the U.S. military design an autonomous robot capable of ferrying injured troops from the front lines to safety with little or no help from a human hand:

It’s no joke—direct from the Pentagon comes word that the Army wants someone out there, beyond its secretive five walls and uber secret underground lair, to develop a robot with powerful limbs and grippers that will be able to adapt to “the large number of body positions and types of locations in which casualties can be found.”

Oh, and not that this is a surprise or anything, but the robot also needs to be able to enter, navigate and escape terrain “without prior knowledge” of the geography. Flying blind, so to speak. Finally, if the robot can perform as part of a hive mind, and cooperate with a swarm of other robot rescuers, that’d be just peachy with the military too. You have until March 24 to submit your life-saving ideas. [Pentagon via New Scientist]

Hey you! Be all that you can be! Help the U.S. military design an autonomous robot capable of ferrying injured troops from the front lines to safety with little or no help from a human hand:

It’s no joke—direct from the Pentagon comes word that the Army wants someone out there, beyond its secretive five walls and uber secret underground lair, to develop a robot with powerful limbs and grippers that will be able to adapt to “the large number of body positions and types of locations in which casualties can be found.”

Oh, and not that this is a surprise or anything, but the robot also needs to be able to enter, navigate and escape terrain “without prior knowledge” of the geography. Flying blind, so to speak. Finally, if the robot can perform as part of a hive mind, and cooperate with a swarm of other robot rescuers, that’d be just peachy with the military too. You have until March 24 to submit your life-saving ideas. [Pentagon via New Scientist]