Look ma, I made a robot

"I wanna hire the guy that makes the machine that makes Pop-Tarts," says Chase Dudley, co-founder of Beyond Theory. The idea is that the Pop-Tart machine "just goes all day and cranks out Pop-Tarts.""For us, one of the main concerns is reliability," says Chase's partner and co-founder, Shane Adams. "To have a functional device is great. But it's not great when it breaks." Especially when the device is your arm. The goal, he says, is to create a robotic device that's as consistent and manipulable as the human arm itself. "Can this be used 22 hours straight?" he asks rhetorically. Not yet, but that's the goal.Just ask Siddhartha Srinivasa, an associate professor in Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, who oversees the Home Exploring Robot Butler project.

Although the immediate goal is to design a machine that can perform "challenging manipulation tasks in places where people live and work," the broader goal is to create a robot that can exist and interact seamlessly with a human environment. A robot that can tell when it's bumping into someone, for instance. Or that can find and retrieve a milk carton from the refrigerator. A robot that can be, in a sense, human. Srinivasa says HERB's not there quite yet. But that's the goal."No one really knows what the robot of the future is going to look like," Srinivasa says. "And that's the beauty of robotics. It's not so rigidly structured — like a car, for example. Robots can be anything. And so, we're still in the stage where we're trying to figure out what these robots should look like, what they should be, how they should behave."

Technology can be a lot of fun. Akshat Dobhal, the Class VII student who stood beside a four-wheeled programmed robot at the Mad About Technology Festival, is a firm believer of this maxim."It will follow voice commands. You can say 'move', 'go back', 'spin' and it will do exactly that," he says. The bystander says "move" and the contraption indeed begins to move forward. "Stop! Go back," says the astounded bystander, and the machine wheels right back. But Akshat is now smiling, and his friends ask him what his hands are doing under the table.Game over. It's not a voice-controlled robot, but a remote-controlled one, which Akshat now reveals with a laugh. "We're trying to see how many people we can fool this way," he said, divulging the scientific intent of the prank.

The AMBER 2 Robot does its best

The AMBER 2 Robot does its best to emulate human foot movements, with the goal of making a machine that can walk on all sorts of terrain.The AMBER 2 Robot from Texas A&M Amber Lab has almost all of the pivot points necessary to mimic human-like locomotion, which is very complex. You'll note the purposeful stumble at the end of the video, which was intentional to show that the boom only provided lateral stability.I want to see when these kinds of legs will be integrated into a real walking robot. Hopefully, Skynet won't use them to help exterminate us all.

Where once landed sandals of Roman, now rolls the rubberized tread of a robot. Or whatever robot feet are made from. Hewn from the solid rock of Italian mountains, the miles-long ancient aqueducts have stood for 2,000 years, forming a vast network the Aqua Claudio is 45 miles long and the Porta Maggiore is 60 miles. And that means it's tough for scientists and historians to just go blindly skipping through them. Sure, there are some dandy maps drawn up by British topographer Thomas Ashby in the First World War,Poppy, a 3D-printed humanoid robot that defies conventions and 3D scanners are also proving quite handy in mapping the tunnels. But the dirty job of exploring cisterns and drains beneath the Roman Forum goes to what archaeologists are calling an "archeo-robot" named Lucius.

The robot runs via remote control and has high-def cameras, 6 wheels and no aversion to weird smells. Awesome. When will there be a Disneyand-type tour for us to go on?Assistant Professor Luis Sentis of the Cockrell School's Human Centered Robotics Lab greets Dreamer, a mobile humanoid robot who may appear in "Transformers 4″ next summer.This summer, Dreamer, a robot with a bright, cartoon-like face received its first set of wheels and made its acting debut in a major Hollywood film.Dreamer is the brainchild of Luis Sentis, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering who established the Human Centered Robotics Lab in 2010 at the Cockrell School of Engineering.

Poppy, a 3D-printed humanoid robot that defies conventions

One of the main reasons the INRIA Flowers FLOWing Epigenetic Robots and Systems team opted to build its own robot is because none of the available commercial kits are truly biologically inspired. By rapidly-prototyping their own robot, Poppy could challenge some of the usual robot design conventions.To begin with, it has an articulated spine with five motors – almost unheard of in robots of this size, but one of the ongoing topics at INRIA Flowers since its first humanoid, ACROBAN, from several years ago. The spine not only allows Poppy to move more naturally, but helps to balance the robot by adjusting its posture. The added flexibility also helps when physically interacting with the robot, such as guiding it by its hands, which is currently required to help the robot walk.

Looking at the knees, you'll see some springs spanning the upper and lower leg joints. The tension in the springs helps to keep the supporting leg straight during each step without motorization. And farther down, its feet are smaller than most robots of Poppy's size, and its toes are thin, allowing them to bend. Rather than planting each foot parallel to the ground, which is how most robots this size walk, the toes help the robot achieve "heel to toe" walking. And as for those children's shoes Poppy wears? They're equipped with five pressure sensors on each sole, which provide useful data.One of the more obvious deviations in design can be seen in its upper legs, which bend inwards at an angle of six degrees. Despite the fact that this more closely models the human femur, most humanoid robot designs have opted for straight leg linkages.

By bending the thighs in, the distance between the two feet is shortened, moving the supporting leg's foot closer to the robot's center of gravity. And that makes it more stable when standing on one leg and when walking.The INRIA team produced two versions of Poppy: one with straight thighs and another with the bent ones. Experiments showed that the robot with bent thighs swayed far less during its walking gait, making it much more stable. However, the robot still can't balance on its own, so for now it needs a human trainer.In the future, the team hopes to get Poppy walking on its own, and plans to share its designs with other labs to promote more biologically-inspired humanoid robot designs.

This Hybrid Robot Cleaner Vacuums and Mops All the Floors In Your Home

If you've got a mix of hard and carpeted floors in your home that you just don't feel like cleaning, you usually have to rely on two separate cleaning bots to get the work done. But you can write your Roomba and Scooba a letter of recommendation and send them on their way now that Moneual's new Rydis H67 promises to tackle both tasks with one machine.Given a wet mop would only serve to further muck up dirty carpets, the microfiber pad the H67 uses on hard wood and tile floors can be removed depending on what needs cleaning.Exaggerated gait allows limbless R2G2 robot to move quickly in confined spaces And the vacuum is smart enough to actually avoid carpeted surfaces while the mopping pad is attached.

On a full battery it can actually mop for about five hours straight in a back and forth zip-zag motion, but you can expect that battery life to be considerably shortened when the vacuum's motor is running. But like any good robo vac, it will automatically return to its charging station when it's running low.At $400 available at Best Buy starting today, it isn't overly expensive, either, especially considering it does the work of two devices. And as an added bonus, with only a single robo cleaner in your home, it has no one to gossip around the water cooler with and get distracted from work. From personalised searches of Google to the seductive experience of driverless cars, from educational robots that hone your French to prosthetics that are stronger and faster than our own limbs: artificial intelligence is poised to revolutionise our lives.

Now scientists, legal experts and philosophers are joining forces to scrutinise the promise of intelligent systems and wrangle over their implications. This week in Brighton, the fourth EuCogIII members' conference is set to tackle these issues head on. "Fundamentally we're interested in considering the ethical and societal impact of such systems," says Alan Winfield, professor of electronic engineering at UWE Bristol. It is time, he says, to make some crucial decisions. "If we get it wrong, there are consequences right now."It's a point well illustrated by IBM's intelligent system, Watson. Two years after thrashing human contestants at the quickfire quiz Jeopardy!, Watson has graduated from gameshows to medical school and could soon be diagnosing diseases.

Exaggerated gait allows limbless R2G2 robot to move quickly in confined spaces

Hopkins used actively actuated friction pads near the head and tail of the robot to improve its traction, and has found that different terrains require unique kinds of friction pads?a bed of nails for traveling over grass; rubber for carpets.In addition, Gupta and Hopkins used 3D printing technology to create a novel mechanism for expanding and contracting R2G2's body while maintaining a small body cross section. This enabled them to make geometrically complex parts and greatly simplify the assembly of the robot. Other researchers with access to 3D printing will be able to easily replicate R2G2 in their labs.Currently robots that use limbless locomotion do not come close to their natural counterparts in terms of capabilities.

"Unfortunately, we do not yet have access to engineered actuators that can match the natural muscles found in biological creatures," Gupta says, "or highly distributed, fault-tolerant, self-calibrating, multi-modal sensors and materials with highly direction-dependent friction properties. So our design options for limbless locomotion are limited and truly mimicking nature is simply not possible right now."In the short term, Gupta believes robotics engineers are better off "taking a different approach that exploits inspiration from biological creatures." Robots like R2G2 advance the science because they "take a useful feature in nature and exploit it to the fullest extent."Seth Green still can't believe the success he's had with Adult Swim's Emmy-winning series, "Robot Chicken."

"It's so strange to me because it's just something me and my friends make," he told CBSNews.com while at New York Comic Con.Green and his Stoopid Monkey producing partner Matthew Senreich won the 2010 Emmy in the outstanding animated program short format category for the stop-motion animated series they created. And they're heavily involved in the process. The duo executive produces and writes the pop culture parody, with Green doing up to 60 different voices each week. The show's sixth season recently came out on DVD, and Green says it's "jam-packed with all the extras, anything that got cut out, anything that we didn't have time to produce."

Double Robot Wants to Take Over the Office, Not the World

As I noted, Double's body is really just a tube with wheels, which means it balances itself when standing still or rolling about. An internal gyroscope keeps it upright and, if you give it a gentle push or, as I did, run it into a trash can, it will wobble but not fall down.The robot starts at 47 inches and can extend to a full five feet tall. You manage this remotely, which may also add to the creep factor. That height difference also changes the robot's speed. While it can cruise along pretty quickly when standing at 47 inches, a 60-inch Double slows down significantly. A message on the navigation screen warns you that if you want to go fast, you need to make the robot shorter. This is understandable, considering how the height difference changes Double's center of gravity. In any case, I soon got the hang of shrinking Double whenever I had to travel around the office and growing when I got to a meeting.

Double won't fall over if it runs low on power or if you choose to "Park" it. The robot has two little metal kickstands that quietly fold out when you hit "park" on the Double app.Telecommuting is a fact of our modern work life, but anyone who has done so will likely agree that the lack of face time can be frustrating. You're always the disembodied voice on the conference call, the person people forget to invite to meetings because they never see you. Telepresence robotics like Double can be the solution.First of all,A Robot Making Coffee With a Keurig Is Wonderfully Redundant it's not one robot for one person. Anyone with the proper credentials can log in and control Double. You'll see his or her face on the screen and at that meeting. It may make sense for Double Robotics to add the option of "virtual footsteps" to imitate the sound of walking to the meeting, though, which would significantly decrease the creep factor.

Would I pay $2,499 for a device that my more than half a dozen telecommuters could use? Yes. Do I wish the better in-the-wings solution for charging the robot and iPad was ready today? Absolutely. However, as soon as it is, this is a robot I want in my office. Heck, I want it now.Since the internet giant announced its ambition to create a driverless car within the decade, its fleet of 10 converted Toyota Priuses have led the way in self-driving robotic vehicles. So far they have covered more than 300,000 miles on California's roads without incident. The cars have roof-mounted cameras and sensors that constantly scan their surroundings, building up a 3D map of each route. Last year, a blind man named Steve Mahan was able "drive" one of the cars in Morgan Hill, California.

A Robot Making Coffee With a Keurig Is Wonderfully Redundant

This particular minnovation comes from a company called FOCUS Integration, and in its defense, the JoeBot does more than just push the brew button on the Keurig. It can load in new capsules, swap out full and empty coffee cups, and even label the cardboard sleeve with a custom design. Now if it could only refill the Keurig's water reservoir, which seems to be perpetually empty whenever you want a brew.Up until he went to college, Japanese media artist Yuri Suzuki thought he was stupid. Music was in his blood, his bones, his thoughts, but he couldn't read it. Suzuki was dyslexic, and as much as he loved music, the only sound a series of notes arrayed upon a musical stave implied was the sound of chaos.

That's why much of Suzuki's work focuses on new ways to visualize music. Looks Like Music is his new project, an alternative to standardized Western musical notation synesthetic enough for even dyslexics to understand. Even cooler? It's music notation done with robots.Even as a child, Suzuki loved music. Raised in a richly musical household where the big band sounds of Glenn Miller seemed to come crashing like thunder from his father's stereo, young Suzuki was inspired to begin his education in the trombone at an age when he would scarcely have been able to hold the thing upright: just three years old. In high school, Suzuki joined a ska band as a trombonist; later, he left the band, and, inspired by musicians such as Yellow Magic Orchestra, Devo, and Kraftwerk, Suzuki began to focus on synthesizers and electronic music.

Although musical, Suzuki was working with a disability, one that it took him a long time to realize was there. "I had all these friends asking me to read scores and do music theory stuff, but I couldn't read the notes. I thought I was dumb," Suzuki tells me. "It was only when I got to college that a coordinator took a look at my work and said, 'Yup, you're dyslexic.'"The revelation was eye opening to Suzuki, whose work since college has largely focused upon visualizing music and sound. "I try to design systems that don't require words to explain," Suzuki tells Co.Design. "Think iOS instead of Unix."

Not Proven

The complexity of medical devices makes safety and efficacy claims hard to evaluate, creating an environment ripe for misleading advertising, including by hospitals, said Robert Steinbuch, a professor of law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. "Hospital advertising is essentially a free-for-all," he said.Bloomberg News reported in February that the FDA was surveying surgeons about the robots after an increase in reported adverse events, including 70 deaths since 2009. Reports of injuries linked to robotic surgery have more than doubled in the first eight months of this year, based on when the reports were received by the FDA, compared with the same period last year.Intuitive Surgical says looking at reporting dates, rather than the dates the incidents occurred, "is likely to seriously misrepresent the true performance of a device."

While Porter Adventist Hospital cannot comment on the Kortz cases due to privacy laws, safety is its top priority and it responds "with swift and immediate action" to clinical concerns, said Thomas Drake, chief medical officer for the hospital, in a statement. "Our approach to robotic surgery marketing is focused on consumer awareness," Drake said.In July, the FDA issued a warning letter to Intuitive Surgical after an inspection found the company hadn't adequately reported device corrections and patient adverse events in some cases.There are questions Sales growth slowed in the second quarter on a decline in robot system sales. Since the first Bloomberg report in February, Intuitive Surgical's shares have fallen 34 percent to $380.99.

"The marketing material that Intuitive puts out is fair and balanced," said Myriam Curet, chief medical adviser for Intuitive Surgical. The company has "a robust program where we review all of the marketing material that goes out and we make sure that discussions of alternative procedures are on the marketing materials as well as discussions about risks," she said.Intuitive Surgical follows regulatory guidance in every market in which it operates, said Angela Wonson, a spokeswoman for the company. It also continually evaluates and updates the informational materials it provides to medical professionals and the public to ensure they reflect recent research, she said."Ultimately, decisions about treatment must be made between the surgeon and the patient during the informed consent process," Wonson said.