A Robot Cat for Granny? MEOW!!!

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"Hasbro introduces robo-kitties for seniors

It's a cat's meow for an older crowdWith its new line of eerily lifelike robot cats, toy manufacturer Hasbro is reaching out to a new demographic — senior citizens.

According to the company website, the new "Joy for all" line is a series of robot pets (so far just cats) designed to "bring comfort, companionship and fun for your elder loved ones," without all the feeding and mess.

Aside from its four C batteries and lifeless gaze, the cats are pretty realistic, with faux feline fur that comes in "orange tabby," "silver," and "creamy white," and automated "cat-like" movements.
The fuzzy robots even purr and meow when you pet them, using built in sensors designed to respond to motion and touch. With a pat on the head, the cats will move toward your hand, nuzzle closer with a pet to the left cheek, and roll over for a belly rub when you stroke its back.

To conserve battery life, the little guys go to sleep when you put them down..."

Read the full article at its source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/robot-cat-seniors-toy-1.3327079

Walking Robot laps the Energizer Bunny

 

"Chinese Walking Robot Sets Distance Record"

"For Xingzhe No.1, the path ahead was smooth. It was also repetitive and unchanging, a flat course in an indoor gymnasium. For 54 hours the robot, whose name translates to “walker,” patrolled the same set path. That’s long enough to watch Waiting for Godot 21 times. Eventually, the robot ran out of power, and stopped. By the time its battery died, it had taken 360,000 steps, covering 83 miles in total. Unconscious and immobile, Xingzhe earned a Guinness World Record for farthest distance walked by a quadruped robot.

Xingzhe No. 1’s design is similar to that of Cornell’s Ranger Robot, the previous record-holder. In 2011, that robot walked over 40 miles in under 31 hours..."

Read the full article at its souce: http://www.popsci.com/chinese-walking-robot-sets-distance-record

Delivery Robot... great for schools?

Here's a real world robot that might make a great item for schools. Not only would it deliver things around the school building or campus, but it would make a perfect focus for kids to get a taste of the evolving world of robotics as students observe, live with, and even use this robot, which is 'good to go' to do real work in the real world. This would elevate STEM learning from the LEGO Robotics level of model and miniature robots to one in which real working robots are in actual service in a 21st Century learning and working environment...

 

"This self-driving delivery robot is coming soon to sidewalks"

"The future of delivery might involve small drones zooming above pedestrians, cyclists and motorists at high speeds. Amazon and now Wal-Mart are moving down this path. Or it might be something a lot slower that travels on sidewalks.

On Monday, a London startup founded by two Skype co-founders unveiled their self-driving delivery robot. It bumbles along at a whopping 4 mph.

That’s slightly faster than a pedestrian but slower than a jogger.

   The Starship is designed to fit two shopping bags. (Starship Technologies)

Starship Technologies says the 40-pound robot could make local deliveries in 30 minutes or less. The technology could be useful for neighborhood restaurants and retailers. Because the robot is largely automated, requiring almost no human involvement, Starship Technologies thinks the costs of delivering goods will drop by an order of magnitude. The slow speed and grounded approach also removes some of the safety concerns with drone delivery.

A customer could follow the robot’s progress on an app, and would be alerted when his or her delivery arrived. The cargo bay is locked to prevent theft, which only the customer could open with the app’s help..."
Read the full article at its source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/11/02/this-self-driving-delivery-robot-is-coming-soon-to-sidewalks/

The Wonder League Robotics Competition

Exactly the kind of thing our kids need to be engaged in!!!
Mark

 

"Teams from around the nation and their Dash & Dot robots will face off to overcome obstacles, solve coding challenges, and have a blast while they're at it. Your mission is to help Dash make it through space to explore a newly discovered planet and then make it back safely to Earth."

Your mission has started! You must register your team by Nov 1 to qualify for prizes.

http://competition.makewonder.com/

Common Ground Between Robots and Humans: Machines of Loving Grace

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"Two Paths Toward Our Robot Future"
From The New Yorker - October 1, 2015
"In 1970, Life magazine published an article about a Stanford University research project that had resulted in the construction of what it called the first-ever “electronic person.” This creature, called Shakey, was a six-foot-tall robot on wheels, and it looked like a filing cabinet carrying around an elaborate video camera. It was an early experiment in artificial intelligence, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, or DARPA—the technological research arm of the Pentagon—and conceived by the Canadian applied physicist Charles Rosen. It was the first robot designed to be entirely autonomous, to reason and make decisions based on information about its environment. Shakey was intended as a prototype for more advanced automatons that would eventually replace human beings in dangerous and hostile territories, and its makers saw it as the advance guard of a near future in which humans would be emulated, and eventually replaced, by intelligent machines. Shakey’s degree of autonomy was much more limited than that suggested by Life’s Promethean claims; its movements were slow and halting, and its battery tended to die after a few minutes of juddering operation. But many of the project’s innovations eventually entered the bloodstream of modern technology: the mapping software in your smartphone, for instance, was first used in Shakey, and Siri’s voice-command technology is a successor of a speech-control mechanism that was pioneered for the project.

Shakey is introduced in the early pages of John Markoff’s new book, “Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots,” as an example of an ongoing conflict between artificial intelligence and the linked but divergent project of intelligence augmentation. (The robot was intended to replace people in specific situations, but its technologies wound up augmenting the intelligence, or at least the efficiency, of flesh-and-blood humans.) Markoff begins with the story of Bill Duvall, a young programmer hired to write code for Shakey. Duvall became frustrated with the limitations of the robotics project and decamped to another research group, just down the hall at Stanford Research Institute, which was engaged in an entirely different sort of enterprise, called the N.L.S., or “oN-Line System.” This project, led by a computer scientist named Doug Engelbart, was aimed at creating “an interactive system to capture knowledge and organize information in such a way that it would now be possible for a small group of people—scientists, engineers, educators—to create and collaborate more effectively.” The project, in other words, was an early version of the Internet. Not long after walking down the hall and leaving Shakey to its own limited and whirring devices, Duvall used Engelbart’s N.L.S. software to connect a computer in Menlo Park to one in Los Angeles via a data line rented from a phone company. “Bill Duvall,” as Markoff puts it, “would become the first to make the leap from research to replace humans with computers to using computers to augment the human intellect, and one of the first to stand on both sides of an invisible line that even today divides two rival, insular engineering communities.” ...

Read the full article at its source: http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/two-paths-toward-our-robot-future 

New App for Student Robots Teaches Kids to Code

Got an announcement for this new offering in my in box this morning. Very appealing!

Mark

 

 

"Hello - Wonder Workshop announces the release of 'Wonder,' the new mobile application for award-winning robots Dash and Dot. Wonder embeds coding and robotics into a child’s world of play and is designed to code the way we think, encouraging children 8 and up to explore and create with their favorite pair of bots.."