Category Archives: Robotic
New Quince robots for gathering data inside the radiation-contaminated Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant are ready to go into action; three months after an older version got stuck inside the No. 2 reactor building. Equipped with cameras, thermometers and hygrometers, the new pair of caterpillar-shaped robots from Chiba Institute of Technology, Japan, called Quince No. 2 and No. 3, are expected to be sent in by the end of February. Robot Quince No. 2 is outfitted with a dust sampler to collect radioactive dust or ultrafine particles to ensure that workers at the Fukushima No.1 nuclear power plant are not overexposed. Robot Quince No. 2 has a 3-D scanner. The robots are the advanced version of Quince, the first Japanese robot to enter the plant in June. It was abandoned inside the No. 2 building after its cable snapped in October.
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Japan is planning a futuristic farm where robots do the lifting in an experimental project on land swamped by the March tsunami. Land in Miyagi Prefecture, some 300 kilometers north of Tokyo, which was flooded by seawater on March 11, has been earmarked for the so-called Dream Project. Under an agriculture ministry plan, unmanned tractors will work fields where pesticides will have been replaced by LEDs keeping rice, wheat, soybeans, fruit and vegetables safe until robots can put them in boxes. Carbon dioxide produced by machinery working on the up to 250-hectare site will be channeled back to crops to boost their growth and reduce reliance on chemical fertilizers.
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Robot guards will patrol jail corridors in South Korea as early as next year, lifting the burden off human prison guards. Asian Forum for Corrections Chairman Lee Baik-chul said the robots will perform simple tasks such as patrolling during night hours and this will significantly help human prison guards focus on other more complex tasks. At night the robots will watch for any signs of suicide attempts or physical attacks on prisoners instead of the human guards. This will allow the human guards to work on more difficult problems such as educational work and counseling. When the robot sees something unusual, it will report to the central control facility which will then take action. The robots have a speaker and microphone installed on their bodies so that when a prisoner speaks, the guard at the central tower can respond and vice versa. The robots will be able to observe their surroundings through visual software installed in their face.
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Robotics researchers at the Institute for Cognitive Systems ICS at TU Munchen in collaboration with Japanese scientists have developed a new robot face that can talk and respond like humans. By using a projector to beam the 3D image of a face onto the back of a plastic mask, and a computer to control voice and facial expressions, the researchers have succeeded in creating Mask-bot, a startlingly human-like
plastic head. Mask-bot can already reproduce simple dialog. To replicate facial expressions, Takaaki Kuratate developed a talking head animation engine – a system in which a computer filters an extensive series of face motion data from people collected by a motion capture system and selects the facial expressions that best match a specific sound, called a phoneme, when it is being spoken.
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Osamu Hasegawa, associate professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology is working on making Robots that learn from experience and can teach themselves to perform tasks they have not been programmed to do, using objects they have never seen before. In a world first, Osamu Hasegawa has developed a system that allows robots to look around their environment and do research on the Internet, enabling them to “think” how best to solve a problem. The Self-Organizing Incremental Neural Network, or SOINN, is an algorithm that allows robots to use their knowledge—what they already know—to infer how to complete tasks they have been told to do. SOINN examines the environment to gather the data it needs to organize the information it has been given into a coherent set of instructions. The SOINN machine asks for help when facing a task beyond its ability and crucially, stores the information it learns for use in a future task.
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The new Yamaha robot driver TS-SD is dedicated to the TRANSERVO series that supports pulse train command input and offers low price and easy operation while achieving high performance. The new Yamaha robot driver TS-SD has been developed as a new driver that can perform closed-loop control and is dedicated for use with the single-axis robot TRANSERVO series, which utilizes a stepping motor controlled with a vector control method. The result is a model that supports a variety of command pulse input methods while achieving low price and easy operation.
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Panasonic today announced the development of an innovative Hair-Washing Robot. The new Panasonic Hair-Washing Robot can complete the entire process of hair washing automatically, from wetting to shampooing, rinsing, conditioning and drying. The Hair-Washing Robot has been developed using Panasonic’s robot hand technology. It has advanced from the previous model to scan the head shape more finely and perform a series of hair-washing processes, from hand washing through bubble washing and drying, using newly added hand techniques. The robot can even store the data of each person’s head shape and preferred washing mode to meet the needs for everyday hair-washing and scalp care.
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Japan’s space agency is considering putting a talking humanoid robot on the International Space Station to watch the mission while astronauts are asleep, monitor their health and stress levels and communicate to Earth through the microblogging site Twitter. Following up on NASA’s Robonaut R-2 program, which is set for launch on the Discovery shuttle next week, the Japanese android would be part of a larger effort to create and refine robots that can be used by the elderly. The robot is being developed with the Japanese advertising and communications giant Dentsu and a team at Tokyo University.
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