The WowWee robotic family is getting a female version, the Femisapien, and it is boasting the most fluid movements of the group. I am only quoting when I say that the new robot has "her own language consisting of emotive sounds", but it does show some attention to detail in trying to give the Femisapien her own sense of character.
The $99 robot is to be released in late summer, but the video shows the lady WowWee in a fencing competition, more or less. [more]
Finding a chair in a library while you browse a book might be a thing of the past if Dutch designer Jelte van Geest has it his way. In fact, the chair would find you, following you through the library, anxious to serve as your sitting place.
The robotic chair was designed for Openbare Bibliotheek Endhoven, a library project. It looks like he has developed an interesting use of technology that could be interesting. I am not sure how well it could maneuver when there was a crowd of chairs in an aisle, but the video does show a manager function that has several of them following in a group, and they very neatly fall in line. Really interesting. [more]
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Ever want to go for a walk with six legs? No doubt such a thing could be handy for rough terrain or other places that would require some sure footed movement. Sterlac is working to provide you that capability, with their Muscle Machine that responds to human movement with its own six legged movement. The control itself is as simple as walking.
When the operator moves a leg, encoders at the hip joint direct the machine as to direction and speed to move. The operator's leg lift instructs the six legged machine to lift its three alternate machine legs and swing them forward, in what I assume is a modified tripod arrangement. By twisting its torso as it moves the machine walks in the direction it is facing.
The Muscle Machine is five meters in diameter, and it is a pneumatically powered system using fluidic muscle actuators. The rubber muscles, according to the project website, contract when inflated and extend when exhausted, creating a flexible and reliable engineering design.
Once the Muscle Machine starts moving the symbiosis of man and machine creates a interlocked system that seems almost cyborg in nature, since both man and machine are in control of the movement. The applications are numerous for such a design, and it will be interesting to see how far this develops.
Guitar Hero is a popular video game, and requires quick action and practice on the part of the player to master it. But some folks from Near Future Laboratory has a better way of playing it, via robotics.
The project, known as Scale (link), uses electric solenoids to control the buttons on a standard Guitar Hero controller. There is no detail on the programming aspects of the system controller, but I assume that it is rather trial and error until you get the timing right. Then it is perfect every time, baby.