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The Great Internet Migratory Box of Electronic Junk (aka TGIMBOEJ) has left the building! As promised in our earlier story on migratory junk boxes, robots.net has launched one especially for robot builders. There are now are a dozen or so TGIMBOEJ boxes moving around the world but ours is the only one designed by and for roboticists. The first recipients of the box will be Kris and Carly, those robot-savvy girls from Iowa who developed an award-winning iRobot Create robot painter for the 2007 Austin Maker Faire. They'll get first choice of all the interesting junk and will adding in some of their own. Who will get the box next? Maybe you. To be considered as a recipient, you need to add your name as well as a link to your blog to the TGIMBOEJ wiki box request page. Please also add a note by your name saying you're requesting the robots.net box to make it easy for us to find you. We'll be posting updates as the box reaches new recipients and you can also following it's progress at the TGIMBOEJ wiki tracking page. Our box is designated robots.net-box1. (pretty catchy name, eh?) So, you're probably wonder what useless junk, er, I mean valuable electronic and robotic components, made the final cut and got included in the box? Read on for a partial list and more photos.
http://robots.net/article/2695.html
2008-11-20 10:33:28

http://robots.net/article/2693.html
2008-11-19 11:10:46

NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander bit the dust today (no pun intended). After five months performing scientific experiments that included digging, scooping, baking, "sniffing", and "tasting" the Martian soil, the seasonal changes in sunlight have ended the mission. The robot's solar panels are no longer generating enough light for the robot to operate. The robotic lander, which had its own Twitter account, posted a final tweet today that said, "01010100 01110010 01101001 01110101 01101101 01110000 01101000 <3" - binary for "triumph". For more see the CNET story or the NASA news release.
http://robots.net/article/2690.html
2008-11-10 16:29:4

The human brain has a unique ability to easily model all sorts of data, allowing us to estimate things, predict things, identify things, and learn things in ways that would traditionally require the use of complex domain-specific modeling algorithms if they were done by a computer or a scientist with pencil and paper. A new paper, Hierarchical Models in the Brain, by Karl Friston of the Wellcome Trust Centre of Neuroimaging at the University College of London, offers a possible explanation. He describes hierarchical dynamic models and a generic method for their inversion. He goes on to show that "the brain has evolved the necessary anatomical and physiological equipment to implement this inversion, given sensory data." This means the brain could use this single Bayesian mechanism to implement a wide range of algorithms including models with unknown parameters such as state-space models, probabilistic dynamic models, static models, neural networks, nonlinear system identification, general linear models, and identification of nonlinear dynamic systems; as well as models with unknown states such as estimation with static models, hierarchical linear observation model, covariance component estimation, Gaussian process models, and deconvolution; and even models with unknown states and parameters such as Principal Components Analysis (PCA), factor analysis, probabilistic PCA, Independent component analysis (ICA), sparse coding, and blind deconvolution. Obviously, this paper has a lot of math in it, but even if you skip the math, it's an interesting read.
http://robots.net/article/2689.html
2008-11-10 10:19:24

Hiroshi Ishiguro from Osaka University is very well known for creating uncannily life-like androids. In the latest episode of the Robots podcast, Ishiguro introduces his android creations, including a robotic replicate of his then 5 year old daughter, a female android modeled after the NHK news announcer Ayako Fujii and a copy of himself, the Geminoid. He explains Android Science and how his explorations of the uncanny valley may help to understand human presence. This episode then features the last quarter of Science Fiction author Jack Graham's "Selkies". Tune in!
http://robots.net/article/2687.html
2008-11-7 2:7:50

Students at the HTL Saalfelden engineering school created Hexapodmeisterschaft, a six legged dancing robot. The creepy looking robot won the dancing category of the 2008 Austrian Hexapod Championships with this dance to the tune of Mambo #5. The contest took place back in April and since then this video has slowly been climbing the Internet viral video popularity charts. What most of the sites carrying this video don't talk about though is the contest itself. While Hexapodmeisterschaft may be the most visible hexapod, there plenty of others at the event, competing in both the dance category and in a hexapod race. You can find videos of the other hexapods on the competition forum and on YouTube. If you're in Austria, you should plan on going to next year's contest in April of 2009.
http://robots.net/article/2686.html
2008-11-5 12:13:37