This is Tech

• Monkey controls robot with mind (Via Gadget for Life)
• Robots and mongooses team up to detect landmines. (Via Hacked Gadgets)
• NewScientist put together a great video of robots inspired by animals (check out the video below for robotic salamanders, fish, and wall-walking geckos)

Robotics firm Sarcos Inc. is developing a robotic suit designed to greatly amplify the wearer’s strength. Made of aluminum and electronics, the ‘exoskeleton’ suit is being developed under a contract with the US Army, who hopes the technology can one day be used by its soldiers in combat.

(Via Haute Concept)

I have been thinking lately about the inevitability of life recording. As the number of cameras around us multiplies, it seems unavoidable that recording one’s life for convenience will become commonplace.

The concept is simple, strap a video camera to your head and record everything you see and hear. Transfer the data to storage and process the sound and graphics with voice and text recognition to facilitate full text search of things you hear and see. Add face recognition and you can search for conversations based on who you were talking with. Add a GPS chip and you can search based on location. This is Google for your life. Perfect recall.

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The BBC News posted an interesting article this morning about an automated restaurant concept in Germany. Patrons order from touch screens and their food is delivered on a complex rail structure. Does away with waiters. Looks like a bit of a gimmick, but if I were in Germany I would give it a try. Check out the video at the BBC site.

(Via BBC News.)

Check out this video of Dean Kamen’s design for a Luke Skywalker inspired prosthetic arm. Kamen, known for inventing the Segway, is an amazing designer and has a history of creating innovative medical devices.

[Photo by: gadl]

Here is a youtube clip from a BBC documentary highlighting some recent research relating to time dilation and the effect of adrenaline and drugs on the perception of the passage of time. In the first experiment depicted in the video, a researcher compares a subject’s ability to read rapidly flashing numbers during free fall and in a normal state. Under the influence of adrenaline, the subject was better able to read the numbers. This is touted as evidence that the brain is able to slow things down when in crisis mode.

In the second experiment, researchers tested the perception of time in rats under the influence of marijuana and cocaine. These rats had previously been trained to hit a button every 12 seconds to trigger release of a food pellet. Under the influence of cocaine, the rat hit the button too early. With Marijuana the rat was too late.

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Robotics, making the world a better place, one smart dog at a time.

This dog is awesome. Found this video on Brent Evans’ Geek Tonic.

(Via Make and Geek Tonic.)

Trossen Robotics has annouced the winners in its February robotics comptition. The winner is a unique hexapod robot called “Phoenix,” created by Kåre Halvorsen

Phoenix is one the creepier robots I have seen lately. Creepy in the, can’t look away sense. It is amazing what is possible with off the shelf hardware and some ingenuity. Congratulations to Halvorsen. For pictures and information on the runners up, check out TRC’s winners page. [Note: the TRC Winners Page is currently down. Hopefully this will change soon]

From the Trossen Robotics Site:

“Phoenix” by Kåre Halvorsen took the win in the TRC February run. Phoenix is a six legged walking robot. Wait, we know some of you out there may be thinking that hexapod robots are old hat. Well, you’re wrong. So very wrong. Wait until you see it move. Phoenix’s real beauty lies in her graceful motion, which is some of the most convincing and eerily lifelike that we’ve seen in a robot that uses standard hobby servos and a common off-the-shelf servo controller. The kinematics are computed by an intricately programmed spreadsheet, which we highly recommend you check out if you’re a fan of trigonometry.”

Scientists at Texas Instruments have created a neckband called the Audeo that can interpret nerve signals to general voiceless speech. The New Scientist has posted a full article about it and posted a video demonstration on YouTube (embedded below).

This very early stage technology, and the system’s vocabulary is apparently limited to around 150 hundred words and phrases. Nonetheless, it is exciting to see advances in interfaces between the brain and computers. Being able to silently and motionlessly signal to a computer could make for some interesting applications. One application mentioned in the video is silently querying the Internet with questions and having them spoken back to you. Technologies like these can augment human intelligence. Imagine being able to query the world’s knowledge without being at a computer, or even needing to speak or move. In the same way that wearable cameras can give a user a photographic memory, an invisible connection to the Internet would give users enhanced knowledge.

The only criticism I have is that intercepting nerve signals seems like an over complicated means of decoding silent messages. The Audeo band is worn around the neck, which makes me wonder why it couldn’t just pick up subvocalized vibrations directly from the user’s vocal cords. I realize that speech recognition is tricky enough without trying to decode subvocalized vibrations, but the nerve signal methods sounds like it requires a fair about of self training to make it work, and could be overthinking the problem.

Read the whole article at The New Scientist, and check out the demo video below. If you can think of any interesting applications of this type of technology, let us know with a comment.

Slashdot posted a story this week about an open source robot project from a start-up called Willow Garage in the Bay Area. The company is working on an open hardware platform for researchers and tinkerers to build on. In order for large groups of people to contribute to a robotics project, it helps to have everyone working on the same hardware. Excerpt from the original article at Network World below:

Open source robot: your next personal assistant - Network World: “Open source robot: your next personal assistant
Start-up Willow Garage aims to make robotics useful to everyday life
By Jon Brodkin , Network World , 03/06/2008

Imagine a robot that hands you a beer and then cleans your kitchen and living room. That’s what a start-up called Willow Garage in Menlo Park, Calif., is busy developing. But the company isn’t going it alone: Willow Garage is an open source project that wants as much outside participation as possible.

One of its immediate goals is to build 10 robots and make them available to university researchers as a common platform that can be tinkered with and improved. Willow Garage will also supply ‘an open-source code base integrated from the best open-source robotics software available,’ President and CEO Steve Cousins said Wednesday at the O’Reilly ETech conference on emerging technology in San Diego”

(Via Network World.)