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Warrior, by iRobot, has a new video on their website. Unfortunately, it can’t be embedded – but its certainly worth a look.

http://www.irobot.com/sp.cfm?pageid=480

If you’ve ever cleaned a rain gutter – or seen someone do it – then you can appreciate the danger in climbing up a ladder for such sustained period of time and doing that kind of work.

The iRobot Looj is designed to save dads and anyone else who does clean gutters from just such danger.

You simply place Looj in the gutter, climb back down to the safety of earth, and use the remote control to move the robot back-and-forth in the gutter. Using a powerful auger, Looj cleans your gutters and throws the dead leaves on the ground… which also saves your drain pipes from getting clogged.

Check out this video of Looj in action:

Haile is capable of detecting the beat and then jamming with real life musicians.

The robot learns in real-time what the beat is and then can improvise
on its own.  it can also do complex patterns, such as 9/5 9/4, that no
known human drummer can, thus paving the way for new forms of music.

Here’s Haile’s website.

Researchers at CMU’s Robotics Institute have developed a new novel way to get a robot to climb walls.

Instead of using suction cups, the robot uses super stickey rubber for its 16 feets. The gait of the robot ensures that at any given time eight feet are touching the surface (wall). Checkout this video via NewScientist.

Guns on robots have always made me nervous. But there is no denying that having a high flying sniper at your disposal can be invaluable in a number of combat scenarios.

So without further adieu – meet ARSS (Autonomous Rotorcraft Sniper System) – a sniper (helicopter) robot being tested by the US Army.

The challenge of this robot is to have a stabalized gun turret as the helicopter hovers. That job went to Space Dynamics Lab at Utah State University, where they mounted a sniper riffle capable of shooting 7-10 rounds per second along with a high resolution camera, all enabling the operator on the ground to pull the trigger.

And of course as the army likes to do these days, the controll station uses a modified Xbox controller.

Via RoboDynamics Blog.

Rovio telepresence robot by Wowwee

Rovio is one of the first consumer grade telepresence robots out there, introduced at CES 2008 by Wowwee Robotics.

You can think of Rovio as a mobile webcam, where the user can access the robot over the internet and see a video stream broadcasting from the robot’s camera. The user also has the ability to move the robot around (say from room to room) and monitor, survey, or inspect things around the house. Rovio is very small and the camera is about 6″ off the floor – though a tilting mechanism allows you to look up as well.

Rovio user interface screenshot

Telepresence robots are nothing new; NASA has been sending robots all over the universe for at least 30 years now. More recently we sent two mobile robots named Spirit and Opportunity to the surface of Mars. Controllers on earth move the robot around on the surface of Mars and receive high resolution images (and video) from the robot’s cameras. We also did this back in ‘97 – sending the Sojourner robot to Mars. But what is particularly interesting about this robot is its use of the NorthStar navigation system from Evolution Robotics. The NorthStar system enables the robot to autonomously navigate. For example, the user can command the robot to find its base station and recharge instead having to drive the robot to there. I will write about the NorthStar system at length on another post – but for the time being – I believe this is the first deployment of NorthStar in a consumer telepresence robot.

Some questions to ponder:

• What do you guys think about telepresence robots?
• How much would you pay for a small consumer telepresence robot and how would you use it?
• How much value does autonomous navigation add to the robot?

Here’s an interesting robot from Japanese robotics company Little Island.

Standing at approximately 27″ tall the Wedding Bot sits prominently at the head of your wedding reception and greets your guests. Equipped with speech recognition and a variety of touch sensors, the Wedding Bot can be cajoled into telling “secret” stories about the groom, livening up the party.

At only $2,500 you may be able to convince your significat other that you should forgo the flower arrangements and have the robot greet your guests.

Via CNET.