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Q: What do you get when you put 20 Nao robots in one room?

A: A Discotheque

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Nao Robots by Aldebaran

Fitted with four Stereo Vision cameras, the Willow Garage RP2 is able to find, grasp, and fold five towels from a pile.

Nao (the robot) Performs a Scene from Star Wars

Nao has become a strong contender in the small biped robot world. And now, he has even performed scenes from the Star Wars saga:

Stay tuned… Lord of the Rings is next!

Last week’s BlackBerry Developer Conference in San Francisco had one new (cool) addition: a robot competition. Developers were asked to create applications on their RIM BlackBerry that controlled one of four Lego Mindstorm robots through an obstacle course.

The winner – James White of the TDC Group – got a shiny new BlackBerry Storm 2 and a Lego Mindstorm kit.

Watch the video after the jump:

Remember Pacman the video game from the 80’s?

Well, it turns out that we now have a real world version, using the Roomba and Create platforms to recreate the game in real world.

In a presentation on Thursday, October 14 2009, Panasonic unveiled a number of prototype robots at its research lab in Osaka, Japan. A wide range of robots were introduced, including a robust robotic arm for home use, robotic wheel chairs and hospital robots, as well as a number of industrial robots.

The video below is a summary of what was introduced.

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?