Vstone, a Japanese manufacturing company, is currently producing robots of the adorable variety. The idea behind these tiny robots is to bring the robotics hobby to a wider audience with smaller, cheaper programmable units to get a feel for how real bots can operate.
from Robot Gossip:
The Robovie-i is a small and relatively inexpensive robot for experimenters. The -i in the name stands for ‘introduction’ to the exciting world of robots.
After you assemble the robot it basically just walks and dances. It comes with ‘RobovieMaker’ software to edit the movements. The file is then downloaded to the little robot.
While I totally understand and appreciate the idea of getting robots into a wider and younger base, the provided video completely crushed my hopes that the Robovie-i could become the robo-butler of my dreams. It appears instead that Vstone has created a much more updated version of a wind-up toy. At $262 a pop, you may be better off with this contribution from reader Evan. The company does offer some other great humanoid bots that do in fact show promise.
As I have mentioned before, I love watching robots pitted against each other for our amusement. The robotics displayed here are very impressive, yet we are still a ways off from the Transformers style battles we all know are coming in the future.
This video clip of the smooth little bot named ‘Plen‘ demonstrates a few of his more impressive abilities. Particularly impressive is the little guy’s figure skating routine. I suppose that if you can get a robot to walk, it’s not too hard to get him to skate, but it still looks pretty awesome. In the video he skates both forward and backward and performs a few tricks as well.
It looks like our little toy robots seem to have the parlor trick thing down. However, this makes me wonder if these demeaning activities we are forcing on them now will only make them more hostile to us when they inevitably rise to their positions of power.
Wanting to expand the grasping ability of modern robots, US researchers have developed an interesting new technology. Known as “Octarms”, these tentacle-like attachments seem to resemble an octopus’s limb or an elephant’s trunk and can grasp and grapple with a wide variety of objects. These tentacles can be attached to current robots to perform a much wider range of actions than the previous method of robotic grasping (mechanical jaws) ever could.
“Just like a real tentacle, an Octarm simply wraps itself around an object in order to manoeuvre it. This allows it to grasp objects of various sizes and shapes and could let robots deal with unpredictable real-world situations, the researchers say.”
The article actually goes on to say that the robotic tentacles could one day be used to create a robotic octopus or even a backpack with extra limbs. Does this sound familiar to anyone?
