Feral Robots Blog

They haven’t responded to ANY of my emails, not even the cancellation emails, so I’m worried that one day, when they get off of their lazy asses, they’ll charge the order and ship it. I’m going to give them a call tomorrow, hopefully someone will answer…! Will post again as things happen…

a list of (arguably) the world’s 10 coolest robots:

http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/top-10-coolest-robots

and the new robotic carp

http://www.pinktentacle.com/2006/03/hiroshima-engineers-develop-robotic-carp/

Robo-Carp video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=M7YGEVuJ4mM

Why do things take five business days to ship? Crazy.

The first bit of good news is that we have a sensor. Figaro sensors went above and beyond to say that their sensors in Illinois would take two weeks minimum to ship. Fortunately, Natalie said she had a sensor for us, and it works for the most part. It’s a Figaro TGS822 model that’s designed to smell alchohol. The schematics can be found at http://www.figarosensor.com/products/822pdf.pdf. It isn’t what we wanted, but it works nonetheless.

I got the idea lately of turning our dog into a breathalizer. Like the girls working on the Idog, whose robotic dog is stationary, they’re using the same sensors. Turns out all the big companies are lazy at shipping parts. My biggest issue is the wiring boards. Hernando Barragan from http://wiring.org.co secured me 2 wiring boards on Friday March 10. It’s been over a week and I’ve sent him constant emails asking if it has been shipped yet and if there was a tracking number for the package. He’s been dead silent.

Then there’s the press release. I need to write a page and get pictures for an article addressing the many questions that relate to our …

http://www.avclub.com/content/node/46326

14 Exceptionally Memorable Movie Robots
By Keith Phipps
March 14th, 2006

1. “Fake Maria,” from Metropolis (1927)
Any list of great movie robots can only begin with Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s 1927 vision of a future in which science has made Earth a paradise for the privileged, and a hell for those who have to keep it running. Brigitte Helm plays Maria, a beautiful worker whose charisma and organizational skills pose a threat to the powers that be. But said powers have a secret weapon in mad scientist Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who kidnaps Helm, imposes her face on an android, and lets her double loose to mislead the people with some lascivious dancing. Creators are still unpacking the themes laid out here, particularly the robot Maria’s ability to pass as human (and stir desire without real flesh). Where do we draw the line between human and machine? What responsibility do we have for the artificial life we create? And do the answers have to send us tumbling into the chaos Lang depicts here?

2. Gort, from The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951)
Sure, there have been far livelier robots than Gort, Michael Rennie’s robot assistant from The Day The Earth Stood Still. But few captured the anxiety …

Still no response from those bozos. I guess I’ll email them again. I think there’s a contact # somewhere, maybe call them up. Seriously. They’ll probably send it a year from now. AGH.

This article explains recent work to “remote control” sharks and other creatures. This imagines and extends control and containment of animals in another technological direction. Previously we used technologies that looked like fences, gates, locks and now the huge farming enclosures that are indistinguishable from other factories to contain and control animals, radically changing where the animals would go, the nutrient cycling they fostered and the territorial resources they effected. Now these fences that enforce forms of servitude and domination extend further into the body of the animal…

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/mech-tech/mg18925416.300.html.

Secondly, a New York Times article

WEEK IN REVIEW | March 5, 2006
Ideas & Trends: The Art of Building a Robot to Love
By HENRY FOUNTAIN
If robots can act in lots of ways, how do people want them to act, happy or sad, bubbly or cranky?

….
“Some designers give their machines a human touch. Dr. Bartneck’s robot, for example, called eMuu, is a teardrop-shaped cyclops that can arch its eyebrow and mouth to express anger, happiness or sadness.
But not even a rudimentary face is necessary. Dogs, Dr. Nass noted, show happiness by wagging their tail. ”They do a brilliant job expressing emotion,” he said. ”A robot doesn’t have to announce, ‘This is my happy look,’ just as my dog doesn’t.”

This article introduces Maja Mataric’s and the work of others in research to do with emotionally expressive robotics covering presentations given at the Human Robot Interaction conference in Salt Lake City (see: http://hri2006.org/). This represents work to “instrumentalize” emotions. One argument is that designers can exploit the sophisticated emotionally lingua franca of emotions to facilitate effective communication, that we are good at emotional readings because it gives us predictive information about what will happen next. Another argument is that people are good at learning, and can adapt and learn invariant systems. Why try to make them emotional—who prefers the animated paperclip to the pull down menus of Microsoft Word? Don’t we want to reduce complexity, rather than increase it. Other emotional views (so to speak) can be found at: http://emotion-research.net/workshops. Are your dogs “emotionally” expressive? What makes you able to project (or not) emotional response?
Some designers give their machines a human touch. Dr. Bartneck’s robot, for example, called eMuu, is a teardrop-shaped cyclops that can arch its eyebrow and mouth to express anger, happiness or sadness.
But not even a rudimentary face is necessary. Dogs, Dr. Nass noted, show happiness by wagging their tail. ”They do a brilliant job expressing emotion,” he said. ”A robot doesn’t have to announce, ‘This is my happy look,’ just as my dog doesn’t.”

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I haven’t heard back from ActiveWire yet. I sent that email off on Tuesday. It’s been 2 weeks and 3 days since I submitted the order for the board. I’ll email them again.

So I did some light research based on some trivia I knew about UCSD. UCSD was a WWII era rifle range called Camp Matthews that was decommissioned around 1960 when it was sold to the University Regents. Upon the land was first built SIO and then UCSD (although as far as I know, some of the first UCSD buildings were Camp Matthews buildings). So Kevin is supposed to come up with the more exacting research, but I figured that I could come up with a basic visual until then.

The Navy aerial recon photo is in B&W and overlayed upon the 2005 aerial image of the UCSD campus. A source I found stated that the rifle range starts in the upper right of the photo about where I’ve highlighted it in red. However, the source also stated that the range occupied much of the current campus and that’s highlighted in yellow. It is of note that the red area is the Revelle area of campus.

It’s also of note (but somewhat unrelated) that according to my gradstudent townhousemate, there are many bio labs around Revelle and …

any word on the activewire yet?

It’s been a while since the last update. Time to fill in on what’s happened:

I’ve done a sketch of what I believe Robopet will look like on the inside before I actually tore him up. The image can be found below.

http://xs71.xs.to/pics/06101/dog_01.png

For the most part, I was right on the ball. Let’s begin with the back end.

The section controlling the hind legs are run by a pair of motors. They’re motors because in the toy’s off state, I can move the legs fowars or backwards without resistance. The motors are actually pretty light. At first, I thought there was a weight that would give the robot momentum to let it do a roll. But in reality, the movements are very mechanical, going from his side then on top of his head while moving one leg at a time. The exo-shell of the dog was made to give him an easy time to roll. It

A small motor connects the two body sections together that allows Robopet to shift his body so he can scratch himself and roll over. Then two identical motors control the foward legs. This occupies the entire bottom half of the front section. The top section is …