U.S. defense agencies, which have funded this research, are supporting the development of bug-size flyers to carry out reconnaissance, search-and-rescue and environmental monitoring missions without risking human lives. These devices are commonly called micro aerial vehicles or MAVs.
“For military missions in particular, these MAVs must be able to fly successfully through complex urban environments, where there can be tight spaces and turbulent gusts of wind,” said Tiras Lin, a Whiting School of Engineering undergraduate who has been conducting the high-speed video research. “These flying robots will need to be able to turn quickly. But one area in which MAVs are lacking is maneuverability.”

To address that shortcoming, Lin has been studying butterflies. “Flying insects are capable of performing a dazzling variety of flight maneuvers,” he said. “In designing MAVs, we can learn a lot from flying insects.”

The “solve for x” conference continues to be really interesting. Today we have had talks on transforming education, 5x improvements in agriculture through better decision support, synthetic biology and carbon-negative biofuels.

The “solve for x” YouTube channel and web site with all presentations will be up by Monday.

Hat tip to 9to5Google, who provides a more detailed bio for DeVaul, which says he is a member of the “Google [x] Rapid Evaluation Team” and that “he works in a secret Google lab that may or may not be filled with roving robots, space elevators, and talking refrigerators.”

You may recall back in November when reports came out about Google operating such a lab called “Google X”.

In an earlier post, DeVaul, who used to work at Apple, described the event as a “fascinating, invite-only gathering of global innovators” driven by “short, technology rich presentations on topics ranging from low-energy, low-cost water desalinization to stretchable silicon biosensors.”

The description on the Solve for X site says:

Solve for X is a place where the curious can go to hear and discuss radical technology ideas for solving global problems. Radical in the sense that the solutions could help billions of people. Radical in the sense that the audaciousness of the proposals makes them sound like science fiction. And radical in the sense that there is some real technology breakthrough on the horizon to give us all hope that these ideas could really be brought to life.

We can’t wait to share what we discover.

The site is not actually open to the public yet, though you can give them your email address to be notified when it opens up.

There’s a YouTube channel, but there’s only one video up so far:

DeVaul says more videos will be up this afternoon.

Following are some tweets from DeVaul:

Given all the talk about Google X and robots, this might be the most interesting one:

In the video, you can see the quadrotors working together and individually to build small structures using magnetic pieces. Keep in mind that these machines are working entirely from AI or Artificial Intelligence, which to think about is kind of creepy. Now, while building the structures, the robots are able to make micro corrections to snap each piece into place magnetically, which shows their rather impressive intelligence.

Think about this: What if these quadrotors could be built on a grander scale to construct actual buildings in the real world? That’d be pretty cool, right? It’s very possible to do, in fact, the scientists at GRASP or General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception say it’s quite possible to build much larger quads and even build several of the smaller ones to work in large teams to build real world physical structures. I know what you’re thinking, “this is the beginning of Skynet”, well as far as helpful and real world applicable technology, this isn’t Skynet, but it’s funny to think about the similarities between the quadrotors and the Skynet Hunter Killer flying machines.

Each quadrotor weighs just barely over a pound and can deliver a thrust of a little over 2.5 pounds. Swarm robotics; quadrotors working together in swarms is also a tactic displayed in the video. With this ability, the robots can easily work together, with enough units, to lift a heavy objects. If you think about it, swarm robotics would be a little more beneficial while building than an individual quad. If a mechanical failure occurs in the swarm, you still have the rest of the bots to carry the slack, while a failure in a single quad could be very dangerous. Nevertheless, this technology is astonishing and if applied to real world construction, could certainly be mind-blowing to view.

As much as real people really flying in the sky would be.. well, amazing, that wasn’t quite the case. Instead, the objects that people mistook for flying people were actually remote controlled robots that are designed to look like humans. They’re made from super light-weight materials like laser-cut foam and carbon fiber that amounts to the droids weighing a mere 3.3 pounds. Created by RcSuperhero.com, the robots – well, I should say, the airplanes (but I really want to call them robots) were unleashed on the Big Apple recently and the video below captures the stunning display of what a world might look like if superheros really did share this world with us.

Y’know, I gotta say…. even though I know that those robots are not real human beings, watching “people” hover around in the free air like that makes my dorsal hairs stand up. Those poor people on the Brooklyn Bridge below the robots must’ve been in a frenzy. Like… you just can’t surprise people like that, RcSuperhero.com inventors.

One recent example would be the Nao, we looked at about a week ago, showing that robots are getting better at just about everything.

There’s some pretty interesting stuff going on at The Corpora Robotic Company as well. Some video of its QBO robot discovering itself in the mirror has been making the rounds in social media:

If that wasn’t fun enough, the company decided to introduce the robot to a friend:

The company says in a blog post:

From an early age, humans learn to recognize themselves before a mirror using two mechanisms: we have learned how we look like since we are 8 months old, and we verify if our actions or movements are “replicated” in the image of the mirror. Because we are aware of the actions we take and we can recognize those actions in the mirror’s reflection, we have the ability to distinguish ourselves from another “identical” being if we were placed in front of he/she. This is the problem that a robot like Qbo must face in the case of being in front of a mirror or find another robot identical to him.

Inspired by this process of self-recognition in humans, we developed a new ROS node that is executed when the node “Object Recognizer”, previously trained, has identified a Qbo in the image. Using nose signals to see if the image seen by the robot matches its action, a Qbo can tell in real time whether he sees his image reflected in a mirror or he is watching another Qbo robot in front of him. The sequence of flashes of the nose is randomly generated in each process of recognition, so the probability that two robots generate the same sequence is very low, and even lower that they start to transmit it at the same time.

Did you know that robots are being used as prison guards in South Korea? Not these robots, but if you start looking at the various advancements in robotics it starts to get a little scary.

Aldebaran Robotics has a new video out for its NAO robot showing off what it can do:

Here are some of the key features, as the company has diagrammed:

The company explains the robot’s motion:

NAO’s walking uses a simple dynamic model (linear inverse pendulum) and quadratic programming. It is stabilized using feedback from joint sensors. This makes walking robust and resistant to small disturbances, and torso oscillations in the frontal and lateral planes are absorbed. NAO can walk on a variety of floor surfaces, such as carpeted, tiled, and wooden floors. NAO can transition between these surfaces while walking.

The Fall Manager protects NAO when it falls. Its main function is to detect when NAO’s center of mass (CoM) shifts outside the support polygon. The support polygon is determined by the position of the foot or feet in contact with the ground. When a fall is detected, all motion tasks are killed and, depending on the direction, NAO’s arms assume protective positioning, the CoM is lowered, and robot stiffness is reduced to zero.

We may be getting closer to the nightmarish robot future depicted below:

Let’s back up a bit. The robot hasn’t really been trained – it’s actually controlled by a human. Oh, that’s cooler? Yeah, you’re right.

Developer Taylor Veltrop spent the better part of 2011 constructing this little gem – a system that allows him to get in the mind of a two-foot tall NAO robot, and use that control to thoroughly satisfy or seriously annoy (honestly, who can tell with cats?) his feline companion.

Veltrop hacked a Kinect and uses two Wii remotes to control the bot’s arms. He then uses a treadmill in correlation with the Kinect to control the bot’s movement. A head mounted display allows him to control the bot’s head as well as see through its eyes.

The result is this: an amazingly elaborate scheme to brush your cat. Enjoy:

And oh look! There are plans for more:

After doing this exercise, it became apparent that the next feature to add is hearing and speaking through the robot. Luckily both the NAO and my HMD have microphones and speakers so this shouldn’t be too difficult.

You can debate whether or not this project deserved a year of someone’s life. Hey, maybe this invention will allow people with extreme cat allergies to interact with kitties via robotic surrogate? Who knows. But one thing you can’t argue is that it’s nice to see a robot given a task that doesn’t threaten human life as we know it.

[Hat Tip to Engadget]

While using computer hardware and/or accessories to make music is not a new concept, this might be the first well-known Christmas song that I’ve seen recreated with such an “instrument.”

YouTube user bd594 (the guy who brought us the wonderful tech-cover of Bohemian Rhapsody) has done it again. This new viral Christmas vid shows a duo of a robot snare drummer and an HP scanner playing the classic tune.

Check it out below:

Here’s what the creator has to say about the project:

This project was really difficult, it was 70% timing and 30% execution. There are alot of YouTube videos with floppies and stepper motors playing songs. These motors have a quick response time because they are not under a heavy load. The problem with a flatbed scanner is moving the large carriage head. It was not designed to move quickly and when it is playing music you will notice the head changes directions. This is to prevent the carriage from smashing into the chassis.

As the notes are playing the carriage head has to periodically change direction and this can add many seconds to a 3 or 4 minute song. This takes extra programming to compensate for these delays. As for the drums they are just a couple of solenoids connected to a pulley system in order to ampilfy the movement. The solenoids are used and have very slow response time, you may notice a few beats are missed during the drum rolls. Believe me when I say I have a new respect for drummers.

I’m patiently awaiting “Carol of the Bells” on 80′s IBM printer.

In fact, while Siri has certainly been a hit, and has proven useful at times, it’s not perfect. Google’s not perfect either, but when it comes to search, Google has a little bit of background in that area. Siri does more than search obviously, but search is a big part of it. Google happens to do more than search too, and being Apple’s main competitor in the smartphone space, it makes sense that Google would be working on its answer to Siri.

Android and Me reports that this is indeed the case, and we might even see it before the year is over (but more realistically within the next couple of months). It’s being developed under the code name Majel, says Android and Me’s Taylor Wimberly. Majel comes from Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, who provided the voice for most of the onboard computer interfaces throughout Star Trek.

The Star Trek theme is one that Google has embraced for quite some time. Just over a year ago, Google acquired Phonetic Arts, a speech synthesis company that generates natural computer speech from samples of recorded voice.

“In Star Trek, they don’t spend a lot of time typing things on keyboards—they just speak to their computers, and the computers speak back,” said Google Speech Technology Manager Mike Cohen at the time. “It’s a more naturalway to communicate, but getting there requires chipping away at a range of hard research problems. We’ve recently made some strides with speech technologies and tools that take voice input: for example, we launched Voice Search, Voice Input and Voice Actions for mobile phones, allowing you to speak web searches, compose emails by voice, ask your phone to play any song, and more. And last year we started automatically transcribing speech to produce captions on YouTube videos.”

But Phonetic Arts comes in when you start talking about computers talking back to you – voice output as opposed to input – kind of like Siri, though Google has offered some things in this area since long before Siri came to the iPhone. Examples include features in Google Translate and Maps Navigation.

A Star Trek mention also came up in a recent video Google put out about the evolution of search.

“The truth is that our users need much more complex answers,” said Google’s Amit Singhal in the video. “My dream has always been to build the Star Trek computer, and in my ideal world, I would be able to walk up to a computer, and say, ‘Hey, what is the best time for me to sow seeds in India, given that monsoon was early this year?’ And once we can answer that question (which we don’t today), people will be looking for answers to even more complex questions. These are all genuine information needs. Genuine questions that if we – Google – can answer, our users will become more knowledgeable and they will be more satisfied in their quest for knowledge.”

Wimberly says the initial release of “Majel” will likely only include Google search queries at first, and it may include some of what is being worked on at Google X (you, know – Google’s secret robot lab). Other, more advanced features like controlling phone actions and apps with natural language, are expected to come later, he says.

I’m sure that won’t stop people from slamming the service when it comes out, proclaiming that it’s not as good as Siri – kind of like what happened with Google Music, even if it has a very legitimate reason for existing (also like Google Music). Android is doing pretty well these days.

View more daily video round-ups here.

Xbox Live fall dashboard video walkthrough:

Eric Schmidt talks to James Cameron:

Flying robots build stuff:

Social Media ROI Hypocrisy:

Google shared this one on the LatLong blog:

Cello Wars:

Nick Kroll on Conan:

Typography Faux Pas:

Dogs doing the Nutcracker (via StumbleUpon):

Ferrari graveyard: