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MIT Invents a Swarm of Sea-Skimming, Oil-Collecting Robots | 80beats

27 Aug

Discover Magazine

Earlier this week, DISCOVER brought you oil-cleaning bacteria. Today, we bring you oil-cleaning bots.
This weekend in watery Venice, Italy, MIT scientists will demonstrate a creation called Seaswarm, a fleet of autonomous swimming bots intended to skim the water’s surface; each bot would drag a sort of mesh net to collect the crude sitting there. According to their creators, the machines will be able to find oil on their own and talk to one another to compute the most efficient way to tidy it up.
The Seaswarm robots, which were developed by a team from MIT’s Senseable City Lab, look like a treadmill conveyor belt that’s been attached to an ice cooler. The conveyor belt piece of the system floats on the surface of the ocean. As it turns, the belt propels the robot forward and lifts oil off the water with the help of a nanomaterial that’s engineered to attract oil and repel water [CNN].
The bots’ belts can hold 20 times their own weight in oil, the MIT scientists say. And once the belts have collected to capacity, the machines can exact the oil back out it the head—that yellow part—where it can be burned off.
The Seaswarm robot, which is 16 feet long and seven feet wide, uses two square meters of solar panels for self-propulsion. With just 100 watts, the equivalent of one household light bulb, it could potentially clean continuously for weeks [MSNBC].
The researchers say they plan to enter their fleet of bots into the X-Prize Foundation’s million-dollar contest for the best way to clean up an oil spill, inspired by the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The Seaswarm’s creators say that a fleet of 5,000 bots like theirs could tackle a spill like BP’s in about a month—at least what’s on the surface, anyway. For massive wandering undersea plumes of oil, thankfully we have those bacteria.
Related Content:
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Oil-Eating Bacteria Have Started to Clean the Deepwater Horizon Spill
80beats: Next from X Prize: An Award for Cleaning up BP’s Oil Spill?
80beats: Scientists Find 22-Mile-Long Oily Plume Drifting in the Gulf of Mexico
80beats: BP to Kevin Costner: We’ll Take 32 of Your Oil Clean-up Machines
Image: MIT Senseable City Lab

Read more over at discovermagazine.com
Robots have dance moves

27 Aug

The Sydney Morning Herald

Sydney scientists have programmed a group of humanoid robots to dance - already mastering hip-hop.

Read more over at www.smh.com.au
Video: Meet Weird Bipedal Robot ZIN

27 Aug

CrunchGear

We’ve shown you quite a few weird robots over the past years, and now we have one more. Meet ZIN [JP], a model developed at Gifu National College of Technology in Japan. I don’t know why exactly they built the robot this way, but it’s funny to look at, especially on video (see below).
The 11 students behind ZIN say their goal was to create a robot that can walk like a human being and that’s able to mimic the movements of human operators. For that, ZIN uses just one motor that actuates both legs.
Watch ZIN in action in the video embedded below:
Via Plastic Pals

Read more over at www.crunchgear.com
MIT Seaswarm autonomous robots coming soon to an oil spill near you (video)

27 Aug

Engadget

Think of it as an autonomous, swarming, photovoltaic legion of seagoing Roombas (or don't, if you're easily upset). The Seaswarm project at MIT takes a thin, hydrophobic material and drags it behind a robot outfitted with GPS and WiFi for determining its location and communicating within a swarm. When deployed, the group finds the outer edges of an oil spill, and works its way into the center, coordinating the cleanup with minimal human interference. The material itself can take on twenty times its weight in oil. And yes, the whole thing is re-usable. According to researchers, 5,000 of these relatively low cost devices could have cleaned up the BP oil disaster in a month -- which is more than we can say for Kevin Costner! See it in action after the break.
Continue reading MIT Seaswarm autonomous robots coming soon to an oil spill near you (video)
MIT Seaswarm autonomous robots coming soon to an oil spill near you (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Aug 2010 08:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Read more over at www.engadget.com
Multi-touch Surface Used As A Robot Control System

27 Aug

Ubergizmo

We've seen plenty of robots popping up all over the place recently, but what about the methods of controlling the robot? This robot control system that uses Microsoft Surface is quite cool as it allows you to control a swarm of little virtual robots in Star Craft fashion while throwing in a little Flight Control feel into the whole deal. Check out the video after the jump, and imagine yourself controlling a whole army of robots to scare your neighbor in the future.

Permalink: Multi-touch Surface Used As A Robot Control System from Ubergizmo | Hot: iPhone 4 Review, Droid X Review,BlackBerry Torch Review

Read more over at www.ubergizmo.com
Evolution Robotics Introduces Mint at RobotShop.com

27 Aug

StreetInsider.com

Visit StreetInsider.com at http://www.streetinsider.com/Press+Releases/Evolution+Robotics+Introduces+Mint+at+RobotShop.com/5928051.html for the full story.

Read more over at www.streetinsider.com
Empathy with robots depends on exposure

27 Aug

New Scientist - Robots

Brain regions responsible for relating to others "lit up" when volunteers watched a robotic hand

Read more over at www.newscientist.com
Robot Swarm Control On Microsoft's Surface

27 Aug

Slashdot

zerOnIne writes "Dr. Mark Micire of UMass Lowell has built an intriguing new user interface on the Microsoft Surface, a multitouch-capable table computer. The interface is being used to control swarms of robots for disaster response, search, and rescue. One of the most interesting things about it is the intuitive tabletop joystick widget. Using a very fast hand-detection-and-identification algorithm, they can paint a touch joystick (dubbed the DREAM controller) directly underneath the hand. This joystick conforms to the size of the user's hand and tracks with hand movements, making sure that the control is always directly under the hand where the user expects it, even without haptic feedback. I've had a chance to go hands-on with this system, and I think it's truly remarkable."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more over at slashdot.org
Quick Look: Mint Floor-Cleaning Robot

27 Aug

CrunchGear

I’ve been aching to get my hands on a Mint ever since it was introduced at CES this year. It’s a little cleaner robot like the Roomba, but created with hardwood floors in mind. Think of the Roomba as a broom and dustpan, while the Mint is like a Swiffer.
I’ve only had this little guy for long enough to charge him for a few hours and give him the run of the living room once, so this is just a quick overview.
So how is it? It’s cute! And compact. I’m always surprised by how big Roombas really are; the Mint is about the size of a big book or a couple netbooks stacked on top of each other. This means it can get into corners and edge around things easily. It’s three inches tall, which means it’ll go under most furniture and some couches. It fits under my couch just fine, but a low-hanging bookcase hits it on the “forehead,” which to be fair it figured out right away and worked along the edge of.
It’s extremely quiet. If you’re not paying attention, you won’t notice it until it’s bumping into you. But it still has enough torque to push my garbage can around a bit (it wasn’t sure what to make of that).
Very easy to set up. It uses little cloths or Swiffer wipes, which are very easy to install. Then just put its little base somewhere in the room and it syncs up and off it goes. I thought it would restrict itself to the room it’s in, but it found its way into my bedroom through a hallway, and came back after a few minutes. Bonus!
I just wanted to put these pictures up with these first impressions; expect a full review once I try it out for a week or so, get a feel for its battery life, shortcomings, and so on. But I like this little guy. It costs $250, which is a lot more than a broom, but hey.

Read more over at www.crunchgear.com
MIT builds swimming, oil-eating robots

27 Aug

Computerworld

MIT researchers have used nanotechnology to develop a robot that can autonomously navigate across the surface of the ocean to clean up an oil spill.

Read more over at computerworld.co.nz