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Visitors to the Toshiba Science Museum in Kawasaki, Japan, got a treat the other day when the electronics giant showed off a new two-wheeled robot that can balance a plate of food on its head.The bot seems to be called Wheelie, and it's still experimental.

Toshiba hasn't released any info on it yet, but judging from the video, it can self-balance like a Segway, tackle a gentle gradient, and avoid obstacles.
It can also squeeze into tight spots. Two small retractable wheels pop out for added stability while Wheelie is in standby mode.
Its purpose seems to be to help out around the home by carrying objects to and fro. Looks like it would make a good mobile beer coaster, too.
Toshiba has produced a number of household robots, including ApriPoko, ApriAlpha, and ApriAttenda, but unfortunately has yet to commercialize them. I hope Wheelie isn't another tease.

Living in Japan, you have to sort your household garbage into burnable trash, non-burnable trash, recycling, and probably one other category I've forgotten. Each goes to the curb on a different day. I'm tickled to see that Japanese researchers have built a recycling robot that automatically sorts different kinds of plastic by using laser-sensing technology. They call it the first of its kind in the world.

The engineers at Osaka University's Photonics Advanced Research Center and automation firm IDEC, along with Mitsubishi Electric Engineering, say the sorting robot is designed to improve low recycling rates for plastics by automating the sorting process with lasers.

Operating on five different wavelengths, the lasers can recognize six kinds of plastic (even ones indistinguishable to the human eye): polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polystyrene (PS), and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS).

The machine is about 5 feet by 6 feet, and houses a robot arm that transfers plastics from an input area to the laser scanning section. A screen displays the kinds of plastics identified and the related reduction in CO2 from recycling. It's unclear how much plastic the device can process per day.

The sorter is currently being used in a trial at stores in Nara and Osaka in Japan. IDEC apparently plans to commercialize a smaller version of the machine for around $55,000.

Jepang memang dikenal sebagai negara yang sangat antusias mengembangkan bidang robotik. Berbagai lembaga dan perusahaan di sana berlomba-lomba berinovasi dalam menghasilkan karya spektakulernya.Salah satu perusahaan asal Jepang, ZMP Inc, kini tengah mengembangkan produk robotik dan edukasi.

Di samping memproduksi ZMP e-nuvo series, perusahaan tersebut juga menawarkan beberapa tipe robot. Tahun 2009 lalu, perusahaan tersebut meluncurkan prototipe RoboCar yang mana konsep tersebut kini dibuat lebih besar dengan 1 buah kursi di dalamnya, produk ini dinamai RoboCar G.

Kabarnya pengembangan RoboCar G akan dilaksanakan hingga bulan November 2010 mendatang. Begitu pula mengenai harga produk ini belum ada bocoran sama sekali. Tunggu saja.

The Lego robot revolution is unstoppable. From Mindstorms development kits to puzzle-solving machines, the blocks seem to be going where no toy has gone before. Now a Polish tinkerer has thrown down the gauntlet, as it were, by building a robot hand out of Lego.

Polish Web designer Paul Ian Kmiec loves tinkering with Lego Technic kits (he even blogs for the brand).
Not content with building tanks and excavators out of plastic bricks, he has created a motorized human arm entirely of Lego parts.
Kmiec describes the electric/pneumatic arm as something he built over a weekend. It has four remote-controlled motors, four fingers with two joints each, and a thumb that can be raised and lowered. It's not quite fully articulated, but the wrist rotates.
An electric air compressor fills an air tank at up to 20 psi to power the pneumatic system. This allows the hand to grasp objects like the plastic heart seen in the video.
The index finger is controlled separately. "Because when my army of Brickminators is destroying humans, they should be able to point [out] their next victim," Kmiec writes.

Kojiro here is the work of Tokyo's JSK Robotics Laboratory. With his 60 degrees of motion, provided by a network of super effective artificial muscles and tendons, he'll utterly destroy Honda's Asimo in the inevitable slow-motion robot battle in their future.

I say slow motion because, I mean, look at this thing. He's getting more hand-holding help than grandpa at the retirement home. Hell, even grandpa doesn't need someone fiddling with an original PlayStation controller and a UI to get him to perform basic tasks. Like turning at the waist (see video after the jump).

Geezer speed aside, it's the musculature that's the takeaway here. Modeled after human muscles, bones, tendons, and ligaments, the system is incredibly flexible for a robot, and its 60 degrees of motion bests the aforementioned Asimo by a good 26 degrees.
It's also lighter than your traditional humanoid robot, which designers contend will make it more friendly when humans have to interact with it.
Mental note: Lighter materials also mean one can chuck it farther, perhaps off a cliff, should "more friendly" actually be "more deadly" if and when it goes haywire.

In the future, all business meetings will be conducted by telepresence robots--on-site avatar machines that will take care of the boring business of earning a living while we sit back at home sipping lattes and generally enjoying our 300-year lifespans.

Even if you don't believe telepresence robots are going to eliminate the need to get out of bed in the morning, it's hard to dismiss them as a powerful new communication tool, especially if one is waving at you while perched on someone's shoulder.
MIT doctoral student Sigurdur Orn's MeBot is a mobile telepresence bot with richly expressive gestural abilities. It's part of what he terms "socially embodied communication," which is more immediate than an e-mail or phone call.
The robot--which was displayed this week at the Human-Robot Interaction conference in Osaka, Japan--has a small screen atop a three-axis neck that displays the remote user's face, as well as two moving arms. These moving parts help convey user expressions to the other party as the bot moves around on its wheeled base.
The arms seem to be controlled manually, but the moving screen automatically tracks user head movements like nodding or shaking.
MeBot researchers in the MIT Personal Robots Group say that a telepresence robot that is "physically embodied and expressive" is more effective than one that doesn't, citing the findings of an experiment.
"Results showed that people felt more psychologically involved and more engaged in the interaction with their remote partners when they were embodied in a socially expressive way," the PRG YouTube channel says.
"People also reported much higher levels of cooperation both on their own part and their partners as well as a higher score for enjoyment in the interaction."
It's hard to ignore a colleague when he or she is wriggling around in a robot body on your desk. I find MeBot slightly insectile and silly, like the characters in the great video for Donald Fagen's "Snowbound," my fave tune for winter.
I'll bet we're going to see more small-scale, mobile telepresence robot projects, with some bipedal and humanoid, like Japan's Robo-One fighting machines. Maybe when they're not out interacting for us, they can hoof it to the kitchen and fetch the Grey Poupon.