The Wall Street Journal talks to Hugh Herr, founder of Cambridge-based iWalk, which makes the PowerFoot One, a robotic, prosthetic ankle and foot device. Herr is also director of the MIT Media Lab’s Biomechatronics Group.
In the video above, Herr presents his research at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January.
Last week, iWalk received $20 million of a $21 million Series B round to fund development of the prosthetic from General Catalyst and New York-based WFD Ventures.
Herr, who MHT first interviewed in 2005, was trapped in a snowstorm while climbing New Hampshire’s Mount Washington in 1982 at age 17. He was rescued, but suffered frostbite, and subsequently had both legs amputated just below the knee. The ordeal led him to take up engineering to develop better prosthetics.
Scott Kirsner writes about two spinouts from the MIT Media Lab — Waltham-based Affectiva, which makes an emotion-sensing wristband to help study autism, and an unnamed robotics startup founded by Cynthia Breazeal, director of the Media Lab’s Personal Robotics Group, which developed emotion-imitating robot Nexi.
Much more nascent is Cynthia Breazeal’s new company. I’ve been told that it’s going to develop some remotely-operated robotic toys, but Breazeal will only say via e-mail that she’s “doing something innovative in the transmedia space.” It’s not yet incorporated, and she hasn’t yet started pitching investors (though one VC I spoke to last week had already heard about it through the grapevine.) “We’re still working through the concept,” she writes, adding that the company doesn’t yet have a name.
iRobot’s new Warrior 700 robot is a bigger version of the PackBot, and can carry and deploy the smaller robot:
The Warrior 700 was recently put through its paces at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) unmanned systems event in Washington, DC. By rising up on the articulated treads, the Warrior was able to extend its arm and drop the PackBot through a window. The PackBot is rugged enough to survive the short drop to the floor, and using the Warrior to deliver it keeps the operators safely out of harm’s way.
After the jump, watch video of an early Warrior prototype in a rescue simulation. (more…)
The Melrose Free Press reports Nexi, the MIT Media Lab’s emotion-displaying robot, visited the Milano Senior Center earlier this week. Media lab researchers tagged along to do research on how the robot –a white plastic, emotive head perched atop DigitRobotics UBot — interacted with the elderly.
One woman, who declined to give her name but said she’s a regular at the Milano Senior Center, said Nexi is “interesting” and that other seniors were “intrigued, like I am.”
Asked if she thought Nexi could be used as a senior’s assistant, helping out around the house, the woman said it made her think more of technologies such as artificial appendages and the robots that now do much of the work in car factories.
“To me it’s almost like something I never would have anticipated, but now I would take it very much for granted. Why not?” she said.
Robotic fish are not new: In 1994, MIT ocean engineers demonstrated Robotuna, a four-foot-long robotic fish. But while Robotuna had 2,843 parts controlled by six motors, the new robotic fish, each less than a foot long, are powered by a single motor and are made of fewer than 10 individual components, including a flexible, compliant body that houses all components and protects them from the environment. The motor, placed in the fish’s midsection, initiates a wave that travels along the fish’s flexible body, propelling it forward.
Vecna has developed a search and rescue robot that can lift about 500 lbs., according to CNET. The Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot (BEAR) has a humanoid upper body, foldable tank treads for legs and Yogi Bear-style ears, but no hat or necktie.
Boston Engineering has posted video on the company’s YouTube page of its Ghost Swimmer autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) swimming in a pool, looking like a tuna.
The biomimetic Ghost Swimmer, which imitates the motion of a bluefin tuna, first appeared in MHT as the RoboTuna. The Ghost Swimmer was developed with about $100,000 in STTR grants.
The Waltham-based R&D engineering firm has been busy lately — in June, Boston Engineering won a $100,000 SBIR grant to develop a version of the AUV to inspect the hulls of oil tankers. Around the same time, the company brought in $70,000 in a Phase 1 SBIR grant to work on giving landlocked reconnaissance robots the ability to open doors.
At the end of July, the company got a $70,000 SBIR grant to develop a robotic platform to catch, service, refuel and relaunch unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
Incidentally, whoever came up with the UAV and AUV acronyms either didn’t see the kind-of-similar-but-totally-opposite technologies gaining steam at about the same time, or hates me.
MIT, Stanford and the Technical University of Munich are working together to develop the Robot Operating System, an open-source OS that could help robots and roboticists collaborate, according to New Scientist:
This desire has its roots in frustration, says Brian Gerkey of the robotics research firm Willow Garage in Menlo Park, California. “People reinvent the wheel over and over and over, doing things that are not at all central to what they’re trying to do.”
For example, if someone is studying object recognition, they want to design better object-recognition algorithms, not write code to control the robot’s wheels. “You know that those things have been done before, probably better,” says Gerkey. But without a common OS, sharing code is nearly impossible.
And from the comments, a possible down side:
Lets hope its 100% virus proof.
Hacked robots could be a problem well before the self aware ones decide to “KILL ALL HUMANS!”
The article is populated by a cast of characters from the New England robotics scene — MIT, UMass Amherst and DigitRobotics’ UBot, Brown researcher Chad Jenkins, and Barrett Technology CEO William Townsend and the company’s WAM arm.
After the jump, watch video of the UBot at the UMass Amherst robotics lab last summer. (more…)
MIT professor Missy Cummings and her students at the Humans and Automation Lab at MIT Aero/Astro have developed an iPhone-app to control unmanned aerial vehicles. UAVs usually have unwieldy remote controls about the size of a briefcase.
Not only would a iPhone-like controller make soldiers’ jobs much easier, it also opens up UAVs to a whole new, non-military market. If robot control is cheap and intuitive, people might find all kinds of new uses. Cummings’ own favorite: “Being able to launch one out of the window and fly it down to the Starbucks, to tell me how many people are in line, so I know when to get coffee.”
UAV technology will definitely develop at a faster pace than my sense of ease with seeing a flying robot spying on the coffee shop I just left.
Georgia Tech’s Healthcare Robotics Lab has developed a scooping arm attachment for the Roomba robotic vaccuum cleaner. In the video, the hacked Roomba picks up a TV remote, a medicine box and a single pill, which could be handy for the elderly or otherwise incapacitated.
The Healthcare Robotics Lab is also working on a project called Clickable World, which looks to make your immediate surroundings into a user interface that allows you to control robots with a laser pointer. Watch a demonstration after the jump. (more…)
iRobot’s new 
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