The game isn’t just some nutty hack, either. The students made it to demonstrate developing for unmanned aerial vehicles. The Pac-Man Roomba is controlled by a player using a joystick — the ghosts are autonomous. The Pac-Man robot eats tape “pellets” along its path, including the special huge pellet that sends the ghost robots running in the other direction; and even acts out the death spiral Pac-Man does when he gets eaten.
This could open up a whole new cottage industry of robots jazzing up old games: PackBot Minesweeper, Predator-drone Space Invaders, Artaic Pictionary, Precision Urban Hopper Q-Bert, crazy robot baseball, Petman marathons, etc. Competitive BigDog/LittleDog racing at Wonderland could bring together animal activists, racing enthuisasts, the gaming industry, the tech community and maybe even the Nascar crowd. I’d like to see that industry networking event.
If you thought the BigDog video was disturbing, iRobot’s “chembot” video is flat-out revolting: From the title: “Jamming Skin Enabled Locomotion” (JSEL, with the much more pleasant-sounding pronunciation, “Giselle”), to the animation of the green, shrimp-looking robot rendering, to the use of the term “jammable slurry,” — mmm … jammable slurry — to the pulsating, throbbing, ball of pasty colored I-don’t-know-what straight out of Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” video.
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…)
In today’s NewsFlash roundup, Dataupia may not be coming down for breakfast, Genzyme’s Allston problem gets worse, and Drew Bledsoe, VC, makes a cleantech investment.
Just two months after the company cut its staff levels by more than 50 percent, data-warehousing appliance company Dataupia Inc. is seeking to sell its assets, according to an online report.
Former New England Patriots quarterback Drew Bledsoe’s investment firm has invested $10 million in a Florida water purification technology company. Bledsoe Capital Group, founded in 2007 by the 14-year NFL veteran and Montana attorney Chad Wold, will receive a 33 percent stake in Ecosphere Energy Services LLC, a subsidiary of Stuart, Fla., water engineering and services firm Ecosphere Technologies Inc.
As a result of dumping the unfinished batches of Cerezyme, Genzyme will have to take an $8.4 million write-off in addition to the $14.2 million already announced. (more…)
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…)
The iRobot co-founder’s startup is developing a flying first responder robot for emergency situations — the grant says the main challenges are “indoor flight control and safety around people.”
The Department of Defense announced today it has cancelled the Army’s Future Combat Systems Brigade Combat Team program, a modernization program started in 2003.
The restructuring eliminates the manned vehicle portion of the program, which didn’t fit with Defense’s focus on fighting counterinsurgencies in close quarters. Ground robotics, unmanned aerial drones, sensors and other modernization technologies will be handled by separate brigades, according to Defense.
Such a move had been expected since Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced military cuts in the spring.
At the RoboBusiness conference in April, retired U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Joe Dyer, president of iRobot Corp.’s government and industrial robots division, said all of iRobot’s military robots under the Future Combat Systems program would be continued.
Customers don’t want a Roomba vacuuming robot that argues when you tell it to vacuum the floor. That’s what kids are for. When the company I co-founded, iRobot, first delivered Roomba to customers, they didn’t write to us and say, “I want it to be more humanlike.” They said, “Make it cover the floor better and make it recharge on its own” (we did) …
Likewise, the military doesn’t need robots that question commands or find their assignment boring. Combat robots are built for a mission; they are tools for the soldier.
In the same package, Yale computer science professor David Gelernter argues for a resurgence in AI research’s less practical side:
This facet of AI research has more or less shut down because it ignored an all-important detail: Intelligence isn’t just about problem-solving, but about a whole cognitive spectrum that includes dreaming and other forms of unconscious activity.
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iRobot’s new 
The restructuring eliminates the manned vehicle portion of the program, which didn’t fit with Defense’s focus on fighting counterinsurgencies in close quarters. Ground robotics, unmanned aerial drones, sensors and other modernization technologies will be handled by separate brigades, according to Defense.
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