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Justin is a dexterous humanoid robot that can make coffee. Now it's learning to fix satellites. Justin was developed at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, part of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), in Wessling, Germany. The robot has different configurations, including one with wheels. The space version has a head, torso, and arms, but no wheels or legs, because it will be mounted on a spacecraft or satellite. The goal is to use Justin to repair or refuel satellites that need to be serviced. Its creators say that ideally the robot would work autonomously. To replace a module or refuel, for example, you'd just press a button and the robot would do the rest. But that's a long-term goal. For now, the researchers are relying on another approach: robotic telepresence. A human operator controls the robot from Earth, using a head-mounted display and a kind of arm exoskeleton. That way the operator can see what the robot sees and also feel the forces the robot is experiencing.

German researchers have built an anthropomorphic robot hand that can endure collisions with hard objects and even strikes from a hammer without breaking into pieces. In designing the new hand system, researchers at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, part of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), focused on robustness. They may have just built the toughest robot hand yet. The DLR hand has the shape and size of a human hand, with five articulated fingers powered by a web of 38 tendons, each connected to an individual motor on the forearm.

Remember Hitachi’s little helper robot, EMIEW 2 (Excellent Mobility and Interactive Existence as Work-mate)?  It’s been a couple of years since we heard anything regarding the project and we feared the worst.  Hitachi has put those fears to rest by holding a news conference to show off its new enhanced voice recognition and driving performance! Known primarily for its unique legs which have wheels for feet, EMIEW 2 can drive at up to 6km/h to keep pace with people.  If it needs to carry something it can kneel down (for added stability) and scoot around, and thanks to its bipedal legs it can step over obstacles that are too high to drive over.  Now it has been given adaptive suspension control technology which increases its stability when driving over bumpy terrain such as elevator doors.  During the press demonstration, EMIEW 2′s springy legs bobbed independently as it drove over cables and uneven flooring.

California-based company Anybots continues work on a telepresence robot that can take communication to a whole new level by eliminating the need for people to actually be present at board meetings or conferences. Because God knows executives work hard enough. The idea behind QA, the robot, is to interact with people, such as clients or partners, from anywhere in the world, which will save a lot of money on travel costs and different remote-communications equipment. Designed not unlike a sophisticated Skype program, QA relies on a Wi-Fi connection to allow users to interact through video, sound and diagrams projected from and onto the robot’s interface. With a sleek white exterior design, the armless 5-foot robot looks just about how you would expect a robot tailored for the boardroom to look. His rectangular-shaped face with two big eyes reminds a bit of Steven Spielberg’s E.T., so people should warm up to it fairly quickly.

Humans aren't the only ones playing soccer right now. In just two days, robots from world-renowned universities will compete in Singapore for RoboCup 2010. This is the other World Cup, where players range from 15-centimeter tall Wall-E-like bots to adult-sized advanced humanoids. The RoboCup, now in its 14th edition, is the world’s largest robotics and artificial intelligence competition with more than 400 teams from dozens of countries. The idea is to use the soccer bots to advance research in machine vision, multi-agent collaboration, real-time reasoning, sensor-fusion, and other areas of robotics and AI. But its participants also aim to develop autonomous soccer playing robots that will one day be able to play against humans. The RoboCup's mission statement:

As Paolo Robuffo Giordano and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, in Tübingen, Germany, would have it, scientific research means riding the business end of a giant industrial robot arm while playing video games. But hey -- they produced some serious research on it, which was presented at ICRA 2010.  The CyberMotion Simulator is basically a full motion simulator adapted to a racing car game. Players (or subjects, the researchers prefer to call them) sit in a cabin on a robot arm some 2 meters off the ground and drive a Ferrari F2007 car around a projected track with force-feedback steering wheel and pedals. The aim is to make the experience as realistic as possible without having to buy a real F2007, and to test the simulator with an environment that requires sudden, massive acceleration.

Perhaps the most difficult control problem for a drive servo is that of going down a ramp. Any back drivable drive servo will exhibit a freewheeling velocity on a given ramp. This is the speed at which the robot will roll down the ramp in an unpowered state. At this speed, the surface drag and internal drag of the servo are equal to the gravitational force multiplied by the sine of the slope. The freewheeling speed is thus load dependent.

The "kid-size" humanoid league at the RoboCup features standardized humanoid robots that teams write software for. The reigning 2009 champs, from Technische Universitat Darmstadt, worked on making shots and passes quicker in this year's matches. Watch the video highlights and see if their strategy paid off.

Danish Technological Institute's Centre for Robot Technology, one of Europe's leading innovators of robotics, is expanding with larger robot laboratories built in the science park Forskerparken in Odense. The new building takes part in strengthening the Centre’s ties to University of Southern Denmark, which is close by together with other of the Centre’s partner companies.

Getting oil out of water isn’t that hard, on principle. What is hard is getting a huge amount of oil out of an even huger amount of water. If you think about it, this is really a perfect task for a swarm of robots, since it’s simple and repeatable and just needs to be done over and over (and over and over and over) again. With this in mind, MIT’s Senseable City Lab has created Seaswarm, a swarm of networked oil spill cleanup robots:

The science behind gecko toes holds the answer to a dry adhesive that provides an ideal grip for robot feet. Stanford mechanical engineer Mark Cutkosky is using the new material, based on the structure of a gecko foot, to keep his robots climbing.

Can a team of soccer-playing robots beat the human World Cup champions by 2050? That's the ultimate goal of RoboCup, an international tournament where teams of soccer robots compete in various categories, from small wheeled boxes to adult-size humanoids. IEEE Spectrum's Harry Goldstein traveled to Singapore to attend RoboCup 2010 -- and check out how the man vs. machine future of soccer is playing out.

A research project will be conducted this week in Linz, Austria, to discover what the ideal interaction between people and humanoid robots ought to be in the future, Honda R&D and Ars Electronica Futurelab announced today. The research, the first of its kind in Europe, will involve members of the public directly interacting with ASIMO, Honda's humanoid robot.

It should be able to hold an inert grenade with one hand, and pull the pin with the other hand without the need for human control.  The software system must enable the robot to perform the Challenge Tasks following a high-level script with no operator intervention. For example, the operator would issue a command such as “Throw Ball.” That command would in turn decompose into a sequence of lower-level tasks, such as “find ball,” “grasp ball,” “re-grasp ball, cock arm, and throw.”

Honda and the Ars Electronica Futurelab are collaborating on a human-robot interaction study this week in Linz, Austria (September 2nd ~ 8th).  Although they say their goal is to determine how robots ought to interact with people in the future, I think this may be just an excuse to let the public have some one-on-one fun with ASIMO.  In any case, these sorts of studies should help steer Honda’s engineers in the right direction when designing the next version of the world’s most famous humanoid robot.

Ranger, a four legged bi-pedal robot, set an unofficial record at Cornell last month for walking 23 kilometers (14.3 miles), untethered, in 10 hours and 40 minutes. Walking at an average pace of 2.1 km/h (1.3 miles per hour), Ranger circled the indoor track at Cornell’s Barton Hall 108.5 times, taking 65,185  steps before it had to stop and recharge. Ranger walks much like a human, using gravity and momentum to help swing its legs forward, though its looks like a boom box on stilts. Its swinging gait is like a human on crutches since the robot has no knees, and its two exterior legs are connected at the top and its two interior legs are connected at the bottom.

Carnegie Mellon has taught its robotic snake to climb trees, though one hopes it won’t start offering your spouse apples. “Uncle Sam” (presumably named for its red, white, and blue markings) is a snake robot built from modular pieces. The latest in a line of ‘modsnakes’ from Carnegie Mellon’s Biorobotics Lab, Uncle Sam can move in a variety of different ways including rolling, wiggling, and side-winding. It can also wrap itself around a pole and climb vertically, which comes in handy when scaling a tree. You have to watch this thing in action. There is something incredibly life-like, and eerie, about the way it scales the tree outdoors and then looks around with its camera ‘eye’. Projects like Uncle Sam show how life-mimicking machines could revolutionize robotics in the near future.

SLAM ( Simultaneous localization and mapping ),  PID ( Proportional integral derivative ) controller & ODOMETRY ( hodos, meaning “travel“, “journey” and metron, meaning “measure“)

When we first reported on the Willow Garage PR2 robot, it was just a prototype. Earlier this year, Willow Garage started their beta program, which gave eleven lucky organizations two year access to PR2 robots in exchange for furthering work on open source robotics software. Now we've received word from Willow Garage that the PR2 is officially for sale to anyone who wants it. This is not a toy or hobby robot, of course, so don't expect a small price tag. The full retail price is $400,000 per unit. However, if your organization can demonstrate a proven track record in developing open source software and making contributions to the robotics community, you can get a hefty $120,000 discount on your PR2. For more see our previous stories on Willow Garage and the PR2.

Japanese robotics company HiBot has unveiled a nimble snake bot capable of moving inside air ducts and other narrow places where people can't, or don't want to, go. The ACM-R4H robot, designed for remote inspection and surveillance in confined environments, uses small wheels to move but it can slither and undulate and even raise its head like a cobra. The new robot, which is half a meter long and weighs in at 4.5 kilograms, carries a camera and LEDs on its head for image acquisition and can be fitted with other end-effectors such as mechanical grippers or thermo/infrared vision systems. Despite its seemingly complex motion capabilities, "the control of the robot is quite simple and doesn't require too much training," says robotics engineer and HiBot cofounder Michele Guarnieri.