ROBOTS DREAMS - Robot news and robot hacks from a true robot geek

Vstone Robot Center Featured

The new Vstone Robot Center is being featured in the current issue of Hiragana Times, a popular magazine for both students of the Japanese language and for Japanese trying to improve their command of English.

According to the article, Vstone was established in 2000 as a specialty camera manufacturer by Nobuo Yamato. As it turned out, one of the company's executives was really into robotics as a hobby, so the company decided to try it's hand, and introduced it's first humanoid robot kit.

Although the robot was fairly expensive, listing at just over 400,000 yen (close to $4,000), the market acceptance was surprisingly strong, amazing every one. Encouraged, the company shifted it's focus from cameras to robots.

Robovie, the most popular Vstone series, was introduced in 2003, and has racked up sales of over 5,000 units so far. That's quite aways behind Kondo, the market leader, but still quite a respectable number.

The new Vstone shop plans to offer training courses and a fully equipped workspace for hobbyists to use fabrication equipment, in addition to robot kit and parts sales over-the-counter and online.

[Posted from my iPhone]

Soccer is a Contact Sport...

Playing soccer can be just as tough on robots as it is on humans.

Following RoboCup 2009 on YouTube

Here’s the RoboCup 2009 YouTube link we’re using to pickup the latest videos from the competition as they are posted. It works (on our system at least) either as a direct link or as an RSS feed.

Following the RoboCup 2009 Action

Charlie wrote in to let us know that the Darmstadt Dribblers RoboCup 2009 team action can be followed real-time via their Twitter feed in German. We tried setting up a Google translated feed to English, but for some unknown reason it didn’t work. If you know how to do it correctly, or if you know of other RoboCup Twitter feeds, please let everyone know by posting a comment below.

Early RoboCup 2009 Videos Popping Up (Video)

It’s RoboCup time again, and we’re enjoying some of the early videos being posted by the participants. One thing that’s really noticeable among the humanoid competitors is that they are much more stable and seem to evolved quite a bit since the last competition.

This particular video shows the Darmstadt Dribblers during the first Passing Challenge test. Their overall performance seems pretty good, though they did post a remark that they thought their kick moves were too weak.

Each Robot Generation Shows Significant Improvement

Roughly five years ago, when the early ROBO-ONE humanoid robot builders first started on their quest to replicate ASIMO almost all of their designs were rectilinear, probably because the angles and static/dynamic relationships were easier to conceptualize and calculate. Servo orientation, placement, and the supporting body frames, all used right angles and straight lines.

It was only after a few generations of hobby humanoids that new approaches started to appear and take hold. After all, the human body, which is the model that the individual robotists were attempting to emulate or clone, doesn’t use right angles and straight lines, far from it.

RoboCup - Small Size League Demonstration (Video)

The ODENS Team from Osaka Electro-Communication University staged a demonstration of the proposed next generation RoboCup Small Size League during the RoboCup Japan Open 2008 competition this past May in Numazu.

As you can see from the video below, the robots were built based on the popular Kondo KHR-1HV platform, but are operating totally autonomously with no human intervention (other than to pick them up and set them back on their feet from time to time).

Their cute little hats include colored dots that are tracked by an overhead camera. The actual play strategy is determined by a separate computer with instructions sent to the robot players on the field. From what we've seen so far, they are very likely to give the Aldebaran Nao humanoid a run for its money, at least on the RoboCup soccer playing field.

NAO Robot Racks Up 5 Million Big Ones

We tend to focus on the technology and performance aspects of robots and robot companies we cover, but the business aspects are just as important, if not more so. You can design the best, fastest, most capable robot the world has ever seen, but if you can't get investment capital to fund bringing that great product to the market then it's kind of meaningless.

We've been convinced for a long time that the NAO robot developed by Aldebaran Robotics in France was very, very hot. Now it turns out that they have been able to successfully pitch that same message to key venture capital investors. Last Friday they announced the closing of their first round of venture capital financing with a whopping 5 million euro (approximately  USD $7.35 million) investment lead by CDC Innovation.