Servo - August 2010

bots IN BRIEF

SKATING AROUND THE ISSUES

Hitachi’s EMIEW2 humanoid robot uses wheels on its legs instead of feet. This approach gives the robot efficiency and stability while moving, along with the potential for it to make its way over obstacles (sort of).

EMIEW2 has adaptive suspension, but it’s unclear as to whether the robot can actually balance itself on one wheel which would be necessary for it to “step” over an obstacle larger than its wheels are capable of negotiating. It can do precision speech recognition and sound localization which is handy, plus it’s also kinda cute.

As with most Asian humanoid robots with fancy plastic shells, Hitachi suggests many ways in which EMIEW2 might be commercially useful (the obligatory guide/guard duties), but doesn’t offer any sort of cohesive commercial details.

EMIEW2 stands about 32 inches tall and weighs about 30 pounds. It can move around on either two or four wheels depending on its leg position, and navigates via a scanning range finder. Aided by its active suspension system, incorporating a linear actuator movement mechanism and conventional wheel legs, it can roll around obstacles on uneven floors without losing its balance and it is especially mechanized to detect wheel slip. This makes it efficient to overcome the threshold of elevator doors and steps with more stability.

Its top speed is reported to be 3. 7 MPH and it has 25 axes of movement.

It separates the noise out using three-dimensional sound localization with a 14-channel microphone in its head.

SHEDDING SOME LIGHT

LuminAR, designed by Natan Linder, is not the first robotic desk lamp to come out of MIT. In 2007, recall AUR, a five DoF robotic lamp designed to follow your movements around a desktop, changing the color, intensity, and focus of its light to help keep you organized and productive. LuminAR is similar in concept, except it’s significantly more complex, incorporating a pico projector along with a vision system to allow for a large degree of interactivity.

Fortunately, all this interactivity looks to be intuitive rather than overbearing.

QUADRUPLE THE CLEANING POWER

People use Roombas (and Creates) as bases for all kinds of robots. They’re not often used for bigger (heavier) bots, but if you stick four of them together, apparently you can support a payload of up to 20 kg or one Robotinho android. The Roomba QuadDrive was developed by the University of Bonn’s Autonomous Intelligent Systems Lab, and consists of four Roomba 530s bolted together. As far as mobile bases go, it’s probably pretty cheap and reliable. The top speed of 0.5 MPH isn’t going to amaze, but it’s fine for tooling around a museum and scaring little kids.