Servo - April 2012

Robytes

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by Jeff and Jenn Eckert

From Tsunami to Sukiyaki

A pertinent question these days is, "What do you do when a huge chunk of your country is leveled by a 9.0 earthquake, swamped by a tsunami, and damaged by fallout from a nuclear plant meltdown, leaving fields inundated with salt, oil, and radiation?" If you're Japanese, the answer is, "Send in some robots." The country's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries ( www.maff. go.jp/e/index.html, if you really want to know) recently announced that a program called the "Dream Project" will be implemented over the next six years in the Miyagi prefecture which was flooded by seawater and hit by fallout from the Fukushima plant a little over a year ago. The first step in the six-year project is to research how to bring a 600 acre site back to an arable condition. Long term, the ministry hopes to create a patch of farmland that is totally worked by unmanned tractors where CO2 generated by the machinery will be channeled back into crops thereby reducing the reliance on fertilizers, and pesticides will somehow be replaced by LEDs that keep "rice, wheat, soybeans, fruit, and vegetables safe until robots can put them in boxes." The project will receive government funding of about four billion yen ($52 million), and high tech companies — especially bot builders like Panasonic — are being invited to jump in with another six billion yen of private investment capital. Land management during the six year period will be turned over to local farming corporations, and production will begin after they have figured out how to get rid of the salt. Once the project is up and running, local farmers will be encouraged to consolidate their own land under these corporations, eventually putting as much as 90+ square miles of once-fertile land back into production.

Japan's Dream Project aims to reclaim devastated Miyagi prefecture areas as farmland.

Telesmooching Arrives

Moving from silliness to psychopathy, consider the latest product from Lovotics ( www.lovotics.com) — a company dedicated to the research of human-to-robot relationships and "new possibilities for exploring the concept and possibilities of human love." No, it's not what you're thinking, but the company's Kissenger telepresence product is almost as creepy. The product consists of artificial lips attached to a pair of pig-like interactive devices that are supposed to provide "the convincing properties of the real kiss" with your partner over long distances. No price tag was cited, and it doesn't look like they are for sale online yet. No matter. I'm waiting until the version with a tongue is available. For a demo, see www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSckuNlzQdM.

Kissenger V. 1.0 provides long-distance kissing for desperate people.

Recommendation for Bots: Get a Little Tail

Also inspired by the world of reptiles is a robotic car named Tailbot, developed at Berkeley's Mechanical Systems Control Lab ( msc.berkeley.edu). It seems that Prof. Robert Full has spent the last 20 years researching how the toe hairs of geckos help them climb smooth, vertical surfaces and how their tails keep them from falling and allow them to right themselves in mid air. He recently tested a 40 year old theory that two-legged dinosaurs used their tails as stabilizers while running or evading predators. Not having any live dinosaurs on hand, some students used high speed videography to see how a red-headed African Agama lizard avoids spinning out of control when it leaps around. Sure enough, tails are pretty useful for controlling roll, pitch, and yaw (as any squirrel can tell you). The researchers proceeded to create a mathematical model of the lizard and Tailbot (a toy car equipped with a tail and a small position-sensing gyroscope). With the tail and no sensory feedback, Tailbot took a nose dive when driven off a ramp, but with feedback, it stabilized itself by using the tail to redirect its angular momentum. No practical applications of the concept were mentioned, but you have to figure that a dune buggy employing this form of "inertial assisted robotics" could be fun and pretty cool looking.