For at least 353 people who have tossed $134,551 in tip money towards the project on Kickstarter, that question has an easy answer: everyone. And with a project goal of just a little more, $135,000, it seems certain that “Bartendro” will see the bright lights of night-time parties.

What does it do?

Bartendro is a “precision cocktail dispensing robot,” the project founders say, that “makes tasty drinks quickly and repeatably without the mess.” Plus, it’s portable and can be taken to events and parties.

But, assembling one does require some hacker cojones.

A tiny Raspberry Pi serves as the brain, operating up to 15 dispensers, which essentially suck booze out of whatever bottles you’ve got handy, then mix it to your specifications. The specifications are input via any WiFi-equipped smartphone or tablet, which you can mount on Bartendro’s frame for easy access and super-1337 status.

Assuming you have not been overcome by the fruits of Bartendro’s labor, the entire device disassembles and cleans up in about five minutes, its masters promise.

Some assembly is required, and if you are a coder, the entire codebase is open-source and available on Github.

Feeling energetic?

Bartendro could have a Microsoft Kinect attached for more interesting order, the project creators suggest. Or, more practically, a credit card reader to pay for all the ingredients.

Image credits: Bartendro project

“This is the complete liberation of the brain from the physical constraints of the body,” brain-machine interface scientist Miguel Nicolelis says in a recent TED talk.

Nicolelis is a pioneer in neuroprosthetics and brain-machine interfaces at Duke University. He’s helped develop technology to “listen” to the brain, to individual neurons and groups of neurons. He and his team can detect when neurons are firing and find patterns in “brain symphonies” that he can then hook into machines. The result is that an animal — like Aurora, his monkey — can learn to control a virtual avatars and real-world machines with no physical contact.

Source: TED

The brain-machine interface

In 2003, working with Aurora, Nicolelis discovered that the monkey could teach herself to move a virtual hand on a screen in order to get a physical reward — a few drops of orange juice.

“The model of herself that Aurora had in her mind has been expanded to get one more arm,” Nicolelis says.

Expanding on that, Nicolelis had her control a monkey avatar on a screen, which worked by sending feedback directly to her brain “without the interference of the skin” when Aurora was touching or moving things. But more recently, Nicolesis “took this to the limit” by having a monkey run on a treadmill at Duke University in Durham, N.C., and control a robot in Kyoto, Japan.

“What happens here is that the brain activity that generated the movement in the monkey were transmitted to Japan and made this robot walk, while footage of this walking was sent back to Duke so that the monkey could see the legs of this robot walking in front of her, so she could be rewarded not by what her body was doing, but by every correct step of the robot on the other side of the planet.”

Here’s the video:

Interestingly, the time it took for the signals from the monkey’s brain to travel to Kyoto, and for the visual footage of the robot walking to come back to Duke University was 20 milliseconds less, Nicolesis says, than the time it takes for the signals from our brains to travel down our spine and into our legs.

The meaning of this, according to Nicolesis?

“Our sense of self does not end at end of the cells of our bodies, but it ends at the last layer of the electrons of the tool that we’re commanding with our brains.”

Source: TED

And the robot walks!

The long-term goal? To restore the ability for people — quadriplegics and paraplegics — to control their own limbs again by bypassing the break in their spinal cord, and sending their brains’ commands to a “new body,” a robotic exoskeleton. It’s called the Walk Again project, and scientists in Europe, America, and Japan are working on it.

Perhaps, one day, we won’t even need the exoskeleton.

After all, as Nicolesis’ grandmother told him, ”Impossible is just the possible that someone has not put enough effort to come true.”

However, this nightmare is now a reality.

The team at the University of California at San Diego’s Machine Perception Lab just posted a video (embedded below) of DIEGO-SAN, a rather disturbing looking robot that it designed to replicate a 1-year-old baby.

The Machine Perception Lab conducts development of systems that simulate natural human facial expressions. The team worked with Hanson Robotics to create the face and Japanese robotics company Kokoro to build the body. The result? A rather alarming creature with a face that looks like a cross between a russet potato and a spawn of Satan, and a body straight out The Terminator.

The National Science Foundation funded this project in an effort to advance research in cognitive artificial intelligence and human-robot interaction. Basically, the goal is to imbue robots with emotional capabilities, although Diego gives me the chills rather than the warm fuzzies. He has high-definition cameras in his eyes and can react to his environment like a real, human, nonterrifying baby would.

“As much a work of art as technology and science, this represents a step forward in the development of emotionally relevant roboticsm,” said Hanson Robotics founder David Hanson.

The vision behind this project is to achieve greater understanding of infant cognitive development. Dr. Javier Movellan founded the Machine Perception Lab in 1997 to advance study of the brain by creating “machine perception primates” that can interact with humans in natural conditions. He worked with children and robots as part of the MP Lab’s rubi project, which analyzed how toddlers behaved when social robots were a part of their daily environment.

“Its main goal is to try and understand the development of sensory motor intelligence from a computational point of view,” Dr. Javier Movellan said, as reported by Gizmag. “It brings together researchers in developmental psychology, machine learning, neuroscience, computer vision and robotics. Basically we are trying to understand the computational problems that a baby’s brain faces when learning to move its own body and use it to interact with the physical and social worlds.”

Diego has been gestating (it’s OK, I am cringing too) for years and has at last made its film debut. The MP Lab also worked with Hanson Robotics to create an Albert Einstein robot which sports a Stormtrooper-like outfit below an eccentric tuft of white hair.

As much as I fear childbirth, it seems less frightening than spending an hour with either of these brilliant, yet disturbing, creations.

Photos courtesy of Gizmag.com

Researchers led by Krishna Shenoy, a professor of electrical engineering, bioengineering, and neurobiology at Stanford, doubled the efficiency of implanted neural prosthetics to allow brains to control external systems, simply via thought.

In other words, moving things with your mind.

But it’s no Jedi mind trick, and it doesn’t even involve humans at this point, although human brain sensors that drive robotic limbs have been built. Rather, the experiments involved rhesus monkeys with sensors embedded in their skulls.

What makes it possible is that in both monkey and humans, neurons fire in recognizable patterns when we want to move our hands, feet, a robotic arm, or a cursor on a computer screen. By intercepting and decoding those signals, scientists have been able to allow people to control computerized systems simply by thinking.

The primary use case, of course, is people who are paralyzed or who have lost a limb. Eventually, researchers believe they will be able to give disabled veterans or paraplegics the ability to control powered electronic prostheses … hopefully returning their ability to grasp, move, walk, and control their world.

Imagine an Oscar Pistorius, in the next summer Olympics, with smart legs and feet that move naturally, controlled by his brain in exactly the same way as his hands and eyes always have been.

The massive improvement in Shenoy’s work, according to Science Daily, is due to a new algorithm, called ReFIT, that does a better job of interpreting neural signals — twice as good as previous attempts — and a focus on groups on neurons that fire when, for instance, the brain is attempting to signal a limb to move, rather than just single neurons.

ReFIT achieves 75-85 percent of the speed of actual arms, which makes “neuroprosthetic” devices increasingly viable, and learns over time from users’ corrections to get better, quicker.

Which is great news for those who need prosthetics in the future, and one step closer to mind-controlled robots.

photo credit: DevanJedi via photopin cc

Romotive, the “smartphone robot company” that is part of Zappo’s CEO Tony Hsieh’s downtown Las Vegas revitalization project, just launched its third-generation robot with — you guessed it — yet another KickStarter campaign.

This little guy is seriously cute. Check out the team’s video here:

Romo is controlled by an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch — or a modern web browser — and uses an iPod Touch or iPhone 4 or 4S as its brain and face. It has two-way audio and video, so could be used as an inexpensive telepresence unit as well — it retails for $150, and Kickstarter backers can reserve one by backing the project.

“Romo’s pretty amazing,” Hsieh says in the video. “It smiles at you, he’s happy to see you … it seems like it has a personality of its own.”

Source: Romotics

The third-generation Romo

The little personal robot can be used for spying, as the original Kickstarter campaign jokingly suggested, or telepresence, or even for mix-reality racing games. Little suggestion: don’t put your latest phone in Romo when you’re racing him.

In addition, there will be an API available so that hackers can create their own cool uses of the little robot.

As his creators said about the original robot, “Since Romo is a “true” robot, he’s infinitely programmable, and can be made to do just about anything.”

The new Romo is bigger, stronger, and faster, and will, if the Kickstarter campaign succeeds, add remote 2-way telepresence, computer vision, autonomous navigation, and facial recognition.

That would make one mighty capable mighty mite.

ZenRobotics has raised $17 million by creating Wall-E for industry.

The company brings together high technology and recycling to address the world’s trash problem. Its flagship product is the ZenRobotics Recycler, an artificial intelligence system that separates raw materials from waste. The Recycler uses sensors like cameras, 3D laser scanners, metal detectors, and Near Infrared Radiation (NIR) to analyze waste. It then sorts through to reclaim raw materials and remove contaminants.

Customers are commercial and industrial organizations, particularly those that generate construction and demolition waste. The result is not only good for the environment, it is good for business. Reducing the amount of garbage sent to landfills saves businesses money in high disposal costs.

The investment was provided by international equity investment firm Invus and Lifelife Ventures, a Finnish technology accelerator. ZenRobotics is a Finnish company, based in Helsinki, with distribution in 49 countries around the world.

The funding will go towards “world domination”, as well as growing the company globally. ZenRobotics was founded in 2007, but the ZenRobotics Recycler only became available for purchase in July. The first customer was Mes Containers, a Belgian sustainable recycling company.

Whether the ZRR has is own version of EVE and if the robots will embark together on a galactic adventure is unclear, as the technology is still new. I, personally, hope the robots decide to remain on earth where they can make it a cleaner place to live.

Read the full press release.

Home-cleaning robot manufacturer iRobot announced today that it has acquired one of its key competitors, Evolution Robotics, for $74 million. Evolution Robotics is the maker of the Mint floor cleaning robots.

The acquisition means that the largest company in personal and home robotics, which has already sold over 6 million Roombas, is growing even bigger. And it’s acquiring some key technology it lacks.

Mint does a few things Roomba does not. First of all, it specializes in hard surfaces, dusting and then damp-cleaning floors better than a Roomba. Second, Mint has a repeat revenue business with name-brand cleaning cloths such as Swiffer. Third, and probably most important, Mint has better technology for navigating — via what the company calls “indoor GPS,” or NorthStar Navigation.

As anyone who has one knows, Roomba navigation can be a little head-scratching. In fact, Mint used that in, essentially, an attack ad on the market leader … which could be a little embarrassing now:

In a statement, iRobot chief executive Colin Angle said that the company would use its large sales and distribution network to expand sales of Mint products, which suggests that the Mint brand will remain, at least for some time.

Evolution Robotics’ current CEO will be joining iRobot as chief technical officer.

Image credit: thenorwoodbuilder

iRobot‘s Roomba, which promised to vacuum our houses for us, featured pitiful pick-up and puny batteries.

But that didn’t deter iRobot from its efforts to reinvent the world of grunt work. And persistence has paid off: Roomba is now 10 years old, and all grown up.

iRobot has sold over six million Roombas, each of which the company says cleans an average of 300 pounds of dirt over its janitorial lifespan. Add up the square feet covered, and you’ve got about 39 Rhode Islands, which is about 22 percent of Texas. Or 29 million football fields.

Perhaps more interestingly for YouTube fans, Roombas have been successfully ridden by turtles, babies, prairie dogs, and yes, of course, the obligatory cats and dogs.

Here’s the infographic:

photo credit: Ryan Harvey via photo pin cc

Hat tip: Mashable

In a word, sexy.

A Y Combinator startup, DoubleRobotics’ debut product is Double: basically a cylinder and a stick. Just like a Segway, Double balances on its wheels. Unlike a Segway, however, an iPad rides Double, not you. You control it from your own iPad … wherever you happen to be, you see what it sees, and anyone who sees Double, sees you.

Take a look:

The robot, if you can call it that, is only 15 pounds. It adjusts height so you can communicate naturally at either standing or sitting height, and moves forward, backward, and turns as you control it from your own iPad or iPhone at a remote location. When not in use, two kickstands ease down from the cylinder between wheels, allowing Double to conserve power and wait for the next rider.

If you’re shocked that hardware this polished and sophisticated could be created on a typical Y Combinator budget of $20,00-40,000, join the club. But while the company has not received any other funding, and the Y Combinator money has helped, co-founder Marc DeVidts told me that there’s been other sources of income.

“We’ve been working for about a year,” DeVidts said. “DoubleRobotics was bootstrapped from the beginning by building custom robots for Fortune 500 companies.”

The Double will be built in the USA: assembled in Miami, with components fabricated all over the U.S. in various factories. The cost is $2,500, but it can be pre-ordered for $2,000 today.

Image credit: DoubleRobotics

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Kuratas weighs about 12,000 pounds, moves at a top speed of 7 miles per hour, and can be controlled by a pilot sitting inside an on-board cockpit. And it’s now available for the low, low price of just $1.3 million U.S. dollars.

However, fully decked out with a hand gun, LOHAS launcher, and “iron crow” (I believe that’s Jinglish for “iron claw”), my Kuratas specs out at $1.5 million plus.

Source: Suidobashi

Yeah, it is seriously bad-ass

Suidobashi says it is the the first “giant boarding-robot,” which I think means very big robot that you wear.

To pilot the Kuratas, riders climb up the front of the robot, press a button  to open the cockpit, and step inside. Once seated, they can close the hatch but still see the outside world via a video screen.

It does not, alas, walk … but powered by a diesel engine, Kuratas uses four wheels on each of its legs to move. The arms move up and down and left to right, can grasp objects, and come with “weapons” such as pellet guns and water guns. You may or may not be happy to know that the weapons are “eco-friendly and safe for humans.”

Even better, the built-in LOHAS launcher, which fires what appear to be water bottles, hits its target “from time to time.”

Honesty in advertising, at last.

You can control the robot in three ways: direct manipulation of a smaller version, remote control via an app on a mobile phone, or touch screen and other controls inside the cockpit. (See instructional video, below.)

Suidobashi is not promising comfort — or safety. In an accompanying video (see below) the company says that “Kuratas is an art piece. It is not a normal vehicle.” However, the company is quick to say, Kuratas “makes your dream of becoming a robot pilot come true.”

The company is taking orders now and will customize paint schemes to customers’ wishes.

Surely Mark Zuckerberg needs one of these to scare off the financial press?

More pictures here:

And, the sales video:

Plus the owner’s manual:

An aspiring hardware hacker at Twilio has used his company’s own telephony APIs as well as Node.js and Arduino to build the charming robot you see in the clip above.

We just about overloaded on developer buzzwords there, so let’s back it up a bit.

The bot was built by Twilio developer evangelist Jonathan Gottfried, to whom we say, nice work, Jon! There’s no quicker way to developers’ hearts than showing them how to build and code a robot, and no better way to evangelize for your company’s software than by using it in said robot in an actually interesting way. Twilio overlords, give this man a raise!

“Robots have fascinated me for as long as I can remember,” writes Gottfried on the company blog. He then proceeds to go into great, and we mean great, detail on how the bot was made “using Twilio, Arduino, Node.js, and the RN-XV WiFly module.”

The result is a robot you can control from your phone’s keypad. The post includes step-by-step images and lots of code snippets.

You might be asking, “Why, why in heaven’s name, would anyone use Node for such a task?” The Hacker News army asked the same thing, to which Gottfried replied, “It was the easiest way I found to set up a simultaneous HTTP server and TCP socket to the bot.”

In the HN thread, Gottfried also said, “The hardest part for me was getting the Wi-Fi module to work,” and, “It’s pretty fun to play with, honestly. Hasn’t tried to kill me yet….”

And now for something completely different: Here’s a video of a robot brushing a cat.

The bot, a Nao model hacked by clever software developer Taylor Veltrop, is controlled with a Nintendo Wiimote, a Microsoft Kinect, a head-mounted display and a treadmill. The setup is perfect for that special someone in your life who loves animals but is constantly stymied by crippling pet dander allergies.

Veltrop’s video shows three views: his, the view from the Kinect and the view of a third party watching the cat/bot exchange.

We’ve had a Nao bot in our offices before, and these guys are adorable and quite hackable, too.

In the recent past, Veltrop has hacked his non-Nao “Veltrobot” + Kinect setup to do pushups and wield a knife.

Nao robots were designed by Aldebaran Robotics, a French company. Each Nao unit costs around $15,000 and is just shy of two feet tall at 57 centimeters. The bots walk upright and have toddler-like ranges of motion. But being outfitted with an array of sensors, the Nao-bot can navigate a room, track objects and respond to people and faces.

The Nao robots can be loaded with applications, programmed to send status updates or hacked to do any number of tricks, such as pet-brushing.

A couple of days ago, we told you about the free-wheelin’, music-playing robots that OLogic showed off at the Demo fall conference. Today, we can show you more about how those robots work, how much they’ll cost, when you can buy them and more.

AMP (that’s Automated Music Personality) will follow you around and play your favorite music for you. You can attach an iPod or other digital music player to its back, or you can stream your tunes directly to the robot over Bluetooth from your phone. The AMP also comes with mobile apps for iPhone and Android to control the bot (with a virtual joystick) and your music.

I sat down with Bob Allen, Ted Larson, AMP (the two-wheeled music bot) and a new robot, the Oddwerx phone dock, for a lovely tea party. Watch the video for the juicy details on pricing and availability, as well as some of OLogic’s backstory in the robotics department.