In the spirit of Father’s Day, I’m guessing everyone has probably heard the phrase “it’s not what you say; it’s how you say it.” Well, MIT is actually applying that concept to a new automated program that rates your body language as you talk to someone.

Shown in the video embedded below, MIT’s My Automated Conversation coacH (MACH for short) is software that takes the form of an automated person for you to interact with. The representation of a person pops up on a screen and allows you to ask and answer questions. The software then reads facial expressions, speech patterns, and performs behavioral analysis.

The point of MACH is to help people realize when they do things like not make eye contact with someone or do things that might come off as overly nervous or just plain strange. MIT notes that social phobias plague over 15 million adults in the U.S. alone, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Software like this could really come in handy for those who just aren’t good with social interaction — especially if they’re trying to get a new job.

“We’re in the first inning of a nine-inning exercise. The average patient walks in a hospital and is not touched by robotics. That’s going to change in 10 years,” said John Simon, a partner at Boston-based investment firm Sigma Prime Ventures.

That adoption rate, Simon argues, is based on cost: As the price of robotics adoption decreases, hospitals may be more likely to invest in new technology. At their core, robots aren’t all that different from any other hospital gear.

The problem for hospitals, however, is that there’s a danger in pursuing robotics too far. “With medical robots,  if you automate something too much, people won’t accept it,” Simon said.

This results in a fine line that hospitals and doctors must manage. While some automation and robotics is good, the last thing a hospital wants to do is embrace robots to such an extent that they alienate patients.

Little of that, however, is on the minds of hospitals today. Right now, most of them are just trying to figure out how to get robots in the front door. Here are a few ways robots are changing hospitals today.

Zapping germs and cutting infection rates

In hospitals, fewer things are more lethal than the average bacterium. Approximately 1.7 million people get sick each year as a result of so-called “health care-associated infections,” and 99,000 of them die. So you might say that tackling this issue is a major problem for hospitals.

One potential fix is Xenex, a 5-foot, 2-inch robot that fights bacteria by flashing hospital rooms with ultraviolet light. This light, which comes from a Xenon bulb, damages the cell walls of bacteria, frying their DNA and preventing them from reproducing. (The light is so powerful that even humans have to leave the room while the Xenex is working its magic.)

While Xenex has only been around since 2009, evidence suggests that it’s working pretty well so far. Cone Health System, a health care provider in North Carolina, says that Healthcare-Associated Infections dropped over 40 percent after it started using Xenex. Another hospital, Massachusetts’s Cooley Dickinson Hospital, says that Xenex’s helped cut rates of infection of Clostridium difficile by 82 percent, according to a Xenex case study.

Keeping doctors present … even when they aren’t

Fewer companies are as well known in the robotics world as iRobot, the creator of the Roomba vacuum cleaner. But while iRobot is dominating the consumer space, it’s also doing some interesting things areas like defense, naval exploration  and, in particular, health care.

Among its health care products is Remote Presence Virtual + Independent Telemedicine Assistant (RP-VITA), a tablet-controlled telepresence bot it developed alongside InTouch Health. Unveiled last July, the RP-VITA lets doctors care for patients remotely, allowing them consult with patients even when they’re miles away.

Reception to the idea has been pretty strong so far. Not only has the device been commercially deployed in seven American hospitals but the RP-VITA is also the first telemedicine robot approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Telemedicine is officially a thing.

Letting amputees walk again

While some robots are mostly about improving patients’  in-hospital experiences, device’s like the BiOM prosthetic ankle system are improving their whole lives. Developed by Boston-based robotics firm iWalk, the BiOM solves one of the less-advertised problems with conventional prosthetics: They’re exhausting to use.

“When people wear prosthetics, they are providing all the power themselves and sort of dragging this leg around,” notes Sigma Prime’s John Simon, whose firm invests in iWalk.

The problem is one of angles. When we walk up ramps or take stairs, our ankles rarely stay at one angle — but that’s exactly how most prosthetics force wearers to walk around. This is why the BiOM is so effective: Instead of forcing the wearer to power it with their own bodies, it powers itself. And that makes a huge difference.

The only problem with the BiOM is cost: The device runs for $50,000. And while that’s not cheap, it’s a small price to pay for amputees looking to walk around freely again.

Helping doctors cut you open

If you’re a surgeon operating today, it’s hard not to be at least a bit enticed by robotic surgery. Surgical robots promise the capability to operate on patients quickly, accurately, and with fewer of the side-effects associated with traditional surgery. By creating smaller incisions, robotic surgery (which is mostly just robot-assisted surgery at this point) cuts blood loss and reduces recovery time (which means patients leave hospitals earlier). Adding to the intrigue is the possibility of remote surgery, which enables doctors to operate on patient from halfway across the world.

The interest is real: Market leader Intuitive Surgical, which creates the da Vinci surgical robot, says its product was used in 450,000 procedures last year.

The problem is that robotic surgery systems are really expensive.  Systems like the da Vinci cost at least $1.5 million, and for a lot of hospitals, it’s tough to justify that sort of investment. More, robotic surgery systems carry with them significant liabilities, as Intuitive Robotics found out earlier this year. In February, the FDA launched a probe into claims that the Da Vinci was causing post-operation complications for patients. Intuitive surgical maintains that adverse event rates are low, but the debate over the company’s products is ongoing.

Still, in spite of this recent skepticism, robotic surgery remains a popular option for procedures like prostate cancer extraction, which, due to the, er, difficulty of access, is often better left to robot hands than those of humans.

Keeping patients and the elderly company

If all of this talk about amputees, bacteria, and botched operations has got you down, I offer the Paro, a well-known therapeutics robot developed by Japanese research company AIST. Paro has a very simple but very important job: It’s supposed to feel like a pet. Similar to the that ancient tabby that your grandmother’s nursing home keeps around, Paro relaxes patients in ways that other humans can’t. Aist, which was developed over 10 years ago, still remains one of the most well-known robots of its kind.

Remember that classic volcano you build out of papier mache or the plants you grew in light and dark spaces to prove sunshine really is a necessity? Well, the White House is having its own science fair today — with kids who are smarter than you.

This is the third year in President Obama’s administration that the White House has thrown a science fair, and this year it’s promising a display of impressive projects ranging from an “economically-viable algae biofuel” to a cancer-finding computer program.

The science fair is being hosted by two gentlemen you might recognize from the science (and science fiction) arenas: Levar Burton and Bill Nye. We were lucky enough to sit down with Burton last year to talk about his own creation: the Reading Rainbow app. He was passionate about reaching children through technology.

The two spoke with a student named Sylvia who had created a robot that can paint with watercolors. She was asked to explain a “maker,” something she considers herself.

“Well makers are people who like tinkering, they have their own hobbies,” she said. “To be a maker, you just get out there and do something, actually put something together and have fun.”

At the fair, the White House announced a new project called U.S. 2020 that involves a number of tech companies who have asked 20 percent of their workforce to commit 20 hours toward getting youth interested in STEM, or, science technology, engineering, and math. The companies involved include Cisco, Sandis, and Cognizant.

In addition, the White House is also supporting a number of other initiatives this summer.

Mozilla has also partered with the National Writing Project for a similar cause. It is launching its own STEM campaign to get “teachers, technologists, and families” involved in STEM over the summer.

Obama Science Fair image via White House Facebook

It’s 2013, and if you still don’t have a personal robot assistant, you have every right to be disappointed.

But while the world of Bicentennial Man is still very far away, the world of the Roomba and Scooba is very much here: The personal robotics industry made $1.6 billion in 2012 and will pull in $6.5 billion by 2017, according to ABI Research.

The Roomba, however, isn’t really the future of robotics popular culture has trained us to get excited about. Where are our personal assistant bots?

According to ABI research director, Philip Solis, while lots of money is going into personal robots, one obvious reality is holding up the technology: Personal assistant robots are really tough to make compared to your average automatic vacuum cleaner.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

How can you beat a ping-pong robot who has the whole Internet on his team?

“Single-task robots are more affordable, so a market for them exists more easily,” Solis said by email.

While the physical component of personal robots is largely ready, Solis said the devices are currently being held back by software and, more significantly, artificial intelligence, which require a bit more work to pull off properly.

What’s interesting is how manufacturers plan to fix the robotic smarts problem. “Personal robots will essentially be a physical extension of the Internet at some point,” Solis said.

Basically, inside the skulls of every future TOPIO and ASIMO will be the Internet itself. Robots will be personified versions of the web. ”They will just add a physical presence, physical capabilities, and emotional intelligence to form better interactions – a more natural user interface,” Solis said.

It’s neat, slightly unnerving stuff. In this model of robotic intelligence, every bot will be plugged into a shared intelligence database, where the experiences of one node will be used to create the functionality of all others in the network.

Reality, it seems, is finally catching up to science fiction. Bring on the bots.

Top photo: Flickr/Eirik Newth

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Liquid Robotics is revolutionizing our understanding of the oceans with its unmanned sensor robots. And today, the company is announcing a new version, dubbed the Wave Glider SV3, with advanced capabilities such as a hybrid propulsion system.

Roger Hine, chief technology officer at Liquid Robotics, told VentureBeat the new model can use solar power for propulsion. The earlier models used wave energy for propulsion and solar power for sensors and communications. The new solar cells for the robot are 50 percent more efficient, allowing them to power the propulsion system.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Liquid Robotics gained a spot in history when it announced in December that Papa Mau, one of its data-collecting second-generation Wave Gliders, had floated more than 9,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean.

Wave Gliders can collect data on weather in remote locations. They can be used to monitor hurricanes, predict tsunamis, and monitor rare marine life. Wave Gliders collect data on temperature, winds, humidity, wind gusts, water temperature, water color, and water composition. They can also take pictures. These robots are gathering a lot of observational data about climate change, ocean acidification, fisheries management, hurricane and tsunami warnings, and exploration — but in a green way.

The new model will cost $300,000, while the earlier one (the Wave Glider SV2 launched in 2009) cost $175,000. With the additional horsepower, the new Wave Glider models will be able to stay in one place better, despite strong ocean currents. Or they will be able to travel to a destination faster in any weather condition.

“It is still primarily a wave-guided vehicle, but when the waves are low, that is usually when it is sunny,” Hine said.

The company was started in 2007. It has raised $85 million to date from investors including VantagePoint Capital Partners, Riverwood Capital, and oilfield services firm Schlumberger. The company is headed by Bill Vass, a former Sun Microsystems executive. He made headlines last year when he recruited Java programming language creator James Gosling as chief software architect. The company has more than 120 employees and has a test facility on the Big Island of Hawaii in Kamuela.

“The SV3 is a tremendous step forward in terms of what we can accomplish in the ocean and gives customers a competitive advantage to capture data in the most challenging ocean conditions,” said Vass in a statement. “By providing the ability to deploy Wave Gliders across most of the planet and deliver ocean data in a new and cost-effective way, weʼre enabling broad access to affordable ocean exploration.”

The earlier SV2 robots have now traveled more than 300,000 nautical miles around the globe. More than 200 have been deployed from the Arctic to Australia, from the Canary Islands to Loch Ness. To date, none have been lost at sea, but the robots have been through a total of 10 hurricanes. The SV3 series will be available in the third quarter.

Hine said the new robots weigh less and have adaptable modular power systems that can accommodate power-hungry payloads such as sonar, bathymetry, and image analysis. The devices also feature the Regulus operating system for autonomous vehicles, which allows for coordinated fleet operations. The OS is built around an open, cloud-based architecture for massive scalability and secure multi-tenancy. It can dynamically download software changes or new apps while at sea. It can also transmit data to satellites or via cellular or Wi-Fi.

The new Wave Gliders use ARM-based processors running on Linux. The software is written in Java. The devices use lithium-ion batteries.

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RoboteX, a California company building robots for “first responders,” has filled $2.06 million of a desired $5 million round of funding, according to a filing with the SEC.

Peter Thiel, along with RoboteX founder Nathan Gettings and chief executive Alexander Karp were listed in the filing. Though these three are named, the filing cites four investor who are unidentified.

RoboteX was founded in 2007 and creates robots without the use of government funding. Its line of “Avatar” robots are meant to help with security, sometimes in situations that could be dangerous for humans. The website lists examples such as serving papers to a dangerous individual, entering hostage situation, patrolling, investigating suspicious packages, and more.

The company also has a line of robots for the home and office that offer its own form of roving security system. You attack an iOS device to the robot, which you can then remotely control to survey the house on your behalf.

The robots also come with a line of accessories, such as a command center, carrying case, manipulator arm, and stabilizers for rough terrain. With the manipulator arm, the Avatar II almost looks like a tiny NASA Curiosity rover.

The company brought in $3.6 million in 2010, and another $2.6 shortly before that.

Avatar image via RoboteX

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The future of robotics may be less Terminator and more gardener.

Charles Grinnell helped build the world’s largest particle collider at CERN (The European Center for Nuclear Research). Now he’s taken up gardening, or rather, his robots have.

Grinnell’s company, Harvest Automation, makes pint-sized robot farmers who move ornamental plants around nurseries and turn manual laborers, who often don’t even speak English, into robot supervisors.They are the first autonomous robots available for horticulture.

Ornamental agriculture is a highly labor-intensive $17 billion business in the U.S. alone, and it has a severe shortage of workers. “It’s very demanding physical labor out in the elements,” says Grinnell. “In the U.S. not many people want to do this kind of work.”

Harvest Automation’s robots are completely automated. Their supervisor defines parameters like the size of the plant being moved (to distinguish them from people or other objects), the width of the field, the spacing between the plants, and the new configuration required for the fauna.

The little robots use 20 different sensors, including a laser-ranging system to detect plants and obstacles. But the real smarts are in the software. The robots use a technique from MIT called behavior-based programming to keep track of many different things simultaneously, such as the ever-changing environment and the task at hand, while requiring only local information. It doesn’t have a GPS; the uploading of maps or access to other systems is not required. A bot’s battery lasts four to five hours.

Agriculture is a demanding environment for an autonomous robot. Many sensors are optical, but they couldn’t cope with the full range of lighting conditions in the fields, from darkness to full sunlight. “The robots operate in a very unpredictable environment,” Grinnell explains. “The terrain is unpredictable. The environment is constantly changing as the work is going on. People are working in the area. Plants are being moved around.”

The robots share their working environment with human workers, so safety was a critical concern. The typical approach to automation in agriculture is to replace 10 or 100 workers with a giant, intimidating machine. Harvest Automation’s robots are small, do the work of one person (or fewer), and move relatively slowly. “Even if these machines completely malfunctioned, they might bruise someone’s ankle but not critically injure them. Compared to the other equipment workers are using out on these farms, we are orders of magnitude more safe.”

So, how do existing workers react to their robot colleagues? ”These are tasks that the workers don’t enjoy doing. The robot does all the repetitive and physically challenging parts of the job. People do the more interesting things which are much harder for a robot to do. The workers turn into robot supervisors and they love it!” insists Grinnell.

Next on the agenda in Harvest Automation’s green robolution are tasks like watering, spraying, and trimming plants. Nurseries often overuse water, fertilizers, and herbicides because they don’t have enough labor to treat every individual plant. This also causes environmental damage. “When they apply herbicides, they broadcast the chemicals over the entire area. Most of it misses the plants and goes into the ground.”

A new watering robot will go on the market by 2014.

Harvest automation started shipping robots in September, and only a few dozen are out in the field, but Grinnell expects to sell thousands of robots in the near future. A single robot costs around $30,000 but can move 200 3-gallon pots an hour, about the same as a human worker. For other tasks, the robot may only replace a fraction of a single worker but they don’t need coffee breaks or stop to have lunch.

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Autonomous roving robots may be coming to a sewer near you. RedZone Robotics just launched a new robot to inspect mid-sized sewage pipes for corrosion, deformation, and debris in order to prevent leaks that could pose health hazards.

City waste water networks are often outdated, decaying, and maintained by skeleton maintenance crews. The EPA estimates that U.S. investments in wastewater will need to increase by over $150 billion over the next two decades to maintain current services. Many water companies have pipes one hundred feet underground that have never been inspected.

Redzone’s first sewer robot, Responder, was built to inspect the largest pipes in the toughest conditions. Navigation in pipes is relatively easy, but they may be littered with debris and have various levels of sewage flow, making locomotion difficult.”It was a quest to send a robot where no robot had gone before,” says Redzone’s CEO Mike Lach. “Waste water is a perfect application for robotics: dirty, dull, and dangerous.”

Smaller pipes can be inspected manually using a remote control vehicle with a camera attached, but this is inefficient, time-consuming, and impossible for many pipes. Redzone’s robots can be dropped into one manhole and find their way to the next one for collection. They carry cameras, laser, lidar (light detection and ranging), sonar (for detection below the flow line), and hydrogen sulfide gas sensors. Hydrogen sulfide can corrode pipes. A combination of data from all of the sensors is used to build a model of the pipe’s interior and identify, for example, which pipes have the most corrosion.

“Money is tight. You are dealing with public funds,” Lach explains. “How do you get the data you need to make decisions? And even if you can get that data, is it good enough? Do you replace pipes? Refurbish them?” These are the kinds of questions Redzone’s analytics platform can answer.

In many cities, the first task is simply to map the wastewater system and its state of repair using the robot inspectors. For larger pipes, the cost of inspection is similar to existing methods, but the data acquired is much more rich. Inspection of smaller pipes is cheaper and quicker than the alternatives. An assessment that might otherwise take 15 years can be completed in one.

Fast, fearless, and happy to do the dirty work. What more could you want from a robot?

The world’s most famous scientist wants to save the world from the robotic threats of the future.

Steven Hawking has joined the adviser board of The Cambridge Project for Existential Risk (CPER), an international think tank dedicated to protecting the world from all sorts of future-borne dangers, Fast Company reports.

Founded last November, CPER concerns itself with perils like extreme climate change, nanotechnology, and the increasingly likely risk that ultra-intelligent machines could take over the world. As an adviser to the group, Hawking will apply his 71-years of genius to these issues, and, hopefully, prevent them.

In short: He has the most exciting job in the world.

CPER cofounder Huw Price doesn’t understate the importance of his organization. ”With so much at stake, we need to do a better job of understanding the risks of potentially catastrophic technologies” Price said in November.

“The basic philosophy is that we should be taking seriously the fact that we are getting to the point where our technologies have the potential to threaten our own existence – in a way that they simply haven’t up to now, in human history,” Price added.

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Attacknids made their debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. These battling robots are among many robots on display at the show.

Attacknids, sold by Wow! Stuff, have been under development for the past eight years and are the first in a line of fighting robots called Combat Creatures, invented by Jaimie Mantzel. The Attacknids are spider-like robots with six legs. They can fire weapons up to 30 feet and can rotate 360 degrees.

Each comes with Bolt ‘N’ Battle Combat Armor that explodes off when hit by something. You can stage a battle between robots until there is only one left standing. The Attacknids cost under $100.

The weapon projectiles include the Snyper Dart, Destroyer Spheres, and Dissector Discs. You can control up to 40 robots at a time using a wireless remote control handset with 2.4 gigahertz wireless technology.

Check out our video of the Attacknids in action.

Attacknids from VentureBeat on Vimeo.

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LEGO introduced its Mindstorms toy robots 15 years ago, starting a movement toward intelligent toys and instigating a large hobbyist community that was interested in the educational value of programmable toys. Today, it is extending Mindstorms with a new version that allows people to program the robots without using a computer.

The LEGO Mindstorms EV3 has an “intelligent brick” that you can use to program instructions for your robot. In the past, you had to program the robot on the computer. Once it was done, you had to download the program to the robot via a cable. Now the system can bypass the computer altogether.

After three years of development, LEGO is unveiling the new system at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. The system will be available in the second half of 2013 for $349. The platform now has native-language editions for Russia, China, Spain, Japan, Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, and Korea.

LEGO first launched Mindstorms in 1998. It has redesigned it for an audience of children who have grown up with technology and are more proficient in commanding and controlling mobile devices. Today’s audience for consumer robotics is bigger than it used to be, but LEGO wants to widen the market further by simplifying the experience for younger users. At the same time, the new devices will be more flexible and powerful for hobbyists and other enthusiasts.

The EV3 has a faster processor and more memory. A new infrared sensor gives builders more control over their robots than before, adding more personality to the robot. The robot will follow a person with a remote control. It uses Linux-based firmware, a universal serial bus (USB), and an SD expansion slot for programming expansions. It will also be compatible with Apple iOS and Android devices.

Billund, Denmark-based LEGO will include building instructions for 17 different robots such as “Everstorm,” a Mohawk‐sporting humanoid that shoots mini‐spheres as it walks, “Spiker,” a scorpion‐like robot that searches for an IR beacon “bug,” or “Reptar,” (pictured above) a robotic snake that slithers, shakes, and strikes. With modular builds, children can begin programming and playing within minutes. Builders can then add more pieces such as motors or sensors that change the robot’s functions.

A “mission pad” adds a new element of game play and lets children compete against themselves as they create obstacle courses for robots to maneuver around. In a collaboration with Autodesk, LEGO will enable 3D building instructions that allow builders to zoom in and rotate each step in the process, making it easier to assemble advanced robots.

“We were among the first companies to help children use the power of technology to add life‐like behaviors to their LEGO creations with the Mindstorms platform,” said Camilla Bottke, LEGO Mindstorms project lead at The LEGO Group, in a statement. “Now, we are equipping today’s tech‐literate generation of children with a more accessible, yet sophisticated robotics kit that meets their tech play expectations and abilities to truly unleash their potential so that they may surprise, impress, and excite the world with their creativity.”

As the international team designed the system, 12 enthusiasts from Greece to Canada tested the platform and offered advice. The company is making a new version of the platform optimized for schools, since Mindstorms has become a huge phenomenon in educational competitions.

The system has an ARM 9 processor, 16 megabytes of embedded flash memory, 64 megabytes of random access memory, an expansion slot, USB 2.0, four input ports, four output ports, a matrix display, loudspeaker, button-based user interface, on-brick programming, Bluetooth 2.1, three interactive servo motors, two touch sensors, an IR seeker sensor, an IR beacon for remote control with six-feet range, a better color sensor, and icon-based programming. The system is backward-compatible with LEGO Mindstorms NXT.

“Three locations have been found which have skylights on the order of 100 meters across,” says Astrobotic Technology Inc.’s President John Thornton.”It’s a good parallel to where humans settled on earth. They chose caves because they provided shelter and protection.”

Astrobotic’s mission is to provide cost-effective landers and roving robots for planetary missions.”The Moon is a first step in human beings learning to live off beyond the Earth,” Thornton continues. “It’s very important to the future of mankind to expand beyond our home planet: to satisfy our innate curiosity, for exploration and potentially for survival should we damage this Earth beyond repair.”

To survive on another planet, we would need a reliable water supply, food, basic manufacturing facilities like 3D printers to make spare parts or new machines, and robots for exploration and transport. In October 2015, Astrobotic will send a lander and rover to the Moon to search for the most basic of those requirements: water.

Water is an almost magical chemical whose components can be used to make everything from air for breathing to rocket fuel. Procuring water and making fuel locally could dramatically cut the cost of planetary exploration, since currently all resources are carried from Earth at a cost of million of dollars per kilo.

Astrobotic’s Polaris Rover

Astrobotic’s robot rover Polaris will hitch a ride on a Falcon 9 rocket launched by SpaceX. After landing, it will prospect for polar ice and determine how to harvest it. The rover has three vertical solar panels to generate 250W of power, stereo cameras and laser to generate 3-D video and models of the surface and for navigation. Polaris can drive and avoid obstacles autonomously. 

The polar mission is also an attempt to win Google’s Lunar X prize, a $20 million reward for the first privately-funded robot to land on the surface of the Moon, drive 500 meters and send video and images back to Earth. There are bonus prizes for other robotic feats like driving 5 km or surviving 14 frigid lunar nights (at liquid nitrogen temperatures) intact. While most X-prize entries are small-scale, Astrobotic will bring 100kg of payload to the Moon and the company sees it as just a first step in lunar colonization and commercialization.NASA cancelled its manned lunar space program last year so future manned lunar exploration is now the domain of private industry. 

The first lunar industry may be mining. “The Moon could be a potentially huge source of a lot of exotic materials,” Thornton explained. “It has platinum. It has Helium-3, a third generation, nuclear fusion fuel which creates no radiation as a byproduct. It comes from solar wind and doesn’t occur naturally on Earth.”

To mine, you need permanent settlements suitable for human beings. That’s where the caves come in. Robots could prepare landing sites, find new caves, map the cave network, construct infrastructure for returning to those caves and finally create habitats for humans. “Most of the technology is there,” said Thornton. “There are some issues we are focusing on like precision landing with an accuracy of 10s of meters. That’s important when you want to return to same place. There will be a new type of robot to descend down into the cave the first time and then set up the infrastructure to access it regularly.”

Astrobotic’s first customers are, however, the space agencies themselves. The company is developing robotic equipment for NASA and will haul payload from space agencies and scientific institutions to the Moon. Later, space agencies may even buy tickets for their astronauts. Thornton claims that the role of the commercial sector is to take established space technology and put it into an affordable form, while government agencies should continue to push the boundaries.

It’s not all about the money though, even for commercial space companies. “One of the most important things about space exploration is exciting a new generation about space,” Thorton muses. “It’s been 40 years since Apollo landed on the surface of the Moon. How many young people were inspired at that time to become scientists or engineers or the next astronaut? We have lost a bit of that. If we can revive interest in the Moon it’s a first step towards reinvigorating the next generation and that’s important to the future of all of us.”

The ReWalk suit was designed by Israeli electrical engineer Dr Remit Gopher, who became a quadriplegic following an accident in 1997. Gopher devoted 10 years to developing a device which would allow a paraplegic to walk again. Such devices, like metal frames with springs, have been around for at least 50 years but required an enormous effort from the user. 

“It was extremely tiring for an individual to take 10 or 15 steps. A key element of the ReWalk design was that the energy requirements of the user should be no different from that of someone who was not injured,” says Argo Medical Technologies (the company which makes the ReWalk) CEO Larry Jasinski.

Gopher developed a robotic exoskeleton which attaches to the user’s legs and waist and can bear the weight of both the user and the device itself. The suit is controlled via shifts in the user’s center of gravity, somewhat like riding a Segway. The suit’s motion sensor can detect a very small movement of say 4 degrees and send a signal to the bionic legs to begin to move. A backpack carries the suit’s battery and software.

Patients need training to learn how to use the suit (an average of 15 sessions) but some have been able to walk unaided in the third session. The ReWalk is used with crutches purely for balance. The suit’s software includes safety features which detect if the user is about to fall.  

The ReWalk doesn’t just allow users to walk again but may have a remarkable effect on their overall health. “How many of us are told by doctors to get off the couch? The health challenges for someone with a spinal chord injury are immense,” says Jasinski.

Purely because they spend their time in a wheelchair, paraplegics experience depleted bone density, rising body fat, diabetes, declining cardiovascular fitness, severe bowel problems and pain. Argo Medical technologies is involved in two clinical studies on the effect of the ReWalk suit on patient’s general health. “We are evaluating what you do to the overall metabolism of a person when you let them walk again. Our patients are almost universally showing reduced body fat, increased lean tissue and improved cardiovascular function.” 

The ReWalk is currently available in Europe and costs 52,500 EUR. “We believe that we will have patients walking around the streets of the US in the second half of 2013 (pending FDA approval),” says Jasinski. The price stateside is expected to be around $65,000. ReWalks are already in use in 22 rehabilitation centres across the U.S.

The pricetag may be steep but Jasinski told me that the overall cost of care for ReWalk users drops considerably. “We believe that the health impact will more than pay for the cost of this device.” Around 100 Europeans currently have a ReWalk for personal use. 

The company is developing a product for quadriplegics (patients who also cannot use their arms) which is similar to the current suit but will have crutches integrated into the system and is looking at many other medical applications where people cannot walk because of a stroke, Multiple Sclerosis or Cerebral Palsy. Users like John (featured in the video above) are, however, still waiting for the “dance mode”. 

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, makes really freaking cool horse-robots. Or spider-robots. I’m not sure what this thing resembles, but it’s a human-sized robot that can now do more than trot along and get back up if it falls — it can stalk you.

The horse, otherwise known as Legged Squad Support System (LS3), comes out of a partnership between DARPA and the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, as The Atlantic notes. It now listens to a “leader follow” command, which tells it to follow a target wherever it may go. A description on the YouTube video of LS3 says that its footing and ability to roll and get back up when it falls have also improved. This means it can stalk you in a number of different terrains.

Unfortunately, the horse isn’t exactly quiet. Its gears and mechanical parts make a constant whizzing noise that is guaranteed to bring attention to it. That is, unless you’re stalking someone in the Forest of White Noise, then you’re good.

Of course, some might ask, why not just use a regular, quieter horse? Can a horse stalk your target and potentially be outfitted with cameras or maybe even weapons one day to take out that target? NOPE. Not unless it’s Mister Ed, and really, the most spectacular thing we saw out of him was some advanced vocal cords.

Check out the video for more of what LS3 can do, including galloping and walking through tight hallways:

July 9-10, 2013
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Is your robot stressed? Robot yoga for the humanoid robot Nao is just one of the applications you can download from the RobotAppStore, which just landed a $250,000 investment from Grishin Robotics.

RobotAppStore is the first robot app marketplace. The store supplies apps for consumer robots like iRobot’s Roomba vacuum cleaner, InnvoLab’s pet dinasour Pleo or Sony’s Aibo robot dog. The infographic below shows the full range of robots and the types of apps supported.The apps range from a new personality for your Aibo to songs for Pleo to perform. Many of the apps are free but developers receive 70 percent of earnings. The site also provides a knowledge base and programming manuals covering core robots programming topics and access to experts in particular robot models.

Software may be the next frontier for robotics. Traditionally, robots used proprietary operating systems and software but efforts like Willow Garage’s open source ROS (Robot Operating System) are helping to build an infrastructure of libraries for robot capabilities like navigation or vision recognition. The app store is somewhat different since, like mobile apps for the iPhone or Android, the applications need to be developed for a particular model. Extending the functions of robots via apps is a similar approach to that being taken to the Internet of Things by startups like SmartThings.

Grishin Robotics is the brainchild of Dimitry Grishin, CEO of Mail.ru, a Russian email and social media portal worth around $7 billion. His Mail.ru co-founder Yuri Milner runs headline-grabbing investment firm DST, whose investments include Facebook, Zynga, and Groupon.

The RobotAppStore is Grishin Robotic’s second investment after Double Robotics, whose slinky telepresence robots seem designed to glide soundlessly around a chic interior. Grishin Robotics will make investments of between several hundred thousand dollars and several million from its $25 million fund. Funding is one of the biggest problems for robot startups. Hardware requires a bigger upfront investment than software, and Venture Capital is still reluctant to make bets on risky hardware projects.

When I interviewed Grishin a few months ago he talked about how he wanted to bring Internet startup culture to the robot world. “Roboticists spend years and years on research. Then years on a prototype. They need to do quicker iterations and get feedback from users. Without user feedback, you can’t create a good product.” Adding apps seems a logical step in that direction.

Of course no driving app is required for a cat to hitch a ride on your Roomba.

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Hollywood’s latest blockbuster was filmed by robots. Four giant industrial robots whisked props, lights and even actors around the set in a ballet of split-second precision, as well as doing the camerawork. They call it cinematic automation. “We are taking a movie set and thinking about it like a manufacturing facility,” says Jeff Linnell, co-founder of Bot&Dolly.

Bot&Dolly bought three second-hand industrial robots back in 2008. “I had been wondering for years why people weren’t using them to move cameras around,” says Linnell. He ran a small advertising and video production company in San Francisco and had spent his career doing motion graphics and animation. “The first robot found its way into a Louis Vuitton TV commercial a week later.”

Some time later, Linnell got a call from a major Hollywood studio who were shooting a new movie. “It has a lot of impossible shots which you would not be able to do with traditional wire work and is massively ambitious technically,” explains Linnell. It took a year and a half to write a new control system for the robots which could be used on the set.

Bot & Dolly Reel from Bot & Dolly on Vimeo.

Robots were used in film-making as far back as Star Wars but they were always custom-built and required proprietary software and a highly-specialised operator. In the 1980s the computer conquered Hollywood and movies went digital. Bot&Dolly’s founders felt that everything that could be done on a computer had already been done and that it was time to get film-makers back into the real world. So they took Autodesk’s Maya animation software (the industry standard) and wrote tools to allow non-roboticists like animators to run robots.

“Animators were flying cameras around in the virtual world doing Avatar or whatever but they never had the power to be film-makers,” says Linnell. “Now the same animators can move a camera around, or an actor or a prop. Anyone from Pixar can pick up the tool that they use every day, hit an export button and animate a robot.” Bot&Dolly’s software system controls some standard robots like Scout and Iris which weigh from 6 up to 500 kilograms but users can also control their own robots by adding a new model to the software.

Robots can achieve a level of precision, speed and coordination of movement which cannot be matched by humans. “If you want to move a coffee cup six inches across a table at two meters per second and have it stop on a dime, we want to give you a tool to do that without hiring a developer.” Lights, props, explosions, special effects and even the positions of the actors, can be synchronised to the millisecond and coordinated with sound and playback.

Industrial robots don’t usually work in such close proximity with people so safety was a critical issue, especially when those people are expensive movie stars. The system contains checks and safeguards to ensure the robots are on the programmed flight path and uses laser tripwires, pressure mats and other technology to keep track of the humans. High-risk shots are rehearsed at various speeds, building up to real-time.

Bot&Dolly’s robots have also developed showbiz careers of their own. They have appeared in advertisments for Google and star in a Las Vegas show where they act and play music with the Blue Man group. “People are pretty fascinated by large robots,” muses Linnell. “When they move in a highly coordinated way where all the axes are moving at the same time, the movement is incredibly organic and snake-like. It’s a bit disconcerting and amazing even to myself having watched these things for years now. In a theatrical production, we are trying to give them a sense of character, purposely making them sad or proud or scared. You can convey emotion quite easily.”

George Clooney had better watch out. The next generation of stars may be built, not born.

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Robots are on their way into your workplace, but you may not be there to complain about it.

“Many of us will live to see the day where we have physical, non-human colleagues,” says Matt Beane, a researcher at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Beane’s research addresses what he calls “The Avatar Economy”, where remote workers operate robots. Such robots are already used for tasks which require highly skilled labour and physical presence but where it’s either too dangerous or extremely expensive to use human beings. Aerial and ground-based robots were used in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, for example, to help assess system and structural integrity and evaluate demolition plans. 

According to Beane, the next wave of robotic workers will be in retail, security and remote supervision of manufacturing operations. Telepresence robots like those made by DoubleRobotics (and their human operators) will help you to find the right TV in a retail store or allow an operations supervisor in Chicago to do quality control on an assembly line in Shanghai. 

But robots are just one small slice of our automated future. Google’s driverless car depends on the company’s massive sensing, mapping and data sorting network. Technologies like Big Data, the Internet of Things, Speech Recognition and Machine Learning will make robots smarter but that’s the least of their applications. “Robots will not be a discrete element of the change in the economy, but rather the physically extensible part of this ever-expanding bubble of underlying technology.”

“The next frontier for automation is non-routine work,” explains Beane. “Some of the biggest changes in work could be at the high end. These jobs can be automated without a physical avatar.” So while taxi drivers and farm workers can be replaced by robots operated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) or a human operator, it’s still expensive to manufacture that hardware. “Most automation will be intangible. It’s progressing very rapidly and is much less expensive than physical production. Once you have got good AI, it’s replicable at almost zero cost.” That, gentle reader, means you. Replacing lawyers or software developers or technology journalists with AI could result in the ultimate scalable business. 

These developments raise some rather uncomfortable questions for non-extensible human beings. “Who am I if this robot can do my job?” says Beane. He points to surgeons as an example of highly skilled workers who already work with robots and will face this dilemma. “This is one of the most narcissistic, ego-driven working cultures you can imagine and many of us owe our lives to that culture. Being decisive in the face of imminent death or disability takes an almost inhuman amount of confidence and skill,” he elaborates.

A surgeon’s whole identity is based on incredibly high status, skill and autonomy relative to other professions. “Yet when they use a Da Vinci surgical robot, if they stray outside the surgical field, the robot can be programmed to resist. They get force feedback on the manipulators. Even the best surgeon in the world can be told by the robot, multiple times during an operation ‘You shouldn’t be doing that.’”

So is all automation bad for humans? Beane has studied hospitals using Aethon’s Tug robots, which move supplies around the building. No jobs were lost. In hospital pharmacies Tugs were used to deliver drugs. “Pharmacy technicians spend two to four years in schooling and certification but they were spending eighty percent of their time ferrying drugs around. Now the technicians are doing the things they were trained to do and have much higher job satisfaction.”

In general though, if automation significantly reduces the amount of work there is to go around, this could lead to fundamental structural problems in the economy such as higher concentration of wealth, greater inequality, fewer high-paying jobs and lower consumer spending. “We may automate ourselves into a recession,” concludes Beane. 

This is a guest post by Laura Teller

In the typical office, machines will increasingly do more work, automating functions that were once performed manually.

Machines that are capable of learning seem smart to us today.  Consider how Internet radio service Pandora is able to better-understand your music taste over time.

There are copious reports that machine learning on “big data” will replace human domain expertise.

However, even the smartest machines still need teachers, and those teachers are human experts. We shouldn’t fear that they will replace people in the workplace.

["Big data" and machine learning is a focus at VentureBeat's upcoming CloudBeat conference.]

These machine learning solutions that include closed-loop feedback require someone to correct their mistakes, so the machines can learn from them. But there’s a bigger reason humans will never be replaced by machines, and it has to do with the three levels of cognition, developed by Prof. Terrence Deacon, Ph.D., Chair of the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Berkeley.

The top level is iconic

At this level, a computer can identify something for what it is. The perfect example of this is music identification apps for smart phones, such as MusicID, Shazam, or SoundHound, which can identify recorded music by listening through a mobile phone’s microphone.

The second level is indexic

This refers to the mind’s ability to make associations. For example, pointing a finger to a given person means that you’re talking about that person. Other examples include how we group certain things, such as peanut butter and jelly, hats and scarves, or time and money.

Machines are very good at these two levels because they are driven by clearly defined patterns and boundaries (in the case of the iconic) and simple rules (in the case of indexic). In other words, they can be programmed. But the third level is not so clearly defined, and thus it is where human virtuosity becomes essential.

The third level is symbolic

The human mind uses abstractions, which allow us to complete a story or picture that has missing parts. If the amount of information present is only 2 percent of the total data available, we will complete the picture with what we’re given as if it’s 90 percent. Some simple examples for this would be how our brains are able to complete words in Wheel of Fortune or how the smell of pine needles represents Christmas. Like the missing letters in that iconic TV trivia show, the Christmas tree is the missing link between the pine smell and the holiday.

Machine learning’s Achilles heel

Symbolic thinking is also what allows us to look forward in terms of innovations. We take the information available and the goal we’re trying to achieve and fill in the blanks to bring ideas to fruition.

Machines are not capable of symbolic thinking because it is outside the realm of data and programmable logic. Instead, the computer combines iconic and indexic cognition at increasingly greater scale. But each time it does this, the human mind expands ever further, pushing the limits of the machine even more.

Symbolic thinking allows humans to wonder, create, dream, question, and so forth. When we get a new piece of information and respond, “that raises more questions than answers,” that’s an example of symbolic thinking. Receiving information that is only a small piece of a large puzzle causes our brains to try to fill in the pieces using a number of faculties, including logic, emotion, experience, foresight, and other human-specific attributes depending on the situation.

Machines’ power to fill in such blanks ends at programmable logic and basic pattern recognition.

In the business world, humans will continue to ask the big questions, look at the big picture, innovate, dream, wonder, and so on. They will also establish emotional connections and relationships with clients.

On a more mundane level, they’ll be the ones to provide the feedback that makes learning possible for machines. But most important, humans will always be the ones making the decisions. No matter how smart the machine is, the buck can’t stop at a computer.

Laura Teller is the CSO at Opera Solutions. She has more than 22 years of management consulting experience in marketing strategy and market opportunity assessment and has played a vital role in putting Opera Solutions at the forefront of the Big Data revolution. Since joining Opera Solutions in 2009, Laura has become a leading expert on Big Data and the dramatic positive impact it can have on business.

The author of “Small Business, Big Savings”, Laura holds a BA from Yale and an MBA from Harvard University, where she was a Baker Scholar.

Top image via Shutterstock

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Wired editor Chris Anderson is leaving the magazine after 11 years as its editor-in-chief to run a robotics company he founded, 3D Robotics.

Anderson made the announcement at an all-hands meeting for Wired staffers in San Francisco today.

3D Robotics has a Facebook page, Twitter account, and domain name (3drobotics.com), but currently no website. Currently, that URL redirects to DIY Drones, another company Anderson founded, which sells kits and parts for people making their own unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — robotic aircraft, essentially. It appears that 3D Robotics is an outgrowth of that company.

In addition to running Wired and turning it from a niche magazine with insider geek appeal into a mainstream tech-culture powerhouse, Anderson also wrote several influential books, including The Long Tail and Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Most recently, he published Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, which covers the rise of 3D printers, industrial outsourcing, and the maker movement. He also somehow found the time to become one of the pioneers of do-it-yourself UAV construction and design, and maintained a vigorous speaking schedule.

Anderson, who studied physics as an undergraduate and worked for Science magazine and the Economist before Wired, has an unusually quantitative approach to magazine journalism. For instance, feature story meetings at Wired include votes by every senior magazine editor on each story pitch. The meeting includes a discussion of the average votes each one receives as well as the standard deviation of the votes. However, Anderson, who has a quick and well-informed mind and a firm managerial style, usually has the final say.

The new company is a robot manufacturing company with factories in San Diego, California and Bangkok, Thailand. As of 2010 he was planning to expand into Tijuana, Mexico, according to a video interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. Last year, he posted a photo gallery of the San Diego factory.

Anderson said 3D Robotics was successful and needed more energy, but he sounded very sad and his voice was cracking when he said that he loves Wired, according to a source.

He’ll remain at the helm of Wired until the parent company, Conde Nast, is able to find a new editor-in-chief.

Disclosure: I worked at Wired.com from 2007 to 2011. At the time, Wired’s website was a separate division from the magazine, so I never worked under Anderson, though I know him.

Photo credit: Christina Bonnington

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“Now three or five engineers can start a robotics company. My mission is to help them,” says Dimitry Grishin of Grishin Robotics, an investment fund for robots, and their makers.

Grishin is the CEO of Mail.ru, a Russian email and social media portal worth around $7 billion. His Mail.ru co-founder Yuri Milner runs headline-grabbing investment firm DST, whose investments include Facebook, Zynga, and Groupon and who offers $150,000 to every new startup from incubator Y Combinator.

Robotics is still a niche field, dominated by academic research and expensive humanoid showpieces. According to Grishin, that’s about to change. “Robots will become mass-market products. Where we are with robotics now is where personal computers were in the early 1980s.” 

Robots sense, move, consume energy, and often need some basic intelligence. They are complex creatures consisting of sensors, motors, control software, manipulators like robot arms, and a power supply. Due to the cost, hardware innovation has traditionally taken place in large companies. Venture capital is still reluctant to make bets on risky hardware projects. So for robotics startups, the biggest problem is often cash and not technology. However, the cost of components is dropping, and open-source robotics software like Willow Garage’s ROS is making robots more cost-effective. That’s where Grishin comes in.

Grishin Robotics will make investments of between several hundred thousand dollars and several million from its $25 million fund. Grishin’s first investment is Double Robotics, whose slinky telepresence robots seem tailor-made to glide soundlessly around a chic interior. It’s exactly the type of product Grishin is looking for. “It’s very important to bring design into the culture of robotics. Focus on simple problems. If you build a product which costs several thousand dollars, you are done. You have to make it cheaply enough to make it accessible to a mass market,” he said. Hardware startups do have one big advantage over software; people still pay for physical products.

Grishin also wants to bring Internet startup culture to the robot world. “Roboticists spend years and years on research. Then years on a prototype. They need to do quicker iterations and get feedback from users. Without user feedback, you can’t create a good product.”

Robots have toiled for years in manufacturing, medical applications, and the military. Beyond a few outliers like iRobot’s Roomba, few have stepped out of those silos and into our daily lives. To become consumer products they need to operate in the messy world of human beings and not the sterile and structured environment of the factory floor. Our relationship with technology is also a social one, especially once that technology starts to look life-like. MIT’s adorable cardboard robot is an excellent illustration of the future social life of robots.

Education and entertainment are the first sectors Grishin Robotics is targeting, but the fund is open to proposals from all areas of robotics, and from all geographies. Grishin is particularly passionate about robots in education. “Robotics require electronics, programming, hardware. So if students learn robotics, they are learning most of the important skills they need for the future job market.” 

Whether they will be recycling waste, harvesting crops, helping the wheelchair-bound to walk, or watching over the elderly, the robots are coming.

July 9-10, 2013
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Suddenly, telepresence robots are the hottest gadgets that don’t fit in your hand.

Double Robotics blew the lid of the category just a month or so ago, I’ll be checking out a Vancouver startup’s new product next week, and a number of other pitches are hitting my inbox.

But none of them will will own the market for remote presence if Scott Hassan has his way. He’s the CEO of Suitable Technologies, which launched its competitor to the marketplace, the Beam RPD tonight.

RPD stands for Remote Presence Device, and that’s exactly what Suitable is aiming to provide. Focusing initially on the high-tech industry in the Bay area, Suitable intends to offer talent-starved leaders such as Google and Apple access to talent all across the country,  even the globe, while still giving them the ability to “be” on-site, remotely.

Source: Suitable Technologies

The Beam RPD

But Hassan has two big problems, price and style.

Where competitive devices like Double offer a telepresence solution starting at just $2000, the Beam is a $16,000 investment, plus another grand for the docking charge station. That not just a little more, it’s a lot more.

And despite the high cost, the Beam looks like a boring beige vacuum cleaner. I almost want to apologize for saying that. But design is a competitive advantage, as Apple has taught two entire industries, and where the Double is all sleek sexy modern, the Beam is a boring blob with stalks.

Hassan fights hard, however, to make the case that the Beam is fundamentally different than the Double product, or other products on the marketplace.

“It turns out that reliability is the most important feature,” says Hassan. “It has to be as reliable as a phone … when you use this to set up a meeting, it has to work.”

Where an iPad — which Double uses for its camera, screen, and speaker — is designed for a single person’s close up use, and has a camera field of view and speaker designed accordingly, Beam has two high-quality wide-angle lenses, both of which are $100 components.

And Beam offers a full 17″ screen, to show headshots full-size, an incredible six microphone audio pick-up system with noise cancellation and the ability to focus just on the speaker, and not one but four WiFi radios in the unit, just so that the Beam can negotiate access to a multiple wireless access points simultaneously, the better to never lose connection and interrupt a meeting.

So it’s definitely a well-engineered product.

The question remains: eight times better than than much cheaper competitors?

That, I think, is a hard sell indeed.

See Beam in action here:

Image credits: Suitable Technologies

July 9-10, 2013
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OpenROV, a mini submarine developed in a Silicon Valley garage, has been hailed by the world’s media as the key to unlocking the earth’s last frontier.

No pressure, or anything.

The 20-something creators, David Lang (pictured, above) and Eric Stackpole, did not anticipate that their open-source robot would infatuate the press or be viewed as the low-cost alternative to subs like the Deep Sea Challenger, which took filmmaker, James Cameron, to the deepest, darkest recesses of the western Pacific.

“At the outset, we thought this might be a great project to discover underwater caves that are too small for divers,” said Lang when I met up with him at open-access workshop TechShop in San Francisco, where he and Stackpole make their parts. “Our ideas for what we wanted to use it for were dwarfed by the community.”

Environmentalists and marine archeologists already say they plan to use OpenROV to discover shipwrecks in Cuba and spotlight pollution in the high seas. Treasure hunters can use the mini sub to look for gold in unchartered waters. In November, Stackpole will be headed to Antarctica as an under-ice pilot in a larger-scale, commercial grade ROV.

“We don’t want to be the wealthiest mini sub builders in the world,” said Lang. ”Our goal is to have a high return on adventure.”

TechShop, the site where Lang and Stackpole solder the submarine’s parts.

On popular crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, OpenROV took on a life of its own and far exceeded its funding goal by netting $111,622 from 484 backers.

It didn’t hurt that Stackpole was profiled by the New York Times’, and OpenROV was credited for its potential to transform underwater exploration.

Lang told me no one has used OpenROV to successfully discover any buried treasure in the ocean’s depths, yet.

The founders’ singular focus is to keep up with the demand for the kits. At TechShop, Lang and Stackpoke laser cut electronic material and plastic and hand-pack and mail the kits. Lang told me that the most common purchasers are tinkerers and hobbyists, who add their own flourishes like robotic arms, payload equipment, and additional cameras.

The TechShop chain is a recent addition to the Bay Area, and is a paradise for hardware geeks. For $100 per month, anyone can access high-tech equipment such as 3-D printers. Classes taught at one of the TechShop hacker spaces include Welding 101, and are available for a few extra dollars. At TechShop, Lang learned how to build robots and work with machines in less than six months.

OpenRov, a mini submarine, can dive as deep as 100m.

The basic prototype has been through 35 iterations and is designed to be portable and cheap. At the basic level, its open-source, remotely operated robot that can be deployed underwater and navigated in 3D using a laptop.

The little robot is elegantly simple, but the real innovation is its inexpensive parts. OpenROV is available for $750, and anyone with a knack for DIY can use it to scale the depths of the ocean, as far as 100 meters.

But if you want an underwater robot of your own, you’ll need to be a dab hand with a soldering iron, as the robot is sold in a kit filled with parts.

To keep tabs on how the robot is being used, the pair launched a company blog and discussion forum. It is already proving to be a powerful tool for small-town environmentalists.

OpenROV can be fitted with video equipment to highlight the pile-up of junk in lakes and ponds. It can go in tiny crevices, where a diver can’t. One user plans to search for evidence of plastic pollution in the unchartered, murky depths of a seabed.

“At a tiny un-touristed cove in southern Maine, I’m finding hundreds — sometimes thousands — of bits of plastic wreckage washing up weekly,” he wrote.

At TechShop, where Lang spends the bulk of his time, he tells me that these findings are the tip of the iceberg for OpenROV. “Our story is just the beginning,” said Lang, who animatedly points out a number of other cool projects that are in development.

“We do know that deep sea exploration, space exploration, drones, 3-D printing are now something that anyone can do,” he said.

This post is part of a series produced by Singularity University.

After more than eight years of planning and a 254-day journey through the cold emptiness of space, NASA’s Curiosity rover has finally landed on Mars.  Curiosity is the most advanced mobile robotic science lab to ever explore another planet and thus this is an exciting moment for NASA and the world.

But robotics and artificial intelligence continue to advance at an exponential rate. As we look towards the future of space exploration in the next decade and beyond, we can expect the next generation of space robots to be orders of magnitude more powerful and intelligent, while at the same time costing a fraction of Curiosity’s $2.5 billion price tag.

Regardless of the success of the Mars rover Curiosity, debates will rage again about robotic versus human space exploration. We don’t have the budgets to build the right technology to send humans to the planets and beyond. So we’ve been sending probes out into the solar system as precursor missions for the day we step on another planet and explore other worlds ourselves. But the bigger question for now is about the technology we are using. How do we make sure what we send in space is current? True, Curiosity is the most advanced rover ever made. The development started over eight years ago. How does it compare to recent technological advancements?

Some of the technologies Curiosity carries are similar to what a person might carry on a vacation trip to an exotic destination: several cameras with 4 GB flash cards, a 200 MHz computer, and a transportation vehicle the size of a small rental car.  Like a tourist in a remote location, most days Curiosity can only send messages back home at dial-up speeds (just enough to send emails and some Twitter posts). But it does get “broadband” for 8 minutes a day to send HD images and video from Mars.

At the beginning of Curosity’s exploration of Mars, we look forward to the new images and discoveries. The rover aims to explore for a Martian year, but the nuclear power source may last for 14 years. What does the future hold for Curiosity?

I hope that today’s landing will be followed by a step that has become routine on interplanetary missions: The software on the rover will be updated. Even though spacecraft travel at high speeds through the solar system, the travel times are long enough that software advances can be significant. The software has already been updated once during its 8-month flight.

Beaming software is one way robots throughout the solar system can take advantage of exponential advances on Earth. In a few more years, the computing systems on interplanetary robots will be able to run extremely complex AI programs due to further advances in exponential technology. Perhaps advanced chips will be sent out to be fitted onto older spacecraft, and extend the life of rovers like Curiosity.

Advancement in autonomous navigation systems, such as those used by the Google Cars, and intelligent data understanding (reacting to unexpected events) are current technologies. The rise of semantic technologies (such as a future version of Watson or Siri on Mars) and machine learning will drastically change robotic missions in the near future.

Advanced software could be hosted on the next generations of Mars rovers, or even retrofitted into rovers like Curiosity. Around the time AI systems are creating the next AI systems on Earth, we may be able to beam AI programs out to robots on Mars with a complexity beyond human understanding.

When this happens, would there even be a reason to leave Earth to explore the Universe? Do we enhance our experience through the robots we send out into the cosmos with highly sophisticated exponential sensor technologies that will serve as our eyes and ears – beaming back fully immersive experiences, without traveling for years – or do we even get superseded by super-robots who could one day think for themselves?

Through radical advances in processors including quantum computing, on-board decision making and exponential learning, a robotic intelligence on Mars may eventually “wake up.” How will we know? A sign might be when we tell the rover to go a certain direction, and it disagrees, and then goes a different way based on its own interest. One day, Curiosity itself may become curious.

Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom is VP of Operations for Singularity University. She spent two decades in the private space sector working on program development and operations for companies and organizations like Space Adventures, Odyssey Moon and the International Space University. She co-authored the book Realizing Tormorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight.

Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

July 9-10, 2013
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At VentureBeat, we come across a lot of funding news every day. In order to bring you the most information possible, we’re rounding up the quick-and-dirty details about the funding deals of the day and serving them up here in our “Funding daily” column.

Evernote may be grabbing $100M

File that in your Evernote notebooks, with the tag “that’s a lot of cash.” The popular note taking/organization service is apparently raising a new round of $100M at a $1 billion valuation. Meritech Capital partners is said to be leading the round. Evernote has already raised $95.5 million in funding, so this new round would double its total funding.

Get social and chatty with Tango — it just raised $40M

Th video chat app that could rival Apple’s Facetime, Tango, just raised $40 million from Qualcomm Ventures and Access Ventures. The cross-platform app has snatched up 45 million users in the 18 months it’s been available.

Lifecrowd parties with a new $5M investment

Social events startup Lifecrowd has raised $5 million in its first round of funding from Lightbank, Bullpen Capital, Baroda Ventures, and Prism VentureWorks. Lifecrowd lets anyone create a social event, but curates its social calendar so only the best ones show up — no more lame meetups in someone’s parent’s basement.

BranchOut grabs $25M for a better LinkedIn

If you hate LinkedIn but like Facebook, BranchOut has you covered. The service has the same functionality as LinkedIn but operates on Facebook, so you can share business contact information and find jobs. BranchOut raised $25 million from Mayfield Fund, with participation by Accel, Norwest Venture Partners, and Redpoint Ventures.

Robot vacuum producer Neato Robotics gets funding

Neato Robotics has just snagged $12.2 million in fourth-round funding for its robot vacuum cleaner. Vorwerk Ventures and Noventi Ventures led this fourth round, which will be used to grow the company’s business and launch a new vacuum model.

Insieme gets a $100M investment from Cisco

Cisco has invested $100 million in a networking startup called Insieme that was started by three Cisco employees. The company also has the option to pay $750 million more to buy Insieme, should Cisco choose. Insieme tackles issues in software-defined networking (SDN), a somewhat easier and less expensive way to deploy cloud computing systems.

NComputing raises $21.8M for desktop virtualization

Desktop virtualization and thin-client computing firm NComputing has raised $20 million in a new round of funding. QuestMark Partners led the round with existing investors Menlo Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, and Daehong Technew. The company has raised a total of $57.8 million to date.

Greenlight Planet raises funds for solar lights

Greenlight Planet has raised $4 million. The company provides solar lights for rural villages in Africa and India, hoping to replace the kerosene lanterns most off-the-grid villages use. ZA Associates led the round.

Treehouse snags $4.75M to teach you how to code

Codecademy competitor Treehouse has raised $4.75 million for its online coding school. The company offers classes on how to do web design, write JavaScript, and build iOS apps. The Social + Capital Partnership led the round, with Reid Hoffman and David Sze from Greylock Discovery Fund participating.

If you’ve got funding new for us, send it to tips@venturebeat.com

July 9-10, 2013
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Vroom, vroom. Neato Robotics has just snagged $12.2 million in fourth round funding for its robot vacuum cleaner.

We all thought the future would be full of robots doing our house work for us. Well in the case of vacuuming, those dreams came true a few years ago with iRobot’s Roomba, one of the first home robot vacuums to gain mass attention. Neato Robotics came along a bit later than the Roomba and introduced a robot vacuum that uses lasers to guide itself.

A competitor to iRobot’s Roomba, Neato Robotics has three robot vacuums with less cute names, the Neato XV-11, Neato XV-12, and a new model, the Neato XV-21. Both models stand out from the Roomba by using lasers to scan a room to detect furniture and find particularly dirty areas. According to the company, the vacuums can map out a room so precisely to avoid walls and furniture, that it’s more efficient than the Roomba, which bumps into obstacles and then turns around.

Neato Robotics has raised a total of $35 million for its technology. Vorwerk Ventures and Noventi Ventures led this series D round, which will be used to grow the company’s business and launch the Neato XV-21 in stores.

Neato Robotics was founded in 2004 and is in based in Newark, Calif., near Silicon Valley.

That’s why the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is doing research into vision in a program known as Mind’s Eye. James Donlon (pictured right), program manager for the Mind’s Eye project, said at the recent Embedded Vision Alliance summit in San Jose, Calif., that vision systems being tested now aren’t that bad at recognizing patterns such as a person about to be hit by a car that is backing up. But they still make mistakes that are sometimes comical, like mistaking a stationary object for a person or focusing on the wrong thing in a scene.

The Mind’s Eye research has been going on for about 18 months and is about half-way complete. After three years, the various vision projects will lead to lab prototypes that can eventually be brought to market. The systems being developed will do things like recognize someone walking, touching an object, or taking other actions. If the research pans out, we could see robots and other machines getting much better at the vision-based tasks that humans are best at.

“The difference between how a machine can describe a scene and how a person would describe that scene is quite vast still,” Donlon said. “Solving this is what the Mind’s Eye program is about. So far, humans are still best at this.”

The program has about 15 teams working on various approaches. Donlon spoke to the Embedded Vision Alliance, which has a lot of chip makers as members, because technologists still need to make vision much more computationally feasible. But the task also requires a lot of software smarts aimed at making the hardware smarter. The technology starts with recognition, description, prediction and filling gaps in information, and anomaly detection.

To teach machines how to filter out useless information, the Mind’s Eye researchers are showing all sorts of scenes to the computer-driven machines so that they can understand what is happening. Tracking people moving in a parking lot is doable today.

“What we need to be able to do to make truly robust systems is to enable the systems to recognize anything without advance training,” Donlon said. “I’m absolutely thrilled at the progress we have made, but we are nowhere near where we need to be in the informativeness of the vision analysis or the efficiency of the computing. There are plenty of ludicrous results that go along with the good results.”

In military situations, better vision systems could enable more sensors on a battlefield to interpret meaningful actions, such as an enemy troop movement. Right now, that information is funneled to a command center like the one pictured. But DARPA wants to be able to move the intelligence to the edge of the network, so a camera sensor can send information directly to a soldier that needs it, Donlon said.

Soldiers looking at command screens spend so much time looking at them that they may miss what is important and fail to pass on that information to soldiers in the field.

Right now, the military uses scout robots like those made by iRobot, pictured left, to do reconnaissance ahead of troops so that it can warn them of ambushes or other dangers. The robots have cameras on board, can point at an area, and remain concealed. They can then send back video footage that can be understood by human interpreters. But sending out the right video at the right time is critical.

“This takes some human scouts out of harm’s way and creates more situational awareness,” Donlon said. “It ought to be possible to put the intelligence on the sensors, on the edge. The soldier can then be on the look out for anomalies.”

These kinds of technologies could have both military and civilian applications. You could, for instance, use the vision systems with surveillance cameras for private corporations. Vision could also be useful in car safety. Google is working on a self-driving cars project, for example, in hopes of reducing the more than a million car accidents a year.

“DARPA has a [history] of pioneering technologies that have become important applications,” said Jeff Bier, chief executive of market research firm BDTI and founder of the Embedded Vision Alliance, which has 19 corporate members from Analog Devices to Texas Instruments. “We hope that’s going to happen in this category as well.”

Developers for the Mind’s Eye program include: Carnegie Mellon University, Co57 Systems, Colorado State University, Jet Propulsion Lab/Caltech, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue University, SRI International, SUNY at Buffalo, Netherlands Organization for Applied Sceintific Research, University of Arizona, UC Berkeley, USC, General Dynamics Robotic Systems, iRobot, and Toyon Research.

[Photo credits: DARPA, Dean Takahashi]

DARPA, the U.S. military’s research arm, is getting ready to issue a call to arms — specifically, humanoid arms on a new kind of robot.

DARPA’s Grand Challenge, a prize competition for technological innovation that could be useful in military applications, began in 2004 as the military’s way of crowdsourcing new designs for driverless cars. Now, DARPA is preparing to proclaim a new Grand Challenge.

This time around, the military is looking for a better humanoid robot: a bipedal machine for use in all kinds of terrain and environments, up to and including industrial disasters.

DARPA program manager Dr. Gill Pratt announced the new objective at the Defense Threat Reduction Agengy’s Industry Day. According to sources present at that event, Pratt, whose specialty is in robotics and human/machine collaboration, said DAPRA plans to grant funding to six hardware teams and twelve software teams in the Grand Challenge.

In addition to the robots themselves, DARPA is looking to fund environmental simulations and will be working with unpaid hardware and software teams, as well.

DTRA Industry Day attendees report that DARPA is looking for a robot that can do the following:

• Navigate itself into a open-frame utility vehicle, hop into the driver’s seat, and drive the vehicle to a specified location.
• Exit the vehicle, unlock a door, and go through the door.
• Safely travel down a 100 meter-long hallyway littered with debris.
• Climb a ladder
• Fix a gas-leaking pipe
• Replace a broken pump

The U.S. military has been showing off new robotics projects in a big way lately. Just last month, the Navy held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a state-of-the-art new robotics lab, complete with a range of realistic testing environments (rainforest, desert, wave pool, etc.) and a few humanoid bots, as well.

More details on the DARPA Grand Challenge should be coming soon, so stay tuned to the DARPA newsroom for upcoming information.

Kuka Laboratories is creating robots to help teach young people how robotics actually works and how it will shape future technology.

Robots always seem to capture our imagination. We loved watching NASA’s Mars Rover explore the red planet, squealed when we heard Wall-e say his own name, but now it’s time to learn from them, according to Dominic Bösl of Kuka Laboratories, who chatted with VentureBeat at our Mobile Summit 2012 conference earlier this week. He believes people should learn about the way robots move and interact with the environment to better understand the future of robotics and technology overall.

Kuka is reaching out to mobile companies, looking for new ways mobile technology can enhance Kuka’s educational robots. For instance, some have considered creating whole applications stores for robots, similar to what we have on the smartphone. These apps could give the robot different utility and entertainment functions without the need for extra hardware.

Don’t expect to see this guy in your son’s high school classroom, though. The smallest version of this robot costs 24,000 euros, and the prices just go up from there.

If you ever thought that what your iPhone is really missing is a robotic body, you’re in luck. OLogic just launched a Kickstarter campaign for an autonomous smartphone robot that can move around and interact with other phone-bots.

OLogic developed the modular, wireless, and hackable robots, called Oddwerx, last year at Google I/O. Now the company is hoping to mass market them, which is why it turned to Kickstarter. The crowdfunding platform has launched a lot of products, and OLogic is hoping Oddwerx will be another success story. The Kickstarter campaign ends April 24 and still has more than $50,000 to go to reach the $66,000 goal.

If you give $100 to the Kickstarter project, you’ll get a kit to build a robot and an app with two cartoony “personalities” that interact with each other and humans. If you are feeling particularly generous and have 10 grand to give away, you’ll get a dinner with the OLogic team, two deluxe robots, prototype sensors, and embroidered jackets.

“We have packed tons of advanced robotics R&D software into this robot, to give it a broad spectrum of audiences,” said Brandon Blodget, vice president of tech development at OLogic. “It is suitable for two audiences, those who want to just run robot apps, use the built-in personalities, and the works-out-of-the-box social interaction, and developers doing research with items like ROS (Robotic Operating System) from Willow Garage.”

Beyond a mobile phone robot, the company has built a platform and an open API for developers to expand upon the technology to create games, virtual pets, educational tools, and whatever else can be dreamed up with the technology. The robots are compatible with iOS and Android, and OLogic hopes developers will build on the technology and create some interesting applications.

OLogic presented at DEMO Fall in September 2011. The company is based in Sunnyvale, Calif.

The U.S. Navy has just taken the wraps off a sexy new robotics facility. The bots created and refined there will be automated wonders, some of them amphibious, some able to fight fires or fly, and ever so much more.

The Naval Research Laboratory has opened its Laboratory for Autonomous Systems Research (LASR — see what they did there?), what the Navy is calling the “nerve system” for research on autonomous robotics to help the Navy and Marine Corps in their missions and to get new robotic tech to the front line as soon as possible, according to a statement released by NRL today.

LASR will be home to researchers working in intelligent autonomy, sensor systems, power and energy systems, human-system interaction, networking and communications, and platforms.

Some of the bots being built at LASR include small autonomous air and ground vehicles, at least one swimming bot, and specialized robots for fighting fires aboard ships.

Yes, we say with a measure of impatience, but can they sing and dance? The Navy’s number-one export to date is, in our book, singing and dancing sailors, and it’d take a heck of a robot to top that.

The new, $17.7 million dollar facility got its official ribbon-cutting ceremony just two weeks ago, nearly two years after ground was initially broken on the site. The facility includes a wide range of environments for testing, from simulated deserts and rainforests to a 45-by-25-foot pool with a wave generator capable of producing directional waves.

The Navy said the number and type of research robotics projects will increase as researchers register to use the new LASR facility.

“It’s the first time that we have, under a single roof, a laboratory that captures all the domains in which our Sailors, Marines and fellow DOD service members operate,” said Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder, chief of naval research, in today’s release. “Advancing robotics and autonomy are top priorities for the Office of Naval Research. We want to reduce the time it takes to deliver capability to our warfighters performing critical missions. This innovative facility bridges the gap between traditional laboratory research and in-the-field experimentation-saving us time and money.”

Here are some images of the robots and their new home: