Grok Robots

Mr. Roboto watch prototype from Azimuth

Mr Roboto’s visual appeal embodies the full-flavor revival of vintage tin robotic spaceman. The placements lend for easy reading and a radical tin robot visual appearance. The left ‘eye’ is the hour register, right ‘eye’ comes with GMT indication, the nose region joint with the mouth region are the seconds and retrograde minutes placements respectively.

 A little more freaky than when an animated cat follows your cursor around the screen.

These beautiful wooden carvings by take-g toys seem to be only available in Japan. Read more about them at PrairieMod.

I often get asked “Why do you make robots with wood?” I don’t really have an exact answer for it but I often relate my robots with ‘future’.

What do you relate future with? Cities full of metals, glasses and plastics in a SF movie???
What we really want is not that kind of future but one full of trees and something more natural. I don’t think humans can live without trees no matter what advances technology makes.

Phobot is “a phobic robot, who’s very scared of certain objects, and robots in particular.” While designed as a tool to help kids with phobias, such behavior might also be desirable in any personal companion robot who would fear joining up with any robot uprisings.

Phobot was the winner of the Human-Robot Interaction 2008 Student Design Competition.

The “uncanny valley” is Masahiro Mori’s hypothesis which states:

that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong repulsion. However, as the appearance and motion continue to become less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.-Mori, Masahiro (1970). Bukimi no tani The uncanny valley (K. F. MacDorman & T. Minato, Trans.). Energy, 7(4), 33–35. 

The media latches on to the first part — “as a robot becomes more humanlike in appearance and motion” — often. Most recently, Simroid the dental patient robot got this sort of attention.With the recent popularity of the BigDog video, I think the hypothesis needs amending. While BigDog looks more like an AT-AT Walker than your old pal Fido, its movement is nothing short of, well, uncanny. This was enough to activate the empathy response in humans worldwide:

I thought it was cute, and I felt bad for a second when it was kicked.

Something about the way the bot moves elicits sympathy in the viewer - its motions are so animal-like they throw you. When the researcher kicks BigDog to demonstrate how it can regain its balance, my first reaction was one of sympathy for “the animal”

On second viewing, I’m incredibly creeped out at how sad it makes me when BigDog gets kicked. 

At this rate if they just added a wagging tail and a machine gun, BigDog would be unstoppable.

Over at Riding with Robots you’ll find pictures and news of robot antics on missions to Mars, Venus, Saturn and other out-there destinations. Remember, all photos taken by robots are now eligible for the Pulitzer Prize.

Bear Vs. Robot Passport Case by tinymeat, at Etsy. Naturally our money is on the robot.

via The Onion

Why would they turn against us? It doesn’t make any sense. We’re the ones who created them. At least the alpha models.

Are photos taken by robots (such as the photo above of a martian avalanche taken by a robotic spacecraft) eligible for a Pulitzer Prize? According to officials at The Pulitzer Prizes, the answer is yes.

In response to a query from Grok Robots, Sig Gissler, Administrator, The Pulitzer Prizes, responded:

If the photos were published in a newspaper and ultimately chosen, we would have to figure out how to
allocate or explicate credit.

Now that photos by robots are eligible, who should get the actual credit? Manufacturers? Programmers? The robots themselves?

Up for auction is this 1927 poster for a production of Karel Capek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots. This is the play in which the word “robot” was coined in the early 1920s.