For a limited time, Japanese robotics company Kokoro will offer two animatronic dopplegangers to consumers willing to shell out 20.1 million yen per unit. Kokoro is the maker of the Actroid, a line of interactive robotic receptionists that can move their upper bodies, mimic human facial expressions, recognize human speech, and speak themselves. The robotic double will have similar features, and its appearance, movements, and voice will be based on its owners.

Anyone who wants to be immortalized in silicone can order the doubles from Sogo, Seibu, and Robinson's department stores in Japan between January 1st and 3rd. But only two doppleganger robots will be available; if more than two people are interested in the eerie automated replicas, potential buyers will have to draw lots.

Robot doppelgangers for sale [Pink Tentacle]

An Italian research team, lead by neurologist Paolo Maria Rossini, created the LifeHand, the latest in a long line of robotic prostheses. The team performed microsurgery to attach the hand 26-year-old Pierpaolo Petruzziello, who lost much of his left hand in a car accident. Petruzziello apparently mastered the hand in just a few days, and it responded to 95 percent of his mental commands. He claims that he also received incredible sensory feedback from the hand, even registering needle pinpricks.

Several weeks ago, another team reported successful experiments with an artificial hand that provided sensory feedback, but the LifeHand team claims that the experiments with Petruzziello represent the first time a subject has made achieved such complex movements with a prosthetic using only their mind. It's also the longest a subject has worn such a prosthetic; Petruzziello wore the LifeHand for a month. More research is needed, however, before a prosthetic can be tested long-term.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the LifeHand is that it didn't require Petruzziello to learn any new neurological tricks. He simply sends the same sorts of signals to the robotic hand as he sends his right hand, and gets nearly the same result.

The bionic hand controlled by thoughts [Sun via DVICE]

A team of scientists in Italy and Sweden have been developing a sophisticated robotic hand, with fingertip sensors that feed directly into the arm's nerves. The overall look of the hand may be more like Nina Sharp's in Fringe than Luke Skywalker's in The Empire Strikes Back, but it does allow the wearer to actually feel the objects the hand touches. Just as the brain transmits data to robotic limbs — ordering them to grasp and release — so do the receptors feed data back to the brain. It not only returns to the wearer the sensation that they had lost, it likely also makes grabbing and manipulating objects an easier and more precise task.

You can see the robotic hand in action below, as a 22 year-old who lost his hand to cancer tries out the hand and its sensitive fingertips for the first time:

New robotic hand 'can feel' [BBC]

At the Ishikawa Komuro Lab at Tokyo University, a group working on superfast robotic motion has invented robot hands that can do things like dribble balls with alarming accuracy, twirl pencils blurringly fast, and tie knots with a flick of the wrist. This video, which has been making the rounds of the interwebs for the past couple of days, will astound you. Pay attention to the way the researcher talks about the robot motions - I think it's interesting that inventing these motions forces us to come up with ways of explaining complicated things we do with our bodies that we don't normally think about. Like "dynamic holding," which is a way of thinking about what dribbling really is.

It seems to me these would make terrific prosthetics. We already have artificial arms that are activated by neural interfaces - imagine if these were hooked into your nervous system. Essentially you would have superpowers, even if they only work on pencils and ping pong balls.

Meanwhile, Clemson University bioengineering researcher Nina Zhang has invented a biogel that you inject into somebody's brain to regrow injured brain tissues. Essentially, it's brain-in-a-tube: Zhang and her colleagues squirted this substance into rat brains, and it transformed into fully-functioning bits of gray matter. Says Zhang:

These results that we are seeing in adult lab rats are the first of its kind and show a sustained functional recovery in the animal model of TBI (traumatic brain injury). It also represents one of very few in the traumatic brain injury field that attempts structural repair of the lesion cavity using a tissue-engineering approach.

What she's saying is that basically this is a fast way to do tissue engineering on brains. And it might be ready for use in humans within three years.

Here you can see an image of some of the brain tissues that regrew after Zhang squirted the biogel into a damaged rat brain. The red indicates blood vessels, and the green shows nerve cells. Sounds like a great fix for damaged brains, but what about undamaged ones? All I'm saying is that I'd like a little extra brain to add to my current one.

via Ishikawa Komuro Lab and Clemson University

Kamal Youcef-Toumi and Pablo Valdivia Y Alvarado, mechanical engineers at MIT, have developed a foot-long mechanical fish that uses a single motor and fewer than ten individual components to move its compliant body. It isn't quite as fast a swimmer as a biological fish, but it's a vast improvement over the four foot long Robotuna MIT engineers debuted in 1994, which had 2,843 parts and six motors.

The robotic fish's similarity to biological fish make it an ideal underwater explorer, able to travel where other underwater vehicles cannot and tend to last longer than their submersible robotic brethren. The engineers' hope is that one day schools of robotic fish can be used to explore submerged structures, patrol lakes and harbors, and monitor large bodies of water for pollutants.

[MIT via Inhabitat]

The team of European roboticists behind the Eccerobot (Embodied Cognition in a Compliantly Engineered Robot) is looking to create the first "anthropomimetic," a robot whose movements and interaction with its environment mimic those in humans. To that end, Eccerobot's design is meant to ape the human musculoskeletal system, which they hope will result in a robot with the same powers of movement and manipulation as a human being. Rather than utilizing metals and more rigid plastics, Eccerobot's skelton is made from a springy, bone-like, thermoplastic polymer, supplemented with kitline and elastic polymer for the muscles and tendons. The Eccerobot is also equipped with sensors that will allow it to interact with its environment in a more human-like way, enabling it to recognize where objects are and react with the appropriate body movements and pressure to manipulate the object. The robot's cognitive functions are still under development, but you can see its artificial skeleton and muscles in action below:

[Eccerobot via New Scientist]

Asimov's Laws of Robotics, first fully outlined in the short story "Runaround," were meant to give robots utility as tools for humans while ensuring that the robots would never be used to harm humans:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

The laws have been popular not only with science fiction enthusiasts, but with professional roboticists themselves, to the extent that the South Korean government is using them as a guideline for their Robot Ethics Charter. But, according to David Woods, a systems engineer at Ohio State University, and Robin Murphy, a rescue robotics expert at Texas A&M University, when dealing with robots that are not yet self-aware, Asimov's Laws function better as a literary device than as an ethical guideline.

Still, Woods and Murphy believe that Asimov was on the right track, and that engineers and programmers need a set of rules to govern their robots and the way they deploy them, both to ensure human safety and to allow robots to operate with minimal human oversight:

Their first law says that humans may not deploy robots without a work system that meets the highest legal and professional standards of safety and ethics. A second revised law requires robots to respond to humans as appropriate for their roles, and assumes that robots are designed to respond to certain orders from a limited number of humans.

The third revised law proposes that robots have enough autonomy to protect their own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the first two laws and allows for smooth transfer of control between human and robot. That means a Mars rover should automatically know not to drive off a cliff, unless human operators specifically tell it to do so.

Too often, Woods and Murphy say, roboticists try to push robots beyond the limits of their programming, giving them more autonomy than is technologically feasible, resulting in injuries to humans, property, and the robots themselves. The best model of Woods and Murphy's proposed laws? NASA, which carefully tests robots and identifies their limitations, so that the machines can enjoy minimal human supervision during the routine portions of missions, but a human operator can take over if there are any surprises.

And even if we reach the point where robots become more autonomous, they note that robots will still require ethical guidelines more complex than the Laws of Robotics:

"People are making this leap of faith that robot autonomy will grow and solve our problems," Woods added. "But there's not a lot of evidence that autonomy by itself will make these hard, high-risk decisions go away."

Science fiction's robotics laws need reality check [MSNBC]

Julian Togelius and Sergey Karakovskiy of the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, have created a contest to create software that will learn how to play Mario successfully the same way that humans do - by playing it over, and over, and over. It sounds like a joke, but Togelius is convinced of its importance in comparing attitudes in software and artificial intelligence development, and also of his choice of test game:

As far as I'm concerned, Mario is the computer game, both as a gamer and as a good machine-learning challenge that requires a broad set of skills.

(The actual test game will be a recreation of the original game, rather than the real Super Mario, sadly.)

Winners will be named - and given cash prizes! - at London's Games Innovation Conference later this month, and Italy's IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games in September.

Race is on to evolve the ultimate Mario [New Scientist]

The Surrogates movie is released September 25th. The Surrogates: Flesh And Bone, the second graphic novel in the series, is available now.

The Science-Fact Behind 'Surrogates' [Wired]

We've covered Cyberdyne's HAL suits, and their unfortunate names, a couple times before. But we believe this is the first time they've gone out on the streets.

Cyberdyne employees strapped on the robotic leg braces and took them on a 30 mile journey through Tokyo, via train, taxi, and on foot. The 24 pound suit made the commute easier for the demonstrators, but the technology is aimed at people who have difficulty walking. Cyberdyne is optimistic that more people-assisting technologies are in their future.

As of now, a Japanese study predicts these people-assisting robot business will be a $65 billion industry within 20 years.

Cyborg-walkers stride toward Japan's robotics future [via Physorg]

The seemingly strange invention, from the Technical University of Munich, has a purpose beyond contrariness; according to the University of Oxford's roboticist, Paul Newman, it's the next step in robot evolution:

It's absolutely the way to go... Robots use mathematics internally to navigate, but that's not the way you want them to relate to people cohabiting with a machine. If there's a building on fire you don't want to give a fireman a robot-drawn map or a mathematical model, you want to say: 'down the corridor, third door on right'.

Of course, if there's a building on fire, you might want the robot to move slightly faster than he already does. In a recent test, it took the Advanced City Explorer five hours and conversations with 38 people to find a destination 1.5 kilometers away from its starting point.

Lost robot crosses city by asking directions [New Scientist]

Created by German engineering firm Festo, these robotic penguins use state-of-the-art 3D sonar to navigate around their surroundings and, according to New Scientist, are suitably flexible:

The bionic penguins can twist and turn almost as gracefully as their living counterparts because of the flexible glass fibre rods that control their heads. The fibres are arranged around the side of each penguin's head, while motors inside the body pull on one or more of them to twist the penguin's neck in any direction and guide the swimmer... [The design] has been adapted by Festo to make a flexible, trunk-like arm with a gripper on the end for use in industrial applications. The arm can twist up to 90° in any direction, giving it an unrivalled degree of dexterity.

More excitingly, Festo have also created versions of the penguins that can be filled with helium gas, and "swim" through the air. Quite why they have done any of this, meanwhile, remains a mystery.

Bionic penguins take to the water – and the skies [New Scientist]

Wu was invited to participate in this year’s Microwave International New Media Arts Festival in Hong Kong. Wu has through his own research and experimentation created over two dozen robots based on his curiosity concerning human movement:

I remember once when I was a teen, I was sitting at the doorway of my home, bored. Then someone walked past. So I wondered about the two legs that we humans have, and I wondered if I could build a machine that walked like a human. I didn’t know about robots, but it was then that I got the idea.

In 1986, Wu built his first robot, Old Wu One, which was 20 cm tall and walked very slowly. But, after two decades of experimenting, Wu has created an impressive array of vehicles and automata, including a spider-legged chaise and a large, man-shaped rickshaw that can easily accommodate a passenger and driver. In the video below, Wu shows off several of his mechanical creations and explains his interest in robotics.

Rural Robots by Wu Yulu from microwavefest on Vimeo.

[via Design Boom]

Researchers at Boston Engineering and at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering created GhostSwimmer, which a refined version of an initial MIT prototype called RoboTuna. Since the tuna is one of the fastest fish in the oceans, the RoboTuna team reasoned, a robot that could mimic its movements would be an ideal underwater vehicle. RoboTuna — and, by extension, GhostSwimmer — resulted from an extensive study of the hydrodynamics of tuna motion and an intricate mimic design. GhostSwimmer swims by manipulating its dorsal (back), pectoral (chest), and caudal (tail) fins; like its biological namesake, it can reach up to 70 kilometers per hour.

This speed caught the eye of the Navy, who want to use GhostSwimmer as both a spy vehicle and a prototype for a future class of fuel-efficient submarines. After a few more years, we might have an entire school of robotic fish confusing the hell out of the rest of the ocean.

A fin-tuned design [via Economist]
MIT RoboTuna home page

Luckily, the path to robotopia has a map of sorts - the development and integration of computers into our lives. Bill Gates has said that the current state of robotics is similar to the earliest days of the computer industry, and he definitely has a point. Here are five main ways we can rapidly advance the state of robotics.

1. Make robots as cool as cars. The first computer enthusiasts were nerdy engineers. A few years ago, I overheard some guys talking to each other about their computers, and if you substituted "processor" with "crankshaft or "gigahertz" with "horsepower," they could have been a couple of gearheads bragging about their souped up street cars. We need to reach the point where every guy has a "project robot" he's working on out in the garage.

2. Open source robots. The most recent issue of Scientific American had a great article about improving artificial limbs by making the designs open source. The world needs an open source robotics project (there are a few, but they need to be bigger, broader and more ambitious). We don't all need to start from scratch.

3. Make robots commercially appealing. What robotics really needs is a killer app. Detecting bombs is the killer app for military robots, and they're becoming a ubiquitous feature of modern warfare. It's probably not going to sell many robots in Peoria though. Personally, I would shell out for a security robot that quietly prowls around my house when I'm asleep or not home, watching for intruders.

4. Develop an appealing user interface. People will wait in line for hours and pay hundreds of dollars for a fancy phone mainly because they like the interface (and the brand name). We need robots that soccer moms (and even hockey moms) can use.

5. Create a sexbot. I'm not just going for shock value here - a lot of early Internet technology was driven by sex websites. Sex sells. If there's a surefire way to make money with robots and attract early-adopters, it will probably involve sex. If that means someone out there is going to have to spend a lot of time researching and developing robot boobs, then so be it. Image by: EURON.

First, a quick recap of the laws:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Most robots used in industry are designed and programmed to do a very specific task. They can move with great speed and apply incredible force, and for this reason, humans can't work too close to them. While robots can be designed that sense proximity to a human and avoid contact, the added complexity results in less reliable robots. Programming the three laws is not as simple as telling a robot, "Ok, first law, don't hurt humans." You have to give the robot a way of recognizing what a human is and a way to prevent itself from hurting a human.

A project funded by the European Union is working to develop robots that are simple and robust, using new methods of manipulating the robotic limbs that mimic human muscle action. New sensors give a robot kinetic awareness of where its own body parts are. Lighter robots add another safety factor, while limb actuators that "decouple" the force of the motor when the limb strikes something result in softer impacts. If our future will include humans working side by side with robots, then finding a way to realistically incorporate the three laws is a high priority.

Do No Harm To Humans: Real-life Robots Obey Asimov’s Laws. [Science Daily]

According to BBC News:

As the cells are living tissue, they are kept separate from the robot in a temperature-controlled cabinet in a container pitted with electrodes. Signals are passed to and from the robot via Bluetooth short-range radio. The brain cells have been taught how to control the robot's movements so it can steer round obstacles and the next step, say its creators, is to get it to recognise its surroundings.

It's a clear case of Doctor Who influencing the course of science. Remember how in the new Doctor Who Cyberman episdoes, all the humans were controlled by Bluetooth before their brains were taken out and plopped into cyberbodies?

Would it be too creepy for these researchers to put their next rat brain into a robot that looks like a Dalek?

Rat-brained robot [BBC News]

Julio was constructed by David Hanson, who is perhaps best known for his robotic portrait of Philip K. Dick. When Byrne decided to participate in the museum’s “Machines and Souls” show, he wanted to work with Hanson because of the lifelike nature of its work:

Hanson’s robots flirt with the uncanny and test our notions of what it means to be human. They have rubbery flesh made of what he calls frubber, with tiny wires on the inside that pull the “skin” to mimic human facial expressions (to an extent). Some of them can also make eye contact and some can carry on a weird dialogue, adding to their profoundly disturbing nature. Part of what makes this human likeness so creepy is our instinctive desire to empathize with the robots and to ascribe to their behavior human motivations and even emotions.

Byrne and Hanson decided to collaborate a singing robot whose bodily movements and facial expressions would emulate that of a human engaged in the same activity. Music is certainly Byrne’s medium, but he believes that a singing robot is especially surprising:

We often assume that singing is “from the heart” — or at least some part of it is. I myself believe that it is and it isn’t: it’s both a developed skill (to emote convincingly), and a true outpouring of emotion, as the physiological effect of singing is by nature more connected to the lizard brain than to the rationalizing frontal lobes. The fact that singing can engage both parts of the brain makes it maybe the least likely thing one would expect a robot to do.

Byrne further explains that the idea stemmed from his interest in roboticist Masahiro Mori’s theory of the “uncanny valley,” that point at which a robot is so human but at the same time so inhuman that viewers find it repulsive:

Knowing that singing elicits an emotional reaction from a listener and observer, I sense that encountering Julio might push some very odd buttons. I remember that my first encounter with Hanson’s robot made me rethink what it means to see, to look. We think of seeing and looking as something optical, something the eyes do. But actually seeing something, and recognizing it, is a lot more than that—it is the act of “naming” the thing the eyes are locking on to. It involves other meta brain functions that often have nothing to do with optics or the muscles controlling the eye. If seeing were just the visual and eye-muscle behavior, then isn’t that the same as what Jules does? And then isn’t singing, and displaying the attendant emotions, the same as what Julio does?

And the end result is certainly discomforting:

David Byrne Journal [via Metafilter]

As Pittsburgh researchers report in this week's issue of the journal Nature, humans have shown in the past that they can move cursors on a screen using a similar brain-machine interface. But by grabbing food and bringing it to their mouths, the monkeys are paving the way towards advanced neuro-prosthetics for people with permanent paralysis. Further down the road, you even could imagine able-bodied people using the technology to manipulate robo-arms or even full exoskeletons with their thoughts.

Source: Nature via PhysOrg

Images: University of Pittsburgh, The New York Times

Festo's Bionic Arm [The Future of Things]