Google and Apple Alums Invent Adorable Robots That Teach Kids to Code

It’s common knowledge: If you want to learn a language—really learn a language—it’s best to start young. This is true for traditional dialects like Chinese, Spanish and English, but it’s also true of programming. Problem is, teaching kids to code is a lot like getting them to eat vegetables.

Forcing it down their throats is the best way to ensure that they’ll never want to write a line of C++ (or eat broccoli) again. But making programming fun isn’t simple. “Sitting down and writing code is hard,” says Vikas Gupta. “The problem with programming is you have to spend a lot of time on it before you start to see rewards.”Just last year, Gupta, the former head of consumer payments at Google, had his first child. This got him thinking a lot about how he might be able to teach his daughter programming skills someday. Sitting in front of a bright screen writing lines of code isn’t fun for anyone, let alone a 7-year-old who would rather be playing outside. “How do you turn programming into something that kids want to do?” he wondered.

This question led Gupta to quit his job at Google and start Play-i with co-founders Saurabh Gupta, a former engineer at Apple, and Mikal Greaves, formerly of Frog Design. Play-i’s focus is to make little robots that teach children programming concepts and languages through interaction and play. Since launching a crowdfunding campaign a few weeks ago, the company has brought in more than triple its original goal of $250,000 (it’s currently sitting at $793,000).

This flush of money is nothing if not reflective of our current time, where writing code is becoming as important as writing sentences. Gupta himself began programming in his teens, but he quickly realized if the United States wants to keep up with other countries, we’re going to have to start teaching our children how to code much earlier than that.

“The first question was, how early can kids begin to program?” he says. After doing some research, Gupta found that in Estonia, children begin to learn programming as early as first grade. And in the US? “Computer Science education has gotten worse, not better in the last 20 years,” he says. It’s not a question of ability—children are capable of grasping basic programming concepts like, causation, logic and simple sequencing of instructions. So the real question became: If schools aren’t going to take charge, how can parents turn programming into something that kids want to do at home?

Play-i is hoping Bo and Yana is the answer. The two robots look and act like toys—and at their core, that’s exactly what they are. You take them out of the box, turn them on, and kids can instantly play with them. But the robots’ smarts go way beyond your average toy. Both Bo and Yana are covert teaching machines, guiding kids through coding basics disguised as storytelling, music and make-believe. Bo, the bigger of the two, is a three-wheeled creature that can be programmed to dance, play music and even deliver a flower on command. Similarly, tell Yana, the stationary sphere, to roar like a lion when shaken, and she’ll do it.

“Kids can start weaving these characters into stories and learning about sequences,” Gupta says. “On page one you can say, if I throw you, you’re a lion, but if I shake you, you’re a train. Suddenly what they’re doing is programming sequences and conditions and branches, but in the context of a story and characters.”Children simply choreograph a sequence of actions via tablet or puppeteering and the robots perform them. “Kids have a very hard time handling abstract sequences,” Gupta explains. But if you reframe those lines of code into something that children easily grasp—telling Bo to play a song, turn his head or blink his eye—programming almost becomes second nature. This is mostly just teaching causality, “when I do this, you do this,” but it’s a starting point.

All of these actions are recorded in various programming languages like Blockly, Scratch Java and Python, which older, more curious kids can reference and study. As children progress in their skills, the programming language advances, too. Essentially, Play-i is building the backbone of a skill set that children might eventually have to formally learn while in school. But, Gupta is quick to add, playing with Bo and Yana is not homework. “We always want the reward to outpace the work kids put in,” he says. “If it’s not fun, kids aren’t going to use it.”

Source: wired.com

The only flies I would like in my house

Futuristic Concept Cleans Your House With Robot Flies

While we mostly like to post news about real robots doing real robot-y things, it's sometimes fun to take a look at impossible concepts, especially if they're a.) utterly insane and b.) provide enough foundation for us to convince ourselves that they're not actually completely entirely totally impossible, even if they are. 

Adrian Perez Zapata's futuristic concept, which he calls "Mab," envisions a swarm of tiny flying robots zipping around your house to clean surfaces, before returning to a spherical home base. Here's the summary:

Mab is a self cleaning system consisting of 908 robots which clean the surface of a  floor with a drop touching and trapping the dirt particles on the floor. These robots also fulfill the task of feeding the system energy by capturing solar energy in its wings. The second component of the Mab is the core, which the robots returns to, and this central part handles multiple tasks: it generates the mixture of water with an additive that gives higher surface tension and a pleasant odor to the water; it is controlling the robot based on information they are providing of the environment; receiving contaminated droplets and filters it to remove the dirt from the water, saving the highest percentage possible and cleans its walking surfaces.

 

The following summarizes the 7-step cleaning process:

1. Mixes the water and the substance that gives greater surface tension.
2. The mixture is distributed to subordinates - robots
3. The robots fly with the load. The robots use a propeller for flying.
4. The robots cleaning by touching the surface with their droplet of fluid
5. The droplet captures the dirt and carries it back to the core
6. The core filters the dirt out
7. The core recovers the highest possible percentage of water to restart the cycle

The thought behind Mab is to restore a sense of wonder in the everyday life, and to recapture the magic in simple processes, providing human shelters an autonomous purification.

It's a little bit hard to tell from the pictures just how small the the flying robots are, but they're seriously tiny. Getting robots that small to fly at all, much less fly intelligently, is exceptionally difficult, but not impossible, as Harvard is trying to show with their Robobee project.

We recognize, of course, that concept designs like this require little (or no) basis in reality. But they're fun to think about, especially when we have these lovely renderings to look at.

Source: http://spectrum.ieee.org/

Feather-light electronics creates e-skin

An 'imperceptible' electronic skin that can monitor the body, or help people to communicate through touch, is now possible thanks to a new ultra-light and flexible sensor foil, say researchers.

Materials scientist Dr Martin Kaltenbrunner from theUniversity of Tokyo, and colleagues, report their findings today in the journal Nature.

"You could even put it on the inside of the mouth," says Kaltenbrunner. "You would hardly feel that it's there."

Kaltenbrunner says healthcare and monitoring systems that measure such things as temperature, moisture or pressure in the body need to be light, thin and flexible so they don't interfere with the patient.

"The advantage of this very thin material is that it doesn't disturb you when you are moving," he says.

Kaltenbrunner and colleagues have for the first time made an electronic skin from a complex integrated circuit that is just 2 micrometres thick.

"This is 1/50th the thickness of a human hair," he says.

Weighing just 3 grams per metre - 27-fold lighter than office paper - the foil can float through the air like a feather and is extraordinarily tough, say the researchers.

"You can crumple it, you can throw it down, you can tramp on it, and the surface doesn't break," says Kaltenbrunner, adding the foil can be squashed into a radius of just 5 micrometres without bending.

The researchers tested the foil and found it also works at 160°C, and in wet environments.

Putting strips of the foil on a flat piece of stretched rubber could also enable the e-skin to be used, for example, around joints.

Tactile sensor

Kaltenbrunner and colleagues made the electronic sensor foil using a lightweight plastic substrate called polyethylene naphthalate, which last year they used to make solar cells.

On top of this, they placed an array of organic transistors, covered by another plastic layer containing pressure sensors.

They then showed that the electronic skin could act as a tactile sensor on a model of the upper human jaw.

"You could have a touch interface for a person who could not communicate in any other way," says Kaltenbrunner.

He says the sensors in the top layer of the foil could be substituted for others, for example those that measure temperature or moisture.

"Everything your skin can do, can be replicated in electronic form," says Kaltenbrunner.

Alternatively, light or heat emitting diodes could be put in this layer, he adds.

Before the technology is used in the body, however, Kaltenbrunner says it can be used for consumer products, including wearable electronics, which are currently around 100 micrometres thick.

"You can imagine putting them anywhere," says Kaltenbrunner. "You can give electronic functionality to everyday objects."

The research was funded by the Japanese government and the European Research Council.

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/science/

Meet the robot chef who 'prints' cookies

Your cooking partner is a robot, your fridge can talk, and your plate is your own personal dietician. Oh, and for a laugh you occasionally have a cook-off with a famous holographic chef.

This may sound like a scene from 1960s sci-fi cartoon The Jetsons, but the kitchens in coming decades may not be so far off those envisioned by futurologists.

Today, a number of significant developments in culinary tech are happening in the field of robotics. A group of design students in Poland recently programmed an industrial robot -- usually tasked with building cars -- to cook.

"Our project is called 'Let's cook the future' and we try to cook with robots -- we had a robot that initially was made just to be in factories and make cars and we tried to treat it as a human and put it in the kitchen." Says Barbara Dzaman, one of the students involved in the project.

The 'Let's cook the future' robot "prints" cookies three-dimensionally, building them up layer by layer in almost any shape you could imagine.

Dorota Kabala, an industrial designer working alongside the students says that the project looks towards a future where people can make dishes that are only limited by their imagination. "The problem we are addressing in this project is the need for personalization of production ... at the moment we can observe that people need more personalization, more customization of products than before and now it's possible."

Marek Cecula, a respected Polish designer, ceramicist and visiting professor at the Royal College of Art, London, says that he was "amazed" by the students' robot chef but felt that "we simply don't know where this is going ... How will we relate to objects made completely by a machine? How will these objects relate to our emotions? Where will the relationship between person and object be when the object is made by a machine?"

The introduction of robots into the home is not new, of course. Many of us already live with electronics that have robotic components, such as self-cleaning ovens, single-touch microwaves that automatically adjust to the food you have put in them, and fridges that scan used-by dates.

The trend for robots to perform unskilled restaurant jobs has also led to robotic noodle slicers and mechanical waiters, though so far many are mere gimmicks rather than genuine technological solutions.

Thomas Johansson, Design Director at Electrolux, says that he thinks there is a place for robots in the kitchen: "I think kitchen robots could potentially take over some of the common jobs that are repetitive or difficult to do ... I think you could take away some of the boring chores and spend your time doing something more interesting."

Away from robotics, Electrolux has been exploring the creative fringe of kitchen design with its annual Design Lab competition. The company recently announced the semi-finalists for 2013, which include a 3-D food printer and an appliance that calculates the nutritional values, possible toxins and freshness of your food before you start cooking.

Johansson says the range of issues being tackled by students in the competition is fascinating in itself: "A lot of the students are addressing issues like wellbeing, robotics, bio-mimicry, wearable devices, air purification, and also using smart phones and tablets as remote controls.

And then there are the issues about food diagnostics, which are especially interesting in light of the horse meat scandal. People are no longer that concerned about what frying pan they use, but what is in the frying pan. Knowing what it is that you are eating is very important."

With work being done in almost every field of home design, it is likely that the kitchen of the future will look significantly different to how it does today. As the old saying goes, the kitchen will always be the heart of the home -- but increasingly that heart is coming to resemble a pacemaker.

Source: CNN.com

Shrewbot inspired by shrew whiskers

There are numerous examples in nature where ‘active touch’ plays a primary role in how an animal finds its way around and how it behaves. Inspired by the Etruscan shrew, one of the world’s tiniest mammals, researchers at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL) developed Shrewbot – the newest generation of a robots that use sophisticated whiskers to find its way around their environment.

The Etruscan shrew relies on its whiskers to find, track and capture its prey during night, and the efficiency of this tiny creature has inspired scientists to look at ways of to employ a similar technique that can be used to provide the robots with ‘active touch’ rather than vision to navigate their environment. The Shrewbot has been developed at BRL in collaboration with the University of Sheffield Active Touch Laboratory as part of the BIOTACT project.

“When the whiskers touch an object this causes them to vibrate and the vibration pattern is picked up by sensitive cells in the hair follicle at the base of the whisker. These patterns are turned into an electrical signal which is sent to the brain, enabling the mammal to make instant decisions about its environment to help it move around or catch prey”, said Professor Tony Prescott from the University of Sheffield. “The whiskers have another advantage over some other forms of tactile touch. Whiskers themselves are easily replaceable since the sensory cells are at the base of the whisker, not the top, unlike our fingers for example, which are more easily damaged and hard to replace.”

Click here to watch a video of this robot in action!

The research has developed man-made whiskers that can move separately and are mounted on a mobile robot. They mimic the capability of the shrew by capturing information in the robot’s environment and allow it to make decisions about how to move in a particular environment.

“There are real advantages to this form of tactile sensing for robots that we are just beginning to understand. For example this whisker technology could have applications in dark, dangerous or smoke filled environments which are unsafe for humans, where in future we might want robots to go”, said Professor Tony Pipe from UWE Bristol. “Overall this project has taken us to a new level in our understanding of active touch sensing and in the use of whisker-like sensors in intelligent machines.”

Although you might think that touch as obsolete due to other sensors that could be used during night such as infrared cameras, LIDAR or sonar technology, the use of this technology is suitable in environments with particles that make the mentioned technologies unusable. For example, it could be used by fire departments in smoke filled rooms where vision is deeply impaired or in search situations at the bottom of murky waters

Source: http://www.robaid.com

A Robot With a Human Skeleton

By Clay Dillow

ECCEROBOT, The First Anthropomimetic 'Bot

Over at BBC, mathematician Marcus du Sautoy has examined what he’s calling the world’s first anthropomimetic robot--a robot that mimics in extremely high anatomical detail the movements and construction of the human body. The robot, named ECCEROBOT, possesses artificial analogs of human bones, muscles, and tendons that endow it with human-like motions and--perhaps someday--will imbue it with human-like intelligence.

Captured for a BBC show titled “Horizon: The Hunt for AI” (it airs tonight at 9 p.m., for any of our across-the-pond readers who may be interested), ECCEROBOT--for Embodied Cognition in a Compliantly Engineered Robot--serves three purposes. The first, of course, is to prove out the creation of a truly anthropomimetic robot. The second: figure out how to control it. But thirdly (and most interestingly), ECCEROBOT serves to explore how having a human-like physical form could influence human-like cognitive features.

In other words, the University of Sussex researchers working with ECCEROBOT posit that without an artificial body, artificial intelligence cannot really exist--the brain controls the body, but the physical body also informs brain. In the brief teaser clip posted at BBC, we can see that the researchers have made ample progress toward completing objectives one and two. As for the third, we naturally still have a long way to go. 

Source: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-04/video-can-worlds-most-human-robotic-body-help-crack-code-human-robot-intelligence