Friday, July 29, 2011

Chemical shape shifting robot

I have to tell you that this robot video kinda shocked me. I had absolutely no idea that there is something like "chemical robots" and I also had no idea that these robot can change their shape so extremely. In this video you can see prototype of robot that creates one company financed by DARPA and it is very interesting robot. It is really not very easy to explain here what this robot is and how much things this robot can do. It's main purpose is to infiltrate any area through really small holes. You can see in this video that this robot really is still just a concept, but if and when this robot will be finished, it will be something really amazing. If you remember T-1000 from Terminator 2, you know what I'm talking about.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Transforming robots are the best mannequins



I'm sure that you have seen at least some of the movies where robots transform into different shapes, sizes or even into cars. Well, this time we have her something what is really useful. E-shops has one big problem, lot of people who buys clothes there have to send it back, because the clothes does not fit. That is one of the reason why buying clothes in normal stores is still so popular. Well, fortunately, robots can solve this problem for us as you can see in this video. This robot can change shape so when you put some clothes on it you can see exactly how it will look on you. this is absolutely awesome and one of the greatest and also simplest ideas I have seen for long time. This exactly that kind of invention that is very simple, but very useful and has big chance to be very successful. I'm happy that I can bring such robot videos as this one.

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Video of robot that flies like a bird

Flying like birds do is something humans always wanted and took really very long time until we achieved. Well, not exactly "we" achieved this, because no human can still fly like a bird, but one new robot humans created lately can do this. When humans tried to fly in history they usually tried to fly as birds do, but it turned out that it is very hard to fly like a birds do. After some time we developed much easier and simpler methods to fly, but we still wanted to fly like birds.
In this robot video you can see this fascinating robot. This robot is called SmartBird and was created by team of Marcus Fischer. This robot in this video is very light weight, only something more then 400 grams, is made for light material like carbon fiber, has small motor and it really can fly just by flapping its wings like a real bird. Good work guys I hope we will see much more so interesting videos.

Monday, July 25, 2011

Will home robot look like this one?



I'm sure that most of you are looking forward to those robots that will help us in our homes with all those works we don't want. Not many people like to wash dishes, or to do vacuuming and other boring stuff. some these things already do robots. you have probably already seen all those robotic vacuum cleaners, but the problem with these robots is that they only know how to vacuum clean and nothing else. Vacuum robot will not help you with dishes, for something like that you need some much more sophisticated robot. Well, such robot will definetely exist and maybe even much sooner than you think. In this robot video you can see one robot that is maybe the first step in this path.
You can see that this german robot looks really great, but there will be few more years until we all will have such robot at our homes. I really hope it will be soon, because I hate all those house works so much!

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Creepy video with humanoid robot mouth

I have seen so many robot videos in my life that I don't even remember all of those clips now, but I really doubt that I have ever seen so creepy robot video as this one. This clip is so weird! In this video you can see artificial humanoid mouth and it looks absolutely crazy. I have to admit that I have really never seen anything even similar to this. Check out also the sound of this thing, it sounds really very strange.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

Kibot: first robot for toddlers on video

Robot for toddlers? This is no scifi anymore, but reality now as you can see in this robot video. Everyone who has kids wants good future for them and we live in society where you need good education for good future. If you want to have clever and educated baby you have to start soon, but who has the time and patience to teach kids languages, right? There is a great robotic helper you can use now called Kibot. Well, it gets even better, Kibot is not just tutor because Kibot is also a babysitter. I'm sure that every parent sometimes wishes to have robotic babysitter.
The Kibot was created by korean company Kt Corp. It can do much more than just teaching korean kids english. This monkey looking robot can also move and when you leave it home it start to move trough the house and it is searching for kids. That is really cool isn't it? I have not seen many robot videos with such great robot, especially robots that already are in market.
Well, as you already know, Kibot is not just tutor, but also babysitter. That is because it has of course cameras and display and wifi connection. That means you can call it with your phone or some other device and communicate with your kids trough it. Well, it gets even better. If you have small kids, they usually does not know how to make a call, well, with Kibot it is extremely simply. They have card they just puts in front of Kibot's face and then Kibot calls the number that matches the card thanks to RFID chip it has in it. Another great thing about Kibot is, that it is not too expensive, 450$ is I think very good price for all the stuff it can do. I'm sure we will see more and more robot videos as this one in near future and our homes will be full of such devices.

Friday, July 15, 2011

Robot football world cup

Hello, if you are robot vids fan you already know probably very well that robots play football. In this video clip you can see that they are getting better every year and that is really great to see. You can see that those humanoid robots in this video are really not so fast and good as those who has wheels and even some kind of "cannon" to shoot the ball, but the moves they do looks more and more similar to moves humans do and that is something really fascinating to watch.
The day when we will not know if we are watching robots or humans playing footbal is still not even near, but you can see in this robot video then we are getting closer to that target really fast. What will be probably really bad for human players is that robots can play as team much better then humans and can communicate with each other in speed of light, their passes will be perfectly accurate, they will never do anything what could hurt their team and so on. from certain point, there will be simply no chance for humans to win against robots, but as you can see that point is not even close to us, but we can at least watch now how it all starts and that is also very interesting.

Meet Nao from Aldebaran Robotics

Aldebaran Robotics was founded in 2005 by Bruno Maisonnier who has been working with humanoid robots for 25 years. It is the first french company dealing with humanoid robots and now has about 80 members. In this video you can see their first and very popular product, robot called Nao.
Nao is humanoid robot, that has been created for educational purposes. Nao is something like platform for teaching robots. It has user friendly programming environment. They say it is very easy to start working with this robot because they also gives you special educational kits.
Check out this robot video where you can see that Nao is robot who can do lot of stuff, has many sensors..and simply looks really cute and entertaining. It is not cheap robot, but since you can program it to do almost anything, it is really great for robotics classes. I'm sure that robots we all will have at our homes in future will be somehow very similar to this one.

Thursday, July 14, 2011

ALICE - robot with realistic facial impressions

Do you remember those ultra realistic robots from Blade Runner? In this robot clip you can see that we are one step closer to such amazing machines. We still have big problems with human like bypad movement, but as you can see in this video we make big steps forward in facial impression. Even this robotic face still does not look like face of human, it definetely looks very good and makes some very good looking impressions.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

The robot bartender

Another job what people used to do will sooner or later be replaced by robot, this time bartenders should be those afraid losing their jobs to robots. In this video you can first version of real robot bartender. Yes you can see in this robot clip that he is still quite slow, but I'm sure in few years robots like this one will be much faster and who knows, maybe they will even talk with every lonely soul that needs company.

Monday, July 11, 2011

Will robots destroy our society?



Today I have for you something different than usual robot video, there will be no robot videos in today article. This article is about future of robots and us humans, it will not be nice future, at least for some time, in this article you will find out why, even there will be no war with robots and that it will change the whole human society as we know it.
Since the birth of humankind many various kinds of simple machines were used by us to help us in work and it was really great for us all the time. Well, the human society was growing and becoming more and more complicated and complex.
In times when humans were just collecting food, hunting or gathering food from simple agriculture there was only very low level of work specialization, so really almost everyone could do any other job. Thanks to "science" of those times human race started to grow both in population and in level of economy. Well, there is the point in time that will make it really hard for us in near future to absorb working robots in our society. As human society and economy grew, people had to do just one specialized job and had to be really good in it to have decent income, so they even needed after some time to prepare for the job for more and more years, process we now call education. Not much changed from that time. We also live in society that needs extremely specialized people, if you are not specialized you do some simple manual work, work of machine.

It happened before

If you know history you probably also know very well that situation when machines caused that many and many people lost their job happened before and humankind survived that situation. Well, if you know history really well you also know that the problems did not end in just few destroyed machines in factories and some strikes, no, the problem was much deeper and transition of society was very painful and radical. Everytime something like this happened in society it had huge impact on everyone, it caused wars and change of whole world. This fast evolution in agriculture, then few times in industry happened few times before, created feudalism, nationalism, socialism, communism, but no one knows what it will create this time. The only thing we can be sure about is that it will happen and I say that robots will cause it this time. So where is the big problem with robots? It is really not that they will start war against us like in Terminator or Matrix, no it will be something different this time.
I'm sure that fans of robot videos are fans of robots as big as I'm, so don't get me wrong with this, I think that robots will make the world better place, but before that will happen, there will be big and painful transition in our whole society and economy, which is in some point of view the same thing.
The society and economy will have big problem, problem much bigger that the crisis of past years. Imagine situation in next about 10-25 years. Today there is really extremely huge number of people who do manual jobs, but we are now very close to "break point" of automation and robotics. Graphene, optical circuits, new batteries, all these things together or something absolutely different will accelerate development of robots in just few years to levels we cannot even imagine now. Maybe it has already started with that robot from IBM called Watson, or those autonomous drones of US military or some other project of DARPA, no one really knows. After this "break point" people will start to lose their jobs because of robots fast, so fast that economics will not be able to sustain it.

How exactly will robots destroy our society and is it really something bad?

Even today people are losing jobs because of various automats and robots, but it is still quite slow. Well, it is slow compared with the situation that is ahead of us. In next 10-25 years about 90% or even more people with low education level will lose their jobs, because robots will do their work better (it means cheaper). If you don't believe this, then take a look on this older robot video. I think this video shows it all, even two years ago there was robot quite cheap what can learn work millions of people do today. What kind of robots there will be in next ten or twenty years? If you think that owners of factories will still want to have people as workers you are absolutely wrong. The only thing they want is money and robots are very cheap workers.
Every company that produces something today has one biggest expense and that expense are wages and of course taxes. There are no wages you have to pay to machine selling cola and chocolate bars and of course there are also no taxes from that work because you don't pay that work. Well the work is still done. If you want to sell cola and chocolate bars somewhere you cannot just put there boxes with cola and chocolate bars and think that people who gets the bar from box will also pay for it. You have to either put a person there that will collect the money or machine that will do the same. To pay someone for this job when he sells 15 colas and 10 chocolate bars a day would be too expensive because you would have to pay that person wage+taxes, but if the machine do the work, you pay just electricity, it works 24/7/365 and never strikes - best employee ever! This means that robots (from some point that is of course different for every job) are much cheaper than humans and soon we will see, that everywhere where it is possible will work robots instead of humans.
Imagine society where 90% of those low educated manual workers lost their jobs, because of robots. It is really strange situation, because these people does not have
any money and they need money from government to survive. Well, where the government will get the money, when it does not have any money from all those poor low educated who used to work hard and give big percent of their wage to government? I don't know where the government will get the money, definetely not from robots, that is for sure, because they don't have any. we know government, they will find a way. There is something much worse than the fact the governments will have much less money. The biggest problem is in fact quite a paradox.
Imagine that there are so many unemployed people with no money in society because of robots, what will happen to economy? Yes, economy will fall down and really very deep and probably very fast. These people cannot buy anything, they cannot even buy products they used to create that now creates robots, but they also cannot buy any products or services that are still made by humans. What this will do with society? It will change it as similar things changed it before, there will be wars, famine, poverty, new regimes and ideologies. We can just hope that this will not be the end of humankind, because we have now very destructive powers we can use as weapons. In previous transitions we had no such weapons.
I don't want to finish this article so negatively, because I think fans of robot videos are positive people and people who thinks that robots will bring us bright future. I think that also, if we survive this painful transition, there will be beautiful future for humans in world where most of bad work will be done by robots. No human as it is today will have to do dangerous jobs, jobs that kill people both physically and mentally, boring jobs, stupid jobs or just any job you don't like. People will have the time and resources to educate themselves, to do arts, science and later even to explore space and maybe even meet other civilizations and finally after long time, to reach the last step of evolution - finding the reason of existence. All this thanks to robots.

Thursday, July 7, 2011

Realistic dental training robot

Even dentists of course needs to learn and to train and I'm sure I would not find even one person in the world that would like the one who these future dentists will try new techniques and so... Thanks to God and engineers there are robots to this very bad work instead of us. I consider dental care sometimes like some kind of torture and it is really good that at least part of this can take robots, who does not feel any pain. That is really very very good.
If you like realistic robots and looking forward to day when robots will look like those in Blade Runner, then you can be happy. Japan is in lead in robotics so it is no surprise that the most realistic human like robot you can see in this robot video is also from Japan. I have seen huge amount of robot clips, but I have never seen robot looking so great. I think that after watching this video you think the same. I'm sure that we are not longer than 10 years from now when there will be robots so realistic on the first sight that you will not know if it is robot or human. amazing times are really near.

Sunday, July 3, 2011

Video of first flight of NASA robotic lander

Space is very hostile place for humans and there are more and more voices that space exploration is something what humans really should not do, it is just too complicated and too expensive. Well, I think that space exploration is very important, but it is absolutely true that humans should not do it at least now, much better way is to let the robots do the work. They don't need air, water, so much heat as humans and in many many ways they are better than us and every day they are getting stronger and better in everything than we are. It is simple fact we all must accept.

In this robot video clip you can see something really amazing. NASA alway had problems with landing and in fact fact many missions were spoileng because bad landing. Well, it finally looks like they have found really great way how to land on other planets and also on Earth, it is this robotic lander. We have all seen something similar in sci-fi movies, but as you can see in this robot clip, it is finally true.



Why is this roboting lander so amazing? The answer is really very simple, it is because this robotic lander is autonomous and it means it does not need any control, you just give it order and it flyes. To create something like was very hard, but now it can be used in missions to asteroids, Moon, Mars. It can land and lift off again and do maneuvers, hover... really great robot that will help a lot in space exploration.