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Today's Five Most Mind-Blowing Bots

Meet the world's most advanced humanoid precursors: a 'bot with vocal cords, a mapmaking Segway, and more

Posted 8.22.06 at 2:00 am 2 Comments

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WT-6
John B. Carnett
The talker of the town
Atsuo Takanishi and his Ph.D. student Kotaro Fukui at Waseda University in Tokyo thought they had come up with a simple solution to a complex problem. Want a robot to speak like a human? Why not just build it like a human, vocal cords and all? Unfortunately, though, that´s where the solution´s simplicity ends. In order to simulate the flexibility and resonance of the biological structures, the group had to painstakingly re-create the entire human vocal system in this, the sixth version of the Waseda Talker. They modeled the human tongue, vocal cords, lips, teeth, soft palate and lungs out of plastics and rubbery polymers to mimic the real thing. The result is uncannily clear, natural speech-assuming you speak Japanese.
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Ballbot
John B. Carnett
A new way to balance
Why make a robot that has to balance on a point? Because that also means it can turn on a dime. Ballbot´s omnidirectional ball-foot lets it trace any path along the floor without worrying about turning around or getting stuck in a corner-challenges that make wheel-based ´bots squirm. Its stability starts with fiber-optic gyroscopes that feed balance data to an onboard control computer. They calculate how the ball has to move in order to keep the platform upright (or move it in the desired direction), and motors in the base make it so. According to Carnegie Mellon University professor Ralph Hollis, who built the first version of Ballbot in his suburban basement in his spare time, the robot can even cope with roughhousing. Give it a push, and it will sway and roll to keep its balance before returning to attention.
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2 Comments

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mrxxxs

06/23/08 at 3:11 am

Thanks for the beautiful picture
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boyetesguerra

07/01/09 at 3:20 am

Our generation are so lucky that we are now encountering some major advances in technology. But all these things have limitations. And yet, the most advance computer cannot escape the glitch that engineers still finding a way to perfect.
More power to our researchers and to the publishers who gives us cutting edge technology and some information.