Human beings make tools. Animals make tools. A tool gives an advantage over adversity and guarantees survival. Will the same happen if a robot makes a tool?

Researchers at ETH Zurich are on a mission to not only have robots make tools, but they are teaching the bots how to use them. Their goal is to simplify the complexity of this type of robot, while at the same time giving it extraordinary capabilities like creating its own parts, fixing itself, and even creating other robots from printed parts and integrated motors.

So far, their robot consists of a mechanical arm with Hot Melt Adhesive (HMA) capabilities. This means that at the end of the mechanical arm is just a hot glue gun that can be used to create parts layer by layer. In their effort to avoid complexity, it has no manipulator mechanisms, instead it only uses the stickiness of the printed parts to move them and place them.

The project has only just been started. In a demonstration of their progress, ETH researchers showed that their robot is capable of creating tools and thus performing tasks that it would not be able to do otherwise. It took the robot about an hour, but it was able to create a cup with a handle to transport water, an impressive task for a robot with no hands.

Next, the team or researchers are working to give the robot perception capabilities to eventually achieve a completely autonomous robot. At the moment, the robot can only create simple shapes in about an hour’s time; a long way away from creating an entire mechanism, but even bots need to take it one HMA layer at a time.

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(Left) Burritob0t platform (Right) The bot does not print the tortilla, unfortunately (via Marko Manriquez)

Robots have been showing their love for making food over the past few years like Suzomo’s SushiBot which can pump out thousands of the tasty rolls and the MIT BakeBot that mixes up cookie batter ingredients from scratch. It seems all the major cuisines are being slowly represented from our mechanical friends, but none have the unique technique of printing up delicious burritos like that of Marko Manriquez’s Burritob0t.

The robot uses a Mechatronics/Gantry 3D printing system with RAMPS (RepRap Arduino MEGA Pololu Shield) electronics, based in-part from RepRap’s self-replicating manufacturing machine, as the robots base platform. To actually build a burrito, the robot needs a 3D model representation of the ingredients (cheese and beans) which is done through the use of ReplicatorG software that converts the STL/3D model to GCODE. Once the robot has the converted code, the ingredients are fed into two MakerBot Frostruder MK2 compressed air delivery syringes which pump out ingredients based on the 3D model onto a tortilla.

Marko designed Burritob0t for his thesis project at ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU) as a way to examine the relationship between fast-food practices (conveyor-belt edibles) and human nutritional habits. While the robot does not actually build a burrito from scratch, it does print up 3D piles of tasty ingredients with digital perfection.

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(Left) Egestion Vessel for the EcoBot III  (Right) Sludge and water distributor for EcoBot III (via Bristol Robotics Laboratory)

Robots are not only difficult to design and build, but they are also a challenge to handle after a project has ended. Robots are manufactured using resilient materials but many are toxic and non-biodegradable and so have a negative impact on the environment if they are not retrieved and disposed of safely.

Dr. Jonathan Rossiter from the University of Bristol and Dr. Ioannis Ieropoulos of the University of the West of England, are embarking on a project that will tackle this problem head on.

To do this, they have received a grant of over £200,000 from the Leverhulme Trust. The team will attempt to build a robot completely out of biodegradable materials. They will apply this technology to an existing project they call the "Ecobot," which is a robot that uses Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) technology for energy. MFCs function by extracting electrons from the microbial metabolic processes as they feed on things like sugar, fruits or even insects. For this reason, the Ecobot is a perfect candidate to go full biodegradable.

Biodegradable robots will change the way robots can be used for research. Currently, a lot of effort must be put into keeping track of the robot and salvaging them once they are not operating. But if Rossiter and Ieropoulos are successful, researchers could unleash hundreds of robots with no worries of environmental damage after the robots stop functioning.

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As a generous charity for a fundraiser, one brave soul has volunteered to have his head shaved by a robot with three arms (looks similar to Dr. Octopus' extra arms from Spider-Man). The robot is a Multi-Armed Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV ), and was being controlled from an operator through a computer. The charity was for St. Baldrick's Foundation to help cure child hood cancer and the robotics firm helping with the fundraiser and providing their own robot for use was Intelligent Automation, Inc.

The program did a little more than raise money for charity. It demonstrated the flexibility to carry out tasks for their UGV robot. The robot yields three arms, all equipped with cameras, and 29 degrees of freedom. The camera and arm arrangement allows the user to move the arms relative to various frames of reference. As a result, the robot is capable of carrying out tasks that require complex movements and manipulations to objects.

The UGV used has many purposes it can serve. It has shown the ability to handle tools, inspect backpacks, tie knots, breach doors, and IDE disarming. Although the robot gave a far from perfect haircut, it gave a perfect example of how far along robots have come. Not to mention they did have a robot set up for emotional support and one to clean up the hair on the ground. Maybe next time a robot can wash our hair for us too.

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Building projects with microcontrollers (especially Arduinos as of late) opens minds to an unlimited amount of innovations. Whether the projects are created for fun, or to serve specific purposes, they can always motivate others to be creative. The latest Arduino powered creation comes from Ekaggrat, an inspired individual with a strong interest in science.  

Ekaggrat has created a robotic arm that writes down the time by the minute on a dry-erase board. After a minute is up it erases the digit and rewrites the new time. It is driven by four servos that control the arm and hand movements. Two 9G metal gear RC servos move the arm while two 4.5G ultralight servos control the hand movements. Using servos makes it a little loud and noisy and limits the accuracy of the robotic hand writing. However, there still can be improvements to be made such as a change to stepper motors to improve accuracy.

Nonetheless, the creation is truly inspiring and the programming that it takes to complete a project such as this is difficult. Keeping track of the timing, 4 servos, and 7-segment display writing orientation in sync with one another is impressive for a hobby project. This goes to show that the amount of creations possible with technology is limitless.

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A group of researchers from Cornell Creative Machine Labs are currently developing an autonomous robot inspired from metabolisms of biological organisms. The goal is to be able to break down larger complex structures into smaller simpler pieces that may be reassembled to create a different type of structure.

The robot clamps onto a specially designed truss using rotational robot-lockable connectors and can traverse the three dimensional structure using three basic motions. Bi-directional gears on the robot allow it move between perpendicular planes, horizontally and vertically along a truss, and 180 degrees around a truss to move from the top to the bottom. In addition, reflectivity sensors are implemented into the robot which give it a sense of location relative to the truss structure, ultimately allowing it to function autonomously.

The sensors and movements are all controlled from on board the robot. The robot carries with it a sensor I/O board, a microcontroller, servo motors, and an on board battery. These simple electronics allow it detach truss beams with 100 percent success rate and reattach them with a 70 percent success rate.

While they would like to use the robot for building deconstruction and repair, that does not stop the researchers from thinking big. One day they hope that it could help repair and construct the space station or any other dangerous tasks associated with the outside of the space station or a shuttle. Meanwhile, the researchers will be working on improving the robot so it will be cable of carrying multiple truss beams at once, and they plan on re-working the algorithms that will allow it to traverse a path of most efficiency based on the final design. 

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Nano-quads (via KMEL Robotics)

Kmel Robotics may have one of the best promotions for their future flagship product, the mini quad-copter, via a collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania's GRASP Lab. The demonstration shows a series of synchronized flying patterns. The video gives the illusion of autonomous swam behavior. At the moment, both Kmel and GRASP are not letting out any information on the project.

The University of Pennsylvania researchers Alex Kushleyev, Daniel Mellinger, and Vijay Kumar put these quad-copters to the test. As the video shows, it was a very successful project. Like small remote control helicopters, we all received one Christmas in the past, these quad-copters will have a very limited battery power source. This is the only information released at the moment. As more develops, I will report back immediately.

Where can all this lead? To a better understanding of autonomous swarm control, rescue purposes, or continue to work together and impress like the Swarmanoids. Either way, these are sure to make an impact.

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University of Albany's robot in action

It was proven in 1997 that a computer’s computational abilities could outsmart a human when super-computer Deep Blue beat professional chess player Gary Kasparov at his own game. This match put the human brain against the software programming capabilities of a team of developers, but Deep Blue still needed human assistance in physically moving the chess pieces.

14 years later, roboticists hope to grant computers like Deep Blue the ability of playing an entire game of chess independent of human assistance. In 2010, a competition was held at the annual Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference in San Francisco. Roboticists from many places and universities presented robots that resembled those on an automotive assembly line.

Their robots ran into trouble trying to identify and then properly move the game pieces in accordance to the game rules. Some robots used cameras to locate pieces,  but none were programmed to identify them. Instead, memory of the initial position of each piece indicated which piece it was and how it could legally be moved around the chessboard. Despite all methods of movement, all had a tough time clearly identifying what moves were made and where exactly the pieces were placed. Furthermore, they were slow in making their moves, which only took them milliseconds to process and decide.

The winning robot was "Maxwell" from the University of Albany. The robot moved along its side and probably made generous use of its mobility to clearly see moves and piece placement from different angles.

While a robot’s arm-camera coordination still pales in comparison to a human’s hand-eye coordination, it is pertinent to note we developed those skills over hundreds of thousands of years. Roboticists and programmers have only been working on developing these skills in robots for only a few decades.

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