First off, if robots are to be trusted to perform surgical operations on human tissue —which, have no doubt, is the future and even sort of the present—they should probably be able to handle balloons. RE2 Robotics has that down at least, but its imitative robot is a bit less lithe around a razor blade when it comes to the gift-opening task. That cut looks like it'd take off your entire large intestine along with the target appendix.It also seems a bit jittery, no? David Rusbarsky, a senior software engineer at RE2, offered some background to IEEE Spectrum's Evan Ackerman:We popped 5 balloons with the robot and successfully made 8 fish on the first day that we tried making them. Our record only got better on the second day, including making 1 dog. I popped an additional 3 with my own two hands, and successfully made an additional 2 fish before trying with the robot, so I was actually better at making them with the robot than I was with my own hands. Also, in the [video below] we unlocked the lock on the first try with no troubles whatsoever. Not bad for having a grand total of 4 fingers, right?The Zipperbot is something else entirely. Its creator, a PHD student at MIT named Adam Whiton, is interested in "sartorial robots," which I guess we should take literally as "robots that do stuff with clothing." It's creepy, no? The Zipperbot is tiny and trivial, but there's something about it that doesn't sit quite right. It wants into your life at the most banal levels, offering a kind of unnecessary ubiquity that I think as a general notion freaks people out: the dystopia where problem solving is fully sucked from engineering.Anyhow, Whiton's explanation:The Group Identity Surface is a soft-architecture system utilizing thermochromic textiles and computer vision to facilitate human-machine teammate building. Zipperbot, a robotic continuous closure for fabric edge joining, was developed to explore autonomous control of a sartorial gesture and performed as a wearable robot which was evaluated through social interactions. Clothing is a uniquely human pursuit and is nearly universal in its adoption and use. It plays a prominent role in our individual cultures transmitting a mixture of social signals and meanings through the semiotics of fashion. It is through this performance of assemblage of fabric surfaces we reconfigure ourselves and our identities. Merging robotics and fashion within the practice of Sartorial Robotics will enhance the explorations of identities for both humans and robots.Where can I preorder my Velcro-bot?
Advertisement