Imagine you’re a kid having a blast in the park, when out of nowhere a rad robot sidles up beside you, just begging to play. The MORPHs 2.0, created by Interactive Architecture Lab, is meant to encourage kids to interact with robots at an early age, hopefully instilling a life-long love of technology.

MORPHs, or Mobile Reconfigurable PolyHedra, are adaptive polyhedral structures capable of moving around in public spaces, They respond to their environment – both the terrain on which they slowly crawl, and the people around them. An onboard GPS unit and a wireless guidance system define the area in which the robot is allowed to crawl, but otherwise it moves through the space autonomously.

When a curious human happens upon the somehow-adorable walking sculpture, he or she can squeeze one of the rubber joints to interact with it. The robot will then begin moving in that direction. The rubber joints also provide the robot with important information, such as whether there are obstacles (like people) ahead or if it’s still sitting on solid ground. If someone does try to grab MORPHs 2.0 and run off with it, the environment sensors and GPS will cause an alarm to go off.

The robot’s movements are slow and deliberate so it won’t pose any perceived threat to people around it. At just 1.5 meters (almost 5 feet) tall, MORPHs can support up to 30 kilograms (about 66 pounds). The team plans to double the height and increase the load-bearing capacity for a future version. If built big and strong enough, these roving bots could be like traveling monkey bars that just wander to wherever the kids are and invite them to interact, truly making real-world technology a familiar part of kids’ lives from a very early age.

The post My First Robot: Bot Wanders Playgrounds, Engages Kids first appeared on Gajitz.

Handwritten letters are always a delight to receive, but who really bothers with paper and pen when sending an email is so much easier? A company called Bond is using robots to reinvent the way we send personalized correspondence.

The idea is really simple: you use your computer or phone to send to Bond whatever you’d like written on a card or letter, then the writing ‘bots use your own handwriting or a stored calligraphy style to carefully write it out on paper. The envelope is sealed with a wax seal and then sent out for you.

Bond acquires your handwriting through a sample you provide or, if you only communicate in chicken scratch writing, you can choose one of the styles offered on Bond’s website. Whether in your own handwriting or some random pretty calligraphy, the service saves you the irritation and pain of having to write out every single note yourself.

The robot-centric service is perfect for recently married couples who need to send tons of thank-you notes or for businesses that want to add a personal touch to their correspondence. There’s a $199 setup fee for Bond to acquire and store your handwriting, but after that you can send cards for $2.99 each – less if you’re making a large bulk order.

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During the course of creating a full-body, six-degree-of-freedom motion platform for racing simulation, two San Jose State University students took a little side trip to make this deceptively simple-looking robot. It has the amazing ability to perfectly balance a ball in the exact center of the platform, even when you try to knock the ball off.

The robotic platform is a proof-of-concept for the duo’s larger project. The students, Tyler Kroymann and Robert Dee, formed Full Motion Dynamics to realize their goal of the larger motion simulator. This smaller machine also works with six degrees of freedom and a resistive touch panel mounted on its platform as an input device.

Whenever a ball is placed on the Arduino-powered platform, the platform corrects it position to keep the ball perfectly centered. When an evil hand darts in to flick the ball off of the platform, it reacts quickly to correct the ball’s position. When the hand lifts the ball, the platform vibrates as though protesting the absence of its purpose. Full Motion Dynamics has received such interest in the little robot that they are planning to release it commercially as a whole or in kit form.

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The day when robots will do all of our dangerous work for us is quickly approaching, and Google-owned Boston Dynamics‘ walking, self-balancing robot Atlas is a big step (no pun intended) toward that goal. The 6’2″, 330-pound humanoid robot walks on two legs to leave its upper appendages free for lifting, carrying, and manipulating objects. It’s designed to navigate difficult terrain and even to crawl on all fours or climb when its surroundings call for some more flexibility in getting from one point to another.

The Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition has been working on Atlas’ walking and balancing algorithms, including a feature that lets the robot recover from tripping or being pushed. Their newest video demonstrating Atlas’ impressive abilities shows the enormous robot balancing on one foot atop a pile of cinder blocks. This may seem like a small feat for a robot – you could stand your old tin robot on a pile of bricks and it would stay there, right? But Atlas is a dynamic moving robot that can self-correct its position to keep it in place as it moves its arms, much in the way a human body does.

In the video, Atlas adopts the “crane” posed demonstrated in the final fight scene of The Karate Kid: one leg bent and raised high and both arms raised over the head. Atlas adjusts its center of gravity as its arms move around, which would be a feat for a lot of humans. Disappointingly, though, it doesn’t actually do the crane kick in the end. The robot is currently in development, with large groups of researchers dedicating their time to various aspects of its movement. They envision Atlas being able to perform actions that are too dangerous for humans, such as ammunition handling, rescue missions, and bomb disposal.

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We’ve all felt that creepy sensation when you could swear there’s someone right behind you even though you are, in fact, alone. The sensation is known as “feeling of a presence” or FoP, and it’s been reported all around the world. Although it can be experienced by people with healthy neurological functions, FoP is more prevalent in people with certain neurological or mental health problems. Neuroscientists in Switzerland studying the phenomenon believe that they have pinpointed three areas in the brain responsible for FoP – and they built a robot to simulate the creepy feeling.

The researchers first studied the brains of 12 patients with conditions like brain tumors, epilepsy, migraine, and stroke. The patients all reported experiencing FoP regularly. They observed the subjects’ brains as they experienced the phenomenon and identified three damaged areas believed to be responsible for the weird feeling: the temporoparietal, insular, and frontoparietal cortex. They were then able to give healthy people that same bizarre “feeling of a presence,” an experience that left two participants so weirded out they just walked out on the experiment.

The scientists recreated the FoP by analyzing the sensations experienced by the subjects having actual FoP episodes. They noticed that if the person having the experience was seated, they would perceive the “presence” as also being seated. The researchers discovered that the feeling of an unknown presence actually originates from the brain’s confusion over the signals of the person’s own body movements. The affected person’s brain doesn’t realize that these movements are coming from their body, so they attribute the odd sensation to another presence being in the room.

Armed with this knowledge, the researchers created a machine that would purposely confuse a person’s sensorimotor signals – the signals your body sends to your brain when you move. Subjects were blindfolded and then directed to push a lever. In the first part of the experiment, pressing on the lever caused an object behind the subject to poke him or her in the back. This was confusing because it felt like subjects were reaching forward but their movements were being felt from behind.

But in the second part of the experiment, researchers messed with the subjects a little more. This time, the poking was delayed by a second or two. Although the subjects knew logically that they were causing the poking sensation, the delay made it seem like someone else was responsible. It was because the expected reaction to the subjects’ action was mismatched, causing a kind of temporary disconnect in which subjects reported feeling like there was someone else in the room with them, poking them in the back. The researchers explained that the same temporary confusion occurs in otherwise-healthy people from time to time, which explains why we sometimes just get that creepy-crawly feeling like we’re not alone in an empty room.

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