GetRobo

Robot of the Year 2007 - 3

Three more special prizes for the 2007 Robot of the Year. Best component was the ultra-small AC servo actuator RSF-3B made by Harmonic Drive Systems, Inc. Fit for robot hands as in the video below.

Japan's machinery association chose the Automatic Robotic Blood Sample Courier System made by  Matsushita Electric Works, Ltd. to award its prize. Two key features of this system is that the robots can work in groups without predesignated tracks.

Last but not least, an MR Image-Guided Surgical Robotic System developed by a group of academia and companies and led by Prof. Makoto Hashizume of the Dept. of Advanced Medical Initiatives at Kyushu University, received the jury's special award. What is so cool about this surgical robot is that it is compact enough to fit inside an MRI scanner and that all the electronic/mechanic parts needed to manipulate the robot and that would normally interfere with the MRI are OUTSIDE of the scanner. Thus for the first time, the robot enables doctors to conduct surgery utilizing MR images at real time. Something the popular da Vinci surgical system is not capable of doing.

Robot of the Year 2007 - 2 - miuro

The Small- to Medium-sized Venture Award went to miuro - the robotic music player made by ZMP Inc. Here is miuro dancing to the music at the Robot of the Year 2007 event.

Three things to know about miuro in 2008.

1. ZMP is teaming with Sega Toys which will be coming out with  ODO - a low-cost version of miuro - in July. Whereas miuro costs 108,800 yen (a little over $1,000), the ODO is planned to be priced at 15,540 yen (about $150).

2. ZMP is working on new human interfaces including one which you can operate miuro by touching it in certain ways and not just through the remote as with the current version.

3. ZMP is collaborating with researchers at Tokyo University to come up with a new music search engine for miuro that will recommend music according to the owner's tastes.

Wiimote+Roomba=Wiimba!

Japanese roboticist Ryosuke (Ron) Tajima used the Wii Remote to turn the Roomba into a regular - or as he puts it "dull" - vacuum cleaner. Check out the video below.

Tajima-san - who is clad in kimono in this video - is also the creator of the one-leg hopping robot. You can see a video of the robot at this site. Click the photo on the left to see it hop.

Robot of the Year 2007 - 1

There is a beautiful article on Pink Tentacle about who won the 2007 Robot of the Year Award so I don't want to go into the details, but GetRobo was at the award exhibition and symposium where the people that developed the winnng robots talked about their experiences. (GetRobo was invited there to talk about the recent trends in robotics in the U.S.)

Dr. Shinsuke Sakakibara, a managing officer at Fanuc Ltd., talked about how from around year 2000 the advancement in vision sensors and force sensors enabled them to start making intelligent robots for industries that till then had not benefited from robots.  The M-430iA - which won the Grand Prize - is one of them and handles food and pharmaceutical products.

The M-430iA in the video below is packing small pieces of Yokan - or soft bean cakes.

The next video I took at IREX is another Fanuc robot - the M-710iC. Due to its vision sensors, it can pick up odd-shaped parts that are randomly stacked up in a box and place them as necessary.

Dr. Sakakibara said that Fanuc currently has 2000 employees and 1200 robots working at its company. And the reliability of Fanuc's industrial robots is at the level where there is less than one failure in 100 months - that's more than 8 years!