Welcome to Avatar Technology Digest! The latest news on Medical Cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics… Here are the top stories we of the last week we carefully picked for you. This time primarily on robotics. Robotic vehicles aren’t really new. We count on machines for our anto-lock brakes, cruise control and much more. What if the machines turn into fully functional humanoids? Stay with us.

1) Yamaha produced somewhat of a surprise at the Tokyo Motor Show today when it showed a motorcycle-riding humanoid robot.

Yamaha has taken a distinct approach, building a human-like robot that sits on a motorcycle and rides it. The self-driving aspects aren’t baked into the traditional vehicle form, they’re actually taking the seat of a human passenger. Unlike most two-wheeled debutants, Yamaha's new Motobot isn't starting out on a small capacity motorcycle, but release images show the humanoid robot riding Yamaha's most sporting motorcycle, the 1000cc R1M.

The motorcycle-riding humanoid robot combines Yamaha’s motorcycle and robotics technology in an R&D effort aimed at developing a robotic rider which can ride an unmodified motorcycle competently on a racetrack.

Motobot isn’t expected to be a stand-alone product. It’s a way for Yamaha to work toward its vision for autonomous vehicles, in which existing cars and trucks are retrofitted with self-driving capabilities. It thinks this is a quicker way to get autonomous technology to society.

While Yamaha’s video of Motobot may wow you, it’s important to note this technology is far from ready. Motobot has not yet been driven on public roads. The first version of Motobot requires a human present with a remote control to drive it. Yamaha next wants Motobot to be fully autonomous and controlled by GPS and sensors.

So we aren’t close to having Yamaha’s robot drive you to work. But if it ever happens, you wouldn’t have to worry about Motobot texting while driving. After all, his hands are glued to the wheel.

2) With people spending an average of 4  years of our lives in our cars (which equates to traveling to the moon and back three times) Toyota believes that much can be learnt about our behavior and emotion while driving.

And that’s where Kirobo Mini Robot could help. Kirobo Mini is a communication companion robot from Toyota that appeared at the Tokyo Motor Show; it is engineered to make the driver have a better emotional experience when behind the wheel.

Its a new, 10cm high little buddy. He can talk to you, gesture at you, and detect and respond to your emotions, but his mission as your new portable friend doesn’t end there. It has voice recognition technology, as one of its key features. The robot's behavior shows human-like feeling, in that it is capable of answering and exchanging questions with humans.

Kirobo is also designed to be a good listener, attentively taking in what the person says in order to process the information and respond with a positive show of sympathy or kindness.

Kirobo Mini could help driving become a physically and emotionally transformative experience. After all, Kirobo’s name derives from the Japanese word for ‘hope', and company believes he’s filled with exciting possibilities. 

3) It doesn’t seem like the most exciting form factor for a robot would be a cube, but recently, cube robots have been where it’s at. Balancing cubes, jumping hedgehog cubes, even self-assembling cubes: somehow, cubes can do it all. And if you give them springy metal tongues with which they can elastically lick surfaces like MIT did for some reason, they can jump, bounce, and roll.

This looks a little bit like magic, but we’re reasonably certain that it isn’t. Inside of the 200 gram robot there are two motorized rotors, each connected to one end of four flattened loops of spring steel. Activating the rotors causes the spring steel loops that I’m just going to go ahead and call tongues to get pulled through rectangular openings (mouths) into a round cavity inside the body of the robot, compressing them.

As the rotors continue to turn, eventually the compressed tongues get pulled all the way around back to the mouths, at which point they spring out, releasing that elastic energy all at once and causing the robot to jump like 20 cm high.

With some light-weight payloads, such as miniature cameras, the robot can be used for exploration tasks. Moreover, a wireless sensor network can be automatically deployed and reconfigured for outdoor surveillance by using a group of our jumping robots.

4) Consider the earthworm. Ubiquitous, not unfriendly, maybe a little gross–who would think that this humble creature may hold the key to a new generation of soft robots? At the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting in Chicago last week, a team of neuroscientists and engineers from Case Western Reserve were on hand to describe their work turning biological research on earthworm behavior into useful robotics.

Plenty of living organisms use peristalsis, but earthworms move using two types of muscles that contract and expand sacs of fluid. This makes the worm grow thinner and longer, or wider and shorter, helping it propel itself. But this type of locomotion isn’t very well understood. Now, a more complex understanding of those underlying neurological and physical systems is helping him and his colleagues build a robot that replicates those systems on a larger mechanical scale.

For example, the earthworm’s “front,” “middle,” and “end” all use unique forms of motion depending on context, thanks to arrays of neurons that let it move in a huge range of ways across its length.

The body itself is just as important as the robotic “brain:” It is modular, and can be added and cut up like a Lego model using dozens of 3D-printed vertex hubs that are all connected by soft strands of nylon tubing.

Inside the transparent “tube” of the worm, actuators control the contraction and waveform creation. At their poster session this week, reserachers demonstrated how the worm could be built using these modular parts, plugging in and removing hubs in seconds.

We’ve seen plenty of soft robots this year, but none of them are quite as precisely controlled as this–it’s more like a hybrid of both soft and conventional robots, using mechanical parts and biomimetic brains to create a smarter ‘bot.

5) A study by engineers at Oregon State University suggests that they have achieved the most realistic robotic implementation of human walking dynamics that has ever been done, which may ultimately allow human-like versatility and performance.

The system is based on a concept called "spring-mass" walking that was theorized less than a decade ago, and combines passive dynamics of a mechanical system with computer control. It provides the ability to blindly react to rough terrain, maintain balance, retain an efficiency of motion and essentially walk like humans do.

As such, this approach to robots that can walk and run like humans opens the door to entire new industries, jobs and mechanized systems that do not today exist.

The system is also efficient. Studies done with their ATRIAS robot model, which incorporates the spring-mass theory, showed that it's three times more energy-efficient than any other human-sized bipedal robots.

Researchers said in their new study that this technology "has the potential to enhance legged robots to ultimately match the efficiency, agility and robustness of animals over a wide variety of terrain."

And that is all for ATD! Thank you for watching us. As always, you are welcome to subscribe, follow us in social media and join the global conversation. Stay with us and see you soon!

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