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He doesn't have a name yet but I plushified my first furby the other day!!

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This is my boy, Jupiter. He's a joyforall 😊

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Unexpectedly, study participants also discerned intelligence from robot motion behaviors, suggesting people might trust an autonomous system more or less depending on their observations of its movements.

The findings are noteworthy because, much like the importance of personality in people’s interactions, robot personality can influence engagement and trust.

The study was published by the Association for Computing Machinery/Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering’s International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction.

Researchers in the lab of OSU assistant professor of computer science Heather Knight equipped a Neato Botvac vacuum cleaning robot with movement patterns inspired by the personalities of Happy, Sleepy and Grumpy.

Human participants rated the politeness, friendliness and intelligence of each robot motion demonstration after a series of trials that illustrated each of the motion personalities, without being informed of the robot’s intended personalities.

“We implemented an expressive autonomous motion generation system that mapped each personality the robots motion features, such as path shape, acceleration and velocity characteristics, and whether they moved toward or away from the participant,” Knight said. “The Happy robot sought people out with smooth motions at moderate speed. The Sleepy robot also sought people out, but with delays and slower accelerations. The Grumpy robot avoided people while using erratic motions and a range of velocities. Those simple variations told the people a lot.”

True to form, study participants rated Grumpy as the least polite and least friendly, whereas Happy upheld reputation by being rated the friendliest and smartest. Happy and Sleepy were together deemed most polite, though their rating was just above neutral.

“Participants were able to distinguish the motion-based personas, which bodes well for the integration of robot personality into simple robots” Knight said. “In future work, we hope to extend this work to the other four Dwarfs and study how personality could positively impact the specific tasks a robot is taking on around people.”

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Miss kitty fortune teller on cannery row, monterey 💕

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Footage of the animatronic Wario used at Nintendo’s booth at E3 1996. It was later taken out of storage to be used at E3 2001 to promote Wario Land 4; after which it was never seen again. Main Blog | Twitter | Patreon | Store | Small Findings | Source

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Submitted by @theoldeyeon, here’s a very cool animatronic raptor. Here’s a rough translation of the video description.

“Kochi Prefectural Ryugu Castle” was exhibited at the Kochi Prefectural Museum of Art from December 9, 2007 to February 24, 2008. Animatronics exhibited by Treadway Industries Japan

- Mod Rat

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Some recent photos of the bisected Chuck/The King hybrid animatronic intended for museum display! :0 Source.

- Mod Rat

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Adorable and intimidating

I looked in a chuck e cheese i havent been in since i was like 7 and Chuck turned and stared at me.

…Yeah, they do that. It’s called random mode.

- Mod Rat

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Ｓ Ｔ Ｒ Ｅ Ｓ Ｓ

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The world’s first robot designed to carry out unbiased job interviews is being tested by Swedish recruiters. But can it really do a better job than humans?

Her name is Tengai. Measuring 41cm (16in) tall and weighing 3.5kg (7.7lbs) she’s at eye level as she sits on top of a table directly across from the candidate she’s about to interview.

Her glowing yellow face tilts slightly to the side. Then she blinks and smiles lightly as she poses her first question: “Have you ever been interviewed by a robot before?”

Tengai is the brainchild of Furhat Robotics, an artificial intelligence (AI) and social robotics company born out of a research project at Stockholm’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

The firm has spent the past four years building a human-like computer interface that mimics the way we speak, as well as our subtle facial expressions. The idea, according to chief scientist Gabriel Skantze, is that “it feels much less scary or strange compared to a more traditional robot”.

Since October 2018, the start-up’s been collaborating with one of Sweden’s largest recruitment firms, TNG. The goal is to offer candidates job interviews that are free from any of the unconscious biases that managers and recruiters can often bring to the hiring process, while still making the experience “seem human”.

Keep reading

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Rosie by Josh Guglielmo

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Living things are stupendously complicated, and when we make robots (even bio-inspired robots), we mostly just try and do the best we can to match the functionality of animals, rather than the details of their structure. One exception to this is hydraulic robots, which operate on the same principle as spiders do, by pumping pressurized fluid around to move limbs. This is more of a side effect than actual bio-inspiration, though, as spiders still beat robots in that they use their blood as both a hydraulic fluid and to do everything else that blood does, like transporting nutrients and oxygen where it’s needed.

In a paper published in Nature this week, researchers from Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania are presenting a robotic fish that uses synthetic blood pumped through an artificial circulatory system to provide both hydraulic power for muscles and a distributed source of electrical power. The system they came up with “combines the functions of hydraulic force transmission, actuation and energy storage into a single integrated design that geometrically increases the energy density of the robot to enable operation for long durations,” which sounds bloody amazing, doesn’t it?

This fish isn’t going to win any sprints, but it’s got impressive endurance, with a maximum theoretical operating time of over 36 hours while swimming at 1.5 body lengths per, uh, minute. The key to this is in the fish’s blood, which (in addition to providing hydraulic power to soft actuators) serves as one half of a redox flow battery. The blood is a liquid triiodide cathode, which circulates past zinc cells submerged in an electrolyte. As the zinc oxidizes, it releases electrons, which power the fish’s microcontroller and pumps. The theoretical energy density of this power system is 322 watt-hours per liter, or about half of the 676 watt-hours per liter that you’ll find in the kind of lithium-ion batteries that power a Tesla.

Conventional batteries may be more energy dense, but that Tesla also has to lug around motors and stuff if it wants to go anywhere. By using its blood to drive hydraulic actuators as well, this fish is far more efficient. Inside the fish are two separate pumps, each one able to pump blood from a reservoir of sorts into (or out of) an actuator. Pumping blood from the dorsal spines into the pectoral fins pushes the fins outward from the body, and pumping blood from one side of the tail to the other and back again results in a swimming motion.

The innards of the robot fish include two pumps, molded silicone shell with fin actuators, a microcontroller, and a synthetic vascular system containing flexible electrodes and a cation-exchange membrane encased in a soft silicone skin.

In total, the fish contains about 0.2 liter of blood, distributed throughout an artificial vascular system that was designed on a very basic level to resemble the structure of a real heart. The rest of the fish is made of structural elements that are somewhat like muscle and cartilage. It’s probably best to try not to draw too many parallels between this robot and an actual fish, though, and we may have already gone just slightly overboard on the whole “blood” thing. But the point is that combining actuation, force transmission, and energy storage has significant advantages for this particular robot. The researchers say that plenty of optimization is possible as well, which would lead to benefits in both performance and efficiency. 

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Drones building an emergency bridge for rescue after an earthquake

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HOLY FUCKING SHIT GUYS

CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?!?!?!?!

IM SO HAPPY SCREW BEING TOO OLD FOR DOLLS IM GETTING TWO THE WHOLE SET ONE TO OPEN AND ONE TO DISPLAY FOR ALL OF PROSPERITY