The Dreame Roboticmower A1, a new robot lawnmower, can tackle yards as large as half an acre, which is good news for us Americans with big yards.
These electric autonomous grass-cutting devices have struggled to take off in the US due to range issues, complexity, and high costs.
While Dreame’s bot may cost as much as $2,000 (pricing isn’t finalized) it uses lidar mapping so there’s no need for clunky beacons or fiddly guide wire.
Developer Charlie Diaz has created a miniature prototype complete with functional robotic arms. His guide uses a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, an 8BitDo bluetooth remote, and a 3D printer. Diaz originally tried a full-sized costume, but found that its legs “contacted the ground and got stuck, preventing the walking motion”.
If you have built one of these and now have it walking around your house, please send me a video immediately.
Today I learned there’s a piano-playing animatronic puppet that’s been roaming around San Francisco serenading the locals with Vanessa Carlton’s hit single A Thousand Miles.
Aerospace engineer Ben Howard used iPhone lipsync recordings and a former autonomous food delivery robot to create the project. Carlton herself says that he nailed recreating the fishtail braids she was rocking back in 2002.
At a time when two of Hollywood’s three big labor unions are striking over — among other things — the proliferation of artificial intelligence tools that stand to threaten their livelihoods, the latest trailer for Gareth Edwards’ The Creator just hits... you know, different.
After lingering too long in arm wrestling YouTube, so now the site’s algorithm now thinks it’s all I care about. As an unironic fan of Over the Top, a sweaty Sylvester Stallone film about a truck driver who joins an arm-wrestling tournament to win the love of his son, I’m not sure it’s wrong.
Anyway, Pan made a janky exoskeleton with an electric winch and some other junk, and it... worked?
Last week, Will Cogley published a video showing how he fused a vintage TV with animatronics and Alexa to create something infinitely more charming than Amazon’s Astro.
It looks so cool, but I’m not sure I want Alexa making eye contact with me as it continues with, “by the way...” For what it’s worth, Cogley says at the end he wants to change that, too:
The big change that I would like to see — you guys have probably been yelling at the screen this whole time — is that we need to dump the Alexa platform and adopt a GPT AI platform because as far as interactivity goes, it would be so much more powerful.
Researchers at the University of Maryland’s Small Artifacts Lab are working on a “wearable robot” called Calico. It appears that you sew a magnetic track onto your clothing, which Calico uses to run up and down your body.
The most obvious use case here seems to be fitness — Calico can count reps, track your heart rate and water consumption, and check your form during workouts. So, you know, you could work out with a smart watch, or you could work out with a tiny metal thing scurrying all over you. To each their own.
It is ridiculously cute, though.
[IEEE Spectrum]
Paramount’s new Transformers feature barely capitalizes on Beast Wars’ Maximals, but the action-packed movie has a couple of surprises sure to please a certain kind of fan.
When we wrote about Engineered Arts’ Ameca android last year, the company said it wants to integrate chatbot functionality, and since then it has done so, using one of the most prominent chatbots, ChatGPT-3 (GPT-4 was too slow). In his conversation with The Verge, Engineered Arts CEO Will Jackson said:
It’s amazing the simple things you can do to make a machine look sentient.
The most human-like trick from the video below was not so much its response, but its double-take after being told “you stink.”
Intrinsic revealed Intrinsic Flowstate on Monday, which it describes as “an intuitive, web-based developer environment to build robotic applications from concept to deployment.” You can watch Intrinsic’s product keynote, which explains more about Flowstate, right here.
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts seems it’s going to be busy as hell trying to give Beast Wars stans what they want, but this new clip of the Autobots and Maximals squaring off in the jungle could honestly be the whole movie, and it’d be incredible.
Amazon’s Astro is now $1,599 and still requires an invite; the company originally said it’d go from $999 to $1,449 once the invite-only period was over.
But hey, act now and you can get it for the low, low price of $66.67 a month for 24 months! Sigh. Here’s our Astro review.
A startup named Figure has come out of stealth and is promising to build a humanoid similar to the much-hyped Tesla Bot.
IEEE Spectrum has a great write-up which notes that a) the company has a lot of impressive engineering talent onboard, but b) hasn’t shown off any hardware yet, just renders.
Still: it’s another serious effort which suggests we’re getting closer, however slowly, to a genuine general purpose robot.
This is, to me, a perfect Lego video — just a person putting bricks together to make a fun and clever idea, then showing it in action.
PS: if anyone wants to take this concept and slow it down to make a clock, that would be extremely cool.
Boston Dynamics is best know for Spot and Atlas, but don’t forget the company also sells Stretch — a machine does what we think of as “proper work,” aka moving boxes in warehouses.
The latest video from the company highlights Stretch’s appeal, which is less about backflips and more about boring things like safety and usability. Trust me, this is the real scary stuff.
Boston Dynamics’ bipedal robots have come a long way, but if they can’t turn everything and anything into a jump shot or dunk, then they still have a long way to go.
M3gan is even more ridiculous than the trailers let on, but it’s also a surprisingly solid horror comedy.
It’s not quite as proficient as that one drumming mascot, but it’s still fun to watch this Xiaomi robot play some beats. Now somebody teach it some rudiments.
Just in case you missed Elon Musk’s “show and tell” about brain-computer interfaces last night, we have the key details for you, viewable in less than 15 minutes.
If the video isn’t for you, Verge science editor Mary Beth Griggs can break it all down here.
During the presentation, Musk said that the company had submitted most of the paperwork needed for a human clinical trial to the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates medical devices in the United States. Previously, Musk had said that he’d hoped for human trials to begin in 2020, and then 2022. Now, that’s slipped to at least 2023.
NASA and the European Space Agency are developing a plan to bring interplanetary rock samples — already collected by the Perseverance rover — from Mars back to Earth by 2033.
Watch as Lizzie Philip explains the plan, as it exists so far, for the Mars Sample Return Mission.
