Senor Parrot's Perch

I tried to find the blog where I learned about this enormous reading contraption from Japan this morning, but I couldn’t find it. I searched on the term “reading robot” and quickly found another source.

Equipped with character recognition software, this oversized robot can read printed materials. It’s expressive ability is similar to the Kindle’s, which is to say, it is surprisingly good for a machine, but needs a lot of work before it’s ready.

I love robots. I think it is amazing what they can be programmed to do. But this one is overkill. The developers say it will be great for reading to kids or old folks. So maybe it’s really a metal nanny, instead of a reader. I don’t think this will promote reading, but it sure will promote alienation between parents and children. Why bond to mom or dad when I have this lovely machine? Send me a Kindle, instead. Better yet, send me Grandma!

Here is a video:

Thanks to Pink Tentacle for the article on this robotic miscue.

Robots are good for a lot of things, but this is about as good as it gets! I have discovered that someone has made a robot that can make your coffee for you. Now I love my daily grind, but if someone, or something, can grind and brew it for me, well, how can it get any better?Robot Living reported on this fabulous development from Japan.

I’m showing this to the rest of the family and hinting that it would be great for next year’s Father’s Day. I drink enough coffee, all by myself, that Ancora opened a shop around the corner just for me, their best customer.

I’m intrigued by the programming involved. I wonder if I could pull this off with a Lego Robot? Anybody know?

In this video we have a sort of pre-steampunk robot caught on video. Made of wood, armed with two arms and 5 rubber band shooting Gatling guns, and a guy inside. If this wouldn’t scare your cat, nothing will!

From Make Magazine, here is Osamu Kanda’s Ultimate Rubber Band Shooting Robot. This was posted by Marc de Vinck.

If this stuff fascinates you, get Loving the Machine: The Art and Science of Japanese Robots by Timothy N. Hornyak. I highly recommend this book. It has a great section on Japan’s early love affair with automatons that has continued through the centuries and is culminating in their preeminence in humanoid robotics. Here is the link to my previous review of Loving the Machine.

My kids loved this video. Three teens, calling themselves The Galactic Wailers have constructed instruments from Lego bits and pieces and Lego sensors. These are not robots, but they are instruments that incorporate sensors and other stuff used in lego robotics.� Legos are the coolest toys ever made.� It’s� over here is the newspaper article where I learned about this.

Here’s their really cool video where they describe their instruments and� perform the theme to Star Wars:

This sort of stuff inspires them. It’s over their heads, right now, but they start aiming higher. I think its great.

My robotic future is our kids robotic today. One of my Google feeds delivered a blog link to this video of robots building cars at a BMW plant. It’s amazing to watch – like a mechanical ballet. It was maybe 20+ years ago I sat on a plane next to a newly minted grad who was headed to his new job at General Motors plant where he would program robots for their assembly line.

This plant is far more complex than the line he would start work on. In his day, there were still people working side by side with the robots. Look for people in the video. Maybe they’re on coffee break.

Thanks to Computer Finance and Dark Roasted Blend for the links.

When I was still teaching at the community college where I work, every semester I had a few students who were changing their careers, either because their jobs were obsolete, like many printing industry jobs, or that their former manufacturing jobs were moved overseas. I bet some lost jobs to robots like these.

The question for me is, what do we want to teach our kids, or even to learn for ourselves, that will prepare us for the increasing rate of change we’re facing. I’m falling on the side of emphasizing science and technology to my kids, though that isn’t all that the future holds. Nevertheless, I want my kids left with more than just a toe-hold on a future. I’d rather see them as the ones that carve it out.

Robots, as ubiquitous as they already are, still seem futuristic. This is probably because we think of robots as androids, robots made to look and behave as humans, rather than a wide variety of machines programmed to do human work for us without us having to be there with them.

This aspect of robotics is still far off, though it is approaching. An interesting book that looks into this area of robotics is Loving the Machine: The Art and Science of Japanese Robots, by Timothy N. Hornyak, an excellent book written at a high school or adult level. Nevertheless, the human aspect of robotics stimulates the interest of children and makes robots an attractive method for exploring technology and building skills that will prepare our children for their own futures.

Still thinking about children’s books, though, my oldest daughter and I read six that we found at the library which were all worth the time. I wrote about the first three a while ago. The next three were more age appropriate for my older daughter and more interesting, too.

The best of these was How To Build A Robot, by Clive Gifford. Though published almost 10 years ago, this little book covered all the important issues concerning robots, and managed to be both informative, funny, and the most thought provoking and engaging in its presentation of robotics.

How to Build a Robot consisted of seven chapters that covered what a robot entails, their development from a historical period, the components and their functions, control, teaching robots how to think. Along the way, Gifford supplies simple experiments to show readers how they might approach a problem that robotics engineers face. All of this, along with his witty style and the fun cartoonish illustrations make this book a great introduction.

The next book that I liked was Robot, also by Clive Gifford. This is a Dorling Kindersley book from way back in 1998. I’d like to compare it to the current one, Robot (DK Eyewitness Books, by Roger Bridgman. Like all DK books this was of excellent quality and really strong on photographic illustrations. The text was excellent, just as with How to Build a Robot, but the format was just not as engaging, nor as informative, as How to Build a Robot.

The third of my upper tier of robot books for kids is Robots Among Us: The Challenges and promises of Robotics, by Christopher W. Baker. This short book was really nearly the equal of Robot. It also covered the basics of robotics very well and it had excellent photographs. It was the strongest of all three in its coverage of robotic intelligence and the challenges in programming robots to make decisions and to learn, which are the core to artificial intelligence.

Cover Image of R.U.R. by Karel Capek

Today in the Wall Street Journal, theater critic Terry Teachout has a very positive review of Czech playwrite Karel Capek’s 1921 play R.U.R. , which stands for Rossum’s Universal Robots and is the source of our word “Robot”, a word that would describe someone who slaves away at drudge. The play is currently being performed by Chicago-based Strawdog Theater Company.

I enjoyed Teachout’s interesting review because, while many of the books on robots I’ve read recently have mentioned this play as the source for our word “robot”, all but one has without discussed the play itse

In its day, Capek’s R.U.R was quite popular and influential and was performed all over the world and translated into many languages. In the book Loving the Machine: The Art and Science of Japanese Robots, a social history of robots in Japan, author Timothy N. Hornyak discusses in great length the impact on Japanese society of this play when it was performed there in the 1920s, and he contrasts the very different Japanese response to the concept of robots with that of Europe’s and the western world. And he argues that this difference forms at least some of the basis for Japan’s different approach to and welcoming acceptance of robots in their culture. (more…)