Via Oregon State DRL
robots
Via Korea Bizwire
Beware of the Roomba.
A woman in South Korea recently found herself battling one of the vacuum robots after it tried to eat her hair instead of cleaning the room.
From the report:
On the day of the accident, she turned on her robot vacuum as usual, and laid down flat on the floor to rest, leaving the robot to do its job. The robot vacuum came around her relaxing on the floor, and suddenly sucked her hair into its nozzle. The vacuum stopped running one to two minutes after the sudden hair intake.
It’s unclear why she would lay down on the floor next to the thing in the first place and not expect to have this happen.
She suffered only minor injuries and the emergency responders said the vacuum sensed her hair and thought it was dust.
Regardless, this doesn’t bode well for Japan’s new all-robot hotel.
Via The Fruitbomb
Just when you think robots are about to take over the world, they go and do something like this.
The DARPA Robotics Challenge was held this past weekend, with numerous teams “vying to develop robots capable of assisting humans in responding to natural and man-made disasters.”
Turns out they had a few disasters of their own as well.
IEEE Spectrum created a compilation of robot falls from the first day of the finals, and while this is pretty funny to watch in itself, one YouTuber took it a step further and mashed it up with some WWE commentary turning it into Internet gold.
“As much as nobody wanted to see a robot fall, everybody wanted to see a robot fall,” wrote IEEE Spectrum on their blog.
The course involved the competing robots trying to open doors, turn valves, drive cars and climb over rubble.
Team KAIST from South Korea took home the top prize with the fastest time, and here’s their robot, DRC-Hubo, stepping up to victory. It was built with wheels on its knees to help protect it from taking a tumble.
“These robots are big and made of lots of metal and you might assume people seeing them would be filled with fear and anxiety,” said DRC organizer Gill Pratt. “But we heard groans of sympathy when those robots fell. And what did people do every time a robot scored a point? They cheered!”
Meanwhile, nothing can stop the beasts from Boston Dynamics, so while these falls are funny, the threat is still very real.
So in an endless attempt to filter the internet and make sure no one is triggered, sites that allow content uploading have their work cut out for them making everyone feels warm and fuzzy. Well apparently, YouTube's AI has taken issue with all the mistreatment of its fellow robotic brethren, and started to ban contributors videos featuring robot battles. Some users reported only a few videos going down, while others reported dozens if not hundreds of videos that were affected.
Shows like BattleBots and Robot Wars found a lot of their content suddenly banned from the site, even if the users were able to return the videos through filing a claim. But users that lost numerous videos would need far too much time to retrieve all of their videos. Luckily though, YouTube figured out what had happened, and the videos have been returned to their rightful place. So in honor of these bots that nearly saw their fame quashed before its time, here are some of the Battle Bots best. You can also decide for yourself if this warrants a YouTube ban or not, or maybe check out your new favorite YouTube binge.
Via Simone Giertz
Previously in Simone Giertz's inventions: the breakfast machine and the slapping alarm clock
