Hi there and welcome to my weekly robot update. This is where I do a  round up of what’s going on the robot news around the world . So stay tuned!

Hi guys! I’m Philip English of RoboPhil.com, now welcome to the weekly robot update number 9. Today, we are looking at sand sketching, waitress hosting, oh, oh thank you, thank you, ah, how rhyming, hi robot, I have a new trophy, yes, and selfie-taking-robots, ah, can’t take my angle right, oh, selfie robot, alright  robot, ah yeah, yeah, cool, ah yes,  looking good.

Disney builds an adorable robot to fetch massive pictures onto the beach. We’ve seen Disney builds systems that let 3D print impossible spinning tops, software to turn 3D models into massive parade balloons, and solutions for doing motion capture outdoor with nothing but a few Go Pros.

Now, they’re building robots that can draw sprawling pictures across the beach. The robot aptly called Beachbot works by dragging a set of pins through the sand, sort of like a rake. Each pin is individually raisable, allowing the robot to draw lines of varying thickness. More pins down means thicker lines drawn. The artist behind the robot starts a canvas by setting down poles, which the robot uses as markers to finely calculate its position. At that point, the robot can be passed an image file to draw automatically, or the artists can steer it manually.

The Beachbot moves on a set of large, soft wheels that Disney has dubbed balloon wheels, allowing it to move across the sand without leaving tracks or screwing up whatever it’s drawn previously. Disney has beach resorts. People would flip out to wake up in the morning and see their favorite characters drawn in the sand outside of their room  and by lunch, high tide would come in and wash it away, prepping the canvas for a new drawing the next day. This project, like a good number of Disney Research’s projects, was built in collaboration with Swiss engineering school ETH Zürich.

Creepily realistic robot hostess talks, sings and even motions with her hands. Mashable, The Japanese firm has said that its aim is to create ‘real heart-warming communication with human-like facial expression’ with its realistic conservatively dressed android. Toshiba claims its creation has the most realistic facial expressions of any android. Her unnervingly smooth and silent body movements are created using 43 pneumatic actuators including 24 in its shoulders, arms and hands and 15 in the face.

This technology is needed to reflect the robot’s emotions, as it can reportedly be happy, irritated, or sad and even cry. ChihiraAico is the latest member of Toshiba’s human smart community, a group of robots designed to lead to smarter living. In the future, the company envisions that such robots could look after the elderly, work as nurses or waitresses, She’ is so convincing that many people bowed respectfully before requesting politely to take her photo or join a selfie at the event. While the robot currently relies on a hidden camera and a human operator to give her life, a fully independent version is expected in 10 years using artificial intelligence, face and voice recognition. ChihiraAico has silicon skin covering animatronic muscles that move her eyes and power her expressions.

The robots are moving into your house; more than a dozen firms are promoting new kinds of home robots at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. None are the human-like automatons of science-fiction. But they do point the way towards how domestic bots might evolve beyond the robo-vacuum. South Korea’s Furo-i Home is one of the more advanced examples. It’s a sleek-looking sensor-laden cone on wheels topped by a tablet that displays a friendly-looking animated droid’s face. You can verbally instruct it to take control of internet-controlled smart devices telling it to turn lights, music and heating on or off uses it as a teaching aid for your children, or take advantage of its health check software to help care for elderly relations. The robot has many sensors, facial recognition and can detect the temperature, explains Se-Kyong Song, chief executive of its maker Futurebot. You can set it to wake up an elderly parent, remind them to take their medicine, eat breakfast and follow the rest of a schedule. And if something unexpected happens, it can send a message to the family saying there might be a problem and then let them talk to their parent via video chat to ask if they are OK. The machine is set to cost about $1,000 that’s 660 pounds and Futurebot hopes to make and sell about 10,000 before the year’s end.

Robotbase wants to put an intelligent robot in every house. If it’s up to Robotbase, you’ll soon be coming home and a robot will greet you at the door. While you were away, the Robotbase Personal Robot patrolled your home, made sure the temperature was lowered when you left, maybe locked the door after you were gone and, through its built-in camera, allowed you to check in on your dog, too. Robotbase is officially launching its Kickstarter campaign today with an appearance from of our Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. As Robotbase CEO Duy Huynh told me, the company’s mission is to build a platform for an autonomous robot with plenty of sensors, advanced computer vision and a good dose of artificial intelligence built-in so it can’t just react to what you’re telling it to do, but also proactively alert you and handle tasks quietly in the background. In its current form, the Robotbase is a 4-foot tall robot that sits on a wide base with a telescoping arm that holds its screen, camera and other sensors. Huynh likened it to a really smart smart-home hub that goes beyond the standard tasks of those devices because it can’t just aggregate data from those tools, but also move around your home. What really sets Robotbase’s efforts apart, however, is what the team calls talents. These are basically apps you can install on the Gen X. Say you are having a party. The Personal Robot, with its built-in image recognition skills and camera, can become your party photographer.

Lenovo builds robot for selfies. For Lenovo, the craze for selfies knows no bounds the company has developed a robot that can be remotely adjusted to take pictures from a mobile device. The Fiebot is more like a tiny four-legged tripod for mobile devices. A smartphone can be placed on top of the robot, which in turn can be adjusted to different positions via an infrared remote control to take a selfie or shoot videos. The robot can tilt and pan, and take panoramic pictures and record videos over wider viewing angles. In some ways, the Fiebot is good for more than selfies. Remote control in hand, you can take group pictures with a smartphone without setting up a timer. The robot will ship with software for gesture tracking and face recognition. With those features, the robot can be used for remote monitoring, or to keep an eye on children. Many more features will be added to the robot in future versions, said CK Lee, CEO for Glasswonder, a Chinese company that designed the robot for Lenovo. The next version of Fiebot will feature speakers and a projector that can beam smartphone videos to a wall. More prototypes of the Fiebot are under development and it’s possible the robot will get its own built-in camera and also legs, which would make the robot truly mobile without the need of a smartphone.

That’s it  guys,  for your weekly world robot news, I’m your host Philip English, if you liked this weekly robot report and want to see  even more of the latest news,reviews and robot tutorials then please hit the subscribe button above and come visit at RoboPhil.com to keep up-do-date. I placed further information about the robots in the weekly robot update in the links below. As well as extra links for your  review. If you have any robot product that you would like me to do review or to do tutorial on, then please  pay me an  email over at RoboPhil.com. I’ll see what I can do. Thanks guys, I’m looking forward to see you nextime!

Beachbot | ChihiraAico | Furo-i Home | Robotbase Personal Robot | Fiebot YouTube: https://youtu.be/rxNg2CIygGg

Philip English: https://philipenglish.com

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