Butterfly ornithopter high speed video

For most of us, the most familiar ornithopter robot is probably Flytech's remote controlled Dragonfly toy. However, the state of the art of flapping wing robots inspired by nature is still happening in robotics laboratories around the world. This post is about the butterfly ornithopter work at the Shimoyama-Matsumoto Laboratory, University of Tokyo, in Japan.

In a paper published at IROS 2008, Japanese researchers presented their work on building a 0.39gr ornithopter. The focus of their work rests on testing different materials and designs for the robot's wings. They constructed and tested three different types of butterfly wings made of a thin polymer membrane and micromolded polyurethane veins. In the end, the researchers discovered that wings with veins enable a butterfly to fly forward; moreover, they demonstrated stable forward flight using their laboratory-created, rubber-powered, miniature ornithopter. The robot flaps its wings at a frequency of 10Hz.

The video below shows the ornithopter in flight (using each of the three wing types) from the side and the front. The high-speed video is unbelievable!

Roboware E3 open source robot

South Korea's Roboware is close to completing development of their entertainment humanoid robot E3. The robot's name derives from its function as an Emotional, Entertainment and Educational device. Clearly, Roboware has big plans for this open source robot equipped with sonar, sound, camera, and touch sensors including a touch screen on its chest. The robot moves around using a 3-wheel mechanism.

Engineering TV recently interviewed Roboware's CEO (see the video below) who said that his company will start selling the E3 in the second quarter of 2009 for less than $3000. A bit expensive for an entertainment robot but another step forward towards commercially viable consumer robots that are a bit more capable than an iRobot Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner. The past year has been an exciting one as far as advances in robotics are concerned and it definitely looks like 2009 is going to be another great year.

Apple computer history as told by Computer Shopper magazine editor Stan Veit

The story of Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Apple Inc. has been told many times from many different points of view. You can read a myriad of magazine articles and books telling the story of how two young men with a passion and a dream managed to create one of the most influential technology companies in modern history. Apple's struggle against Microsoft and the rivalry between Jobs and Gates is a story worth its weight in gold having fascinated all of us time after time after time. After barely surviving a number of very difficult years in the nineties, Apple has risen practically from the dead to dominate the technology sector with a large number of innovate products such as the iPod, iPhone, and Mac OS X.

Most readers of this blog are probably familiar with Apple's history so why am I writing this? Here is my reason for this post.

I recently came across a magazine article written by former Computer Shopper editor (the magazine's first editor) Stan Veit. He gives a brief overview of his introduction to the two Apple co-founders and their efforts to create and market the most innovative digital computer in the 70s. Veit tells an incredible story of receiving his first Apple I computer in the mail directly from Steve Jobs for a product review in the magazine. He tells about his efforts to help the two young men promote their new computer at the first national computer show in Atlantic City (he provided them with ample space in his demo booth) and the buzz this created for the small company allowing Jobs and Wozniak to make the right connections and turn Apple Inc. to one of the most important technology companies of this century.

Veit also explains his reasons for refusing to invest in the company for a 10% stake at a very early stage. He also goes on to talk about his impression of both Jobs and Wozniak. He describes the large difference in personality between the two (this is a well known and documented fact.) Wozniak has always been the most liked founder of the two men because he always treated other people well and he really loved and fully enjoyed designing and building Apple's computers.

The story concludes with a twist which I honestly didn't see coming. I won't give it away here because I think it is worth one's time to read the entire article as written by Veit. If you want to learn about the personal computer revolution from someone who lived it then you should read the full article following the link below.

Read: Apple Computer: The (Very) Early Years.

Internet image search engine Incogna

Internet search engines are definitely well developed tools for finding textual information online. The same cannot be said for the equivalent image search engines that so far have been keyword based. A small Canadian startup called Incogna wants to change that having developed a new way to find images using a combination of keyword and image queries.

Incogna is the brainchild of Kris Woodbeck a University of Ottawa student who worked on image recognition during his graduate studies. Kris developed algorithms inspired by the function of the human brain trying to take advantage of the parallel processing capabilities of new digital computers includes hardware such as GPUs. This is how Kris describes the ICRE (Image Content Recognition Engine) that is the backbone of Incogna,

ICRE uses clusters of graphics processing units and Incogna's patent-pending distributed SIMD indexing algorithms to sort through your data. It's fast, efficient and is the visual data mining solution of choice.

Computer vision comprises some of the most complex, subtle and processor-intensive tasks in computing. The large scale of many visual databases further amplifies the difficulty of mining useful information from your data. Our technology uses methods derived from how cells in the visual cortex process information, faithfully represented on high speed GPUs, in order to extract and recognize the meaningful parts of any visual input.

Receiving the support of PRECARN and NSERC, Incogna was born and after some alpha testing it opened to the world a couple of weeks ago.

Using Incogna, users begin searching for images using keywords. For example, one can simply search for images of the Eiffel tower. The search engine returns the best matches using keyword metadata information. Users can then refine their search by clicking on any of the returned images to find other images in the engine's index that are visually similar. Integrating this image-based search with images from a product catalog, Incogna also gives users a new way to shop online. You can try the image search engine here.

I tried it for a while earlier today and I did get some very good results. I was actually rather impressed by it. The only problem is that so far only a small number of images have been indexed by Incogna's web robots. I wonder if the visual recognition engine will scale nicely as the number of images in the index grows to the many millions of images available online. Incogna says that quality of results is more important than the size of the index and I agree but if the index is small and users can't find what they are looking for, then they will go back to Google or other keyword-based search engines. I am really going to be keeping an eye on this company and their image search engine because I think they have a bright future ahead of them.