Their research paper “Toward a Vocabulary of Legged Leaping” details how they taught the robot the tricks to not only run, but also jump and execute the equivalent of robotic back flips and triple jumps. The nearly 15-pound, 20-inch long robot can jump up ledges, and can even do leap grabs that let it ascend an impressive 28 inches. Now that the robot knows the leaping lingo, it could use it to take instruments or sensors to the right locations, or right itself when it flips over.

Image via UPenn Kod*lab

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That the bees, which are described as being half the size of a paperclip and weighing less than a tenth of a gram, can fly at all is an engineering marvel in its own right given their minute size. However, the next parts of the project could actually prove to be even bigger challenges.

According to a Harvard University press release:

[T]he next steps will involve integrating the parallel work of many different research teams that are working on the brain, the colony coordination behavior, the power source, and so on, until the robotic insects are fully autonomous and wireless.

Source: Kevin Ma and Pakpong Chirarattananon, Harvard University.

The problems are that building AI-powered brains won’t be easy and that there’s not yet an energy source small enough and dense enough to power a wireless bee.

On the brain side, though, the RoboBees team might have some help. As we explained in October, there’s a team from the Universities of Sussex and Sheffield in the U.K. working on a project called Green Brain that aims to develop a brain that could let robotic bees like those RoboBees is building act autonomously and respond to sensory stimuli.

Again, though, the small scale of the Harvard project could pose some initial challenges depending on how advanced it wants the brain to be. The plan is for the Green Brain project to run on a GPU-powered supercomputer and, presumably, communicate with sensors on the robot. Even if it were possible for a single GPU processor to run the Green Brain at operational speed, that could still prove too big for the tiny RoboBees, which need to do their own processing.

The key to success, however, might lie in RoboBees’ focus on colony behavior, which is somewhat akin to the concepts underlying distributed computing systems. Because the team expects the robotic bees to function like real honeybee colonies, individual bees can get by with less computer power.

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Developing the robot bird was a decidedly start-and-stop affair. Over the course of eight years, design flaws caused incapacitating crashes in each iteration of the robot. 2007 saw the first successful flight by a prototype with simultaneously flapping wings. By 2012, Gupta and colleagues had succeeded in developing a model that could flap its wings independently. For the robot, at least, simultaneous wing-flapping was a drawback. Engineering independent wing-flapping behavior was time-consuming, and also made the robot heavier.

The Robo Raven has two motors that are coupled to coordinate the movements between the two wings. It can be programmed with arbitrary flight patterns, as can be seen in the video below. To compensate for the additional weight of a bigger onboard battery and microcontroller, the robotics team used lightweight 3D printed parts for the body. Aerodynamic optimization allowed the Robo Raven to reproduce observed flight behavior of real birds.

Like quadcopter drones, the future of flapping wing micro air vehicles may lie in surveillance, or in just looking really really cool.

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The project, carried out by a team at ETH Zurich, is called RoboEarth and its linchpin is a cloud software platform called Rapyuta. The way it works is pretty simple at a high level: robots communicate with a cloud-based application platform that carries out computation tasks and connects to a cloud database full of information such as maps, images, language, as well as to other web services. The robots themselves are pretty much hardware terminals equipped with sensors and moving parts but limited on-board processing power or data storage.

This, of course, is an idea that has been with us since the mainframe computer and continues today via cloud computing and web and mobile applications. Why limit a device to its own physical capabilities when there’s an infinite (although, in the case of mainframes, not so much) expanse of computing power, memory, storage and data available in the ether? As long as the device has a strong internet connection, it doesn’t need a massive hard drive or the latest, greatest processor.

One thing RoboEarth does a little differently, though, is allow for databases that robots can update as they go about their business in different situations in different parts of the world. It’s machine learning, only in a much more literal sense: robots are actually learn from the experiences of other robots. That learning, in turn, should make them more useful to humans who won’t have to program them as thoroughly and perhaps can use the robots to perform a wider — and ever-expanding — variety of tasks.

Presumably, though, some statistical machine learning on the backend could make the robots even smarter as they generate more and more data and patterns begin taking shape. (We’ll be talking about unique ways to put machine learning to work at our Structure: Data conference next week in New York.)

The easy joke to make about this type of project is to say it’s the start of SkyNet and the rise of the machines, but that’s a bit of a stretch. After all, the machines themselves aren’t communicating with one another but, rather, with a centralized computing infrastructure operated by humans. It’s similar to IBM’s Watson system, which is really good at answering questions, but only as good as its information database and algorithms allow it to be.

If you’re curious to learn more about the promise and limitations of something like RoboEarth, Markus Waibel, one of the project’s researchers, has a great blog post explaining his vision of the project and where it fits into the greater ecosystem of web-based robotics.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Bruce Rolff.

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Double Robotics is one of a new generation of robotics firms that’s trying to bring the technology to the masses at a reasonable price. Its product, the ‘Double’, is a telepresence robot that uses a couple of iPads (one for control, one for the telepresence imagery) and costs $2,499, although it has a lower pre-order price of $1,999.

“[The] Double Robotics investment perfectly aligns to our strategy,” Grishin said. “It is a very consumer-oriented product with potential to fit a very wide range of applications and has already proven a strong consumer demand.”

Robots for the masses

I’d hesitate to call it a consumer product myself, but I can certainly see its application in many organizations. Telepresence has never been a cheap technology – though the cost is falling – and the Double’s use of iPads is a clever way to keep prices down.

And it seems to be working. In its first post-launch month, Double Robotics apparently picked up 600 pre-orders, equating to $1.2m, from buyers in 44 countries. According to Grishin, whose fund comprises his own cash, the first customers include 24 universities and 17 Fortune 500 companies.

That interest has led to scaling problems, which is where Grishin’s cash – the first to be parcelled out since the fund launched – comes in. With the first run already sold out, the fresh injection should allow the second set to be delivered early next year. It also looks like there may be further play between Grishin and Double in the future.

“We are thrilled to have Grishin Robotics and Dmitry Grishin, in particular, as our largest investor to date,” Double Robotics co-founder David Cann said. “After our public launch in August, we met with Grishin Robotics and were immediately impressed with their mission and deep knowledge of the robotics industry’s past mistakes and potential future. We look forward to working with Grishin Robotics in the years to come as we build our business.”

Here’s a reminder of what the Double looks like:

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Last weekend, in fact, SuperNAP data center operator Switch Communications hosted the second-annual Startup Weekend Las Vegas. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s Vegas Tech Fund put up $500,000 for the winning team for the upcoming Crowdstart LV competition into which the Startup Weekend winner — which ended up being a password-management app called Launch Key — gets automatic entry. Switch actually has its own venture fund, too, as well as multiple programs designed to bring high-tech jobs to the city.

But Launch Key is less than a week old right now. Here are five of the city’s most-promising startups that are actually doing business:

1. Counterless

Think Square, only easier, and you have Counterless. Its app seeks to eliminate the need to wait in line at places like eateries and bars by letting the establishments upload their menus, and letting users order and pay from the comfort of their seats with their mobile devices.

However, Counterless is very young and raw — the idea was first hatched in November 2011 — and its business model requires buy-in from businesses as well as users. So far, Counterless’s only customer is Slidin’ Thru, the city’s favorite food-truck-turned-hamburger joint. But among Counterless’s advisors are a couple casino executives with nightclub businesses that could make ideal testing grounds.

It’s also not alone in this space, as startups such as Storific and Tabula are also trying to use smartphones to streamline the ordering process.

2. Lucine Biotechnology

Lucine Biotechnology is a small, still-unfunded biotech startup that aims to fundamentally change healthcare for women. The current state of affairs, according to Founder and CEO Chandler Marrs, is that it’s pretty much a crapshoot as to whether medicines or treatments will work on women because relatively little attention is paid to their very real hormonal issues. Often times, women end up serving as “their own experiments,” she said.

The idea behind Lucine is to be a version of PatientsLikeMe focused specifically on women. Women join the social platform (which will launch in October) and share everything of relevance about their health situations — age, race, medicines, supplements, hormone levels (Lucine will actually conduct testing), symptoms, etc. Members can learn from others like them what treatments are working or how common side effects really are, while Lucine analyzes their data to draw correlations among the myriad variables.

Given a large-enough user base, platforms like Lucine can do crowdsourced medical studies faster, cheaper and with more data points than can traditional corporate or academic researchers. Although, Marrs acknowledges, that’s just the first step. Hopefully, the next step is that Lucine’s findings will provide enough data to spur scientifically validated studies that change how doctors, pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies approach women’s health. With enough data, Marrs said, “I anticipate we’ll find patterns no one has thought to look at.”

3. Romotive

Romotive, with its vision to fuse the worlds of smartphones and robotics, might be one of the coolest consumer-tech companies around, not just in Las Vegas. And its vision is catching on. It launched in November 2011, and when I first met the company in February, it had four employees (three of whom were the co-founders), had just closed a $1.5 million round, and was hand-building thousands of robots from inside the condo that doubled as its office.

The team still works from their living quarters (one unit now houses a MakerBot 3-D printer), but it has grown to a staff of 13 and continues to hire. One of its newest additions, former Habit Labs co-founder and CEO Jen McCabe, just spent months in China setting up the company’s new production operation that Romotive hopes will help it have 10,000 of its $99 robots ready to ship by the holiday season in order to fulfill demand from some upcoming retail partnerships.

Although it’s very appealing to geeks and hackers, Romotive will have to make a smartphone-powered robot that’s both easy to program and physically approachable if it wants to appeal to a mass market. Its new design (currently under wraps) certainly meets the latter –McCabe describes it as akin to the first-generation iMac — although she acknowledges the user experience piece is a bit more difficult. Like any application in its first real iteration, there’s a fine line between too difficult for laypersons and too simple for experts.

Here’s a video of an app that lets users draw a path for Romo (shown in its current form) to travel, and a blog post explaining how it was built:

RomoDoodleDemo from Romotive on Vimeo.

4. Tracky

Tracky launched in March as an HTML5-based, one-stop shop for collaboration tools, and it has been on a rapid upward trajectory since. The company is planning for general availability in the coming months, and in June topped off a $1 million angel round with an additional $500,000 from Switch Communications Founder and CEO Rob Roy.

The product does project management, chat, calendars, file sharing and more from a single interface, but tries to be more social than standard business services by letting users invite quite literally anybody to collaborate on projects. So, while a team of co-workers could work together, so could a group of conference attendees who just met, or a bride-to-be trying to coordinate her DJ, bridal party and cake baker.

5. Walls360

Walls360 isn’t a tech company, per se, but it’s definitely high-tech — and it’s doing (almost) more business than it can handle. The company’s high-resolution fabric wall prints, which range in size from a small poster to a life-sized Captain Kirk and which can be removed and re-stuck hundreds of times, are proving very popular. The company sells individual prints to consumers, specially designed prints for conferences and events, and has shipped tens of thousands of promotional posters for partners such as EA Sports.

According to Co-founder and CEO John Doffing, literally every time a content creator was able to see and touch the company’s product, Walls360 has closed the deal. The result, he said, is that the company has hundreds of thousands of images that it’s licensed to reprint and sell, although only about 5 percent are currently available on the company’s site. The company can’t talk in specifics about some of its upcoming deals, although Doffing was willing to share that it’s making a move into the realms of sports and music that could prove very lucrative.

In order to meet that presumed demand, the company is looking to double its headcount in the next couple months and probably ramp up its production capacity, too. “We’ve built an infrastructure that’s designed to be huge,” Doffing told me recently. “I want to sell billions [of prints] a year.”

Walls360′s advisors include Guy Kawasaki, Panoramic Images CEO Doug Segal and Facebook Director of Engineering Lars Rasmussen.

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On Friday, Grishin is launching a new $25 million investment fund, Grishin Robotics, with the intention of funding a new generation of robotics startups. It’s his own money, and he wants to use it for something more exciting than yet-another-internet-business.

“I have a big passion for robotics,” he tells me. “Looking around, I think it’s the right time.”

More specifically his fund will look at so-called “service robotics”, the sort of personal robots that can be used to help people (it’s often used as a catch-all for anything that is not military or industrial). That may include telepresence bots that let you be somewhere without really being there, he says, or bots that provide assistance for the elderly. Whatever the case, he wants to go mass market, and he’s looking to invest a few million dollars in companies that already have prototypes in action but need money for production.

Why? Because he believes somebody needs to make the leap.

Robotics requires risk

“Usually venture capitalists are very conservative,” he says. “They only want to fund ideas that have already been proven and don’t really take much money. But robotics requires quite a lot of capital, and you can’t make a big step until some risk-takers invest capital. I really want to make robotics more popular and drive future investment in this area.”

The time is right, he suggests, because the costs of making robots have now fallen to a point that is feasible. Unlike the past, where a single bot might cost hundreds of thousands — or even millions — of dollars to build, the price of even high-end models is dropping. That’s partly due to advances in technology and the efficiency of outsourced manufacturing in China.

But even so, Grishin also says the robotics industry (which has largely spun out of the academic world) could do with an injection of internet culture: more pace, faster iteration, a speedier production process than traditional offline companies. That’s something he can bring as the CEO of Mail.ru Group, which started as a web portal in the late 1990s, span off in various directions until it become one of Russia’s most important internet companies — and went public in 2010.

In undertaking this project, Grishin joins a pantheon of internet industry entrepreneurs who are trying to use their wealth to build a more ambitious future. Most of them are focused on space: Jeff Bezos of Amazon with his Blue Origin project, or Elon Musk who has used wealth generated by PayPal to push Space X to the point where its spacecraft, Dragon, was able to dock with the International Space Station last month.

Grishin says he’ll keep investing in internet companies too, but he thinks the world could be a more exciting place if those who had money used it to fund high-risk, high-reward ideas as well as the more mundane stuff.

“I don’t know too much about their projects, but I think the idea is very similar,” he says. “You need people to put money into the next generation, the next step.”

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There’s still some work to be done here by the creator, who goes by the name of “hairygael’ on his InMoov blog, but it’s impressive, nonetheless. The printed plastic arm is filled with servo motors at every joint and the action takes place via an Arduino platform and keyboard.

Geeks with access to a 3-D printer can replicate the robotic hand as the printer design file is freely available here, along with instructions to print the hand. Aside from the geek factor of a working robot hand, this project emphasizes that not only will we one day be able to print our own 3-D objects, but we can replicate those from others. There’s no need to design everything in the future; just print it!

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Here’s how the small blocks accomplish this, according to the MIT blog post:

“Unlike many other approaches to reconfigurable robots, smart sand uses a subtractive method, akin to stone carving, rather than an additive method, akin to snapping LEGO blocks together. A heap of smart sand would be analogous to the rough block of stone that a sculptor begins with.

The individual grains would pass messages back and forth and selectively attach to each other to form a three-dimensional object; the grains not necessary to build that object would simply fall away. When the object had served its purpose, it would be returned to the heap. Its constituent grains would detach from each other, becoming free to participate in the formation of a new shape.”

It’s going to take time, money and research to further shrink the concept cubes into sand-sized grains, but the technological concepts– which turns tiny magnets in the cubes on or off as needed during the process — is sound.

And computing power is increasing at the same time that chips are getting smaller, which certainly helps the project’s long-term goals. It’s likely that size is the bigger issue as the algorithms used to replicate objects aren’t actually too complex as shown in this video that I found through ZDNet.

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