For a robot the size of a shoebox, OpenROV has made quite a splash in the submersible community in the past year. Just after MakerFaire 2012, where we saw OpenROV for the first time, it and its creator Eric Stackpole showed up in the New York Times along with a bold proclamation about the open source project: "It could change the future of ocean exploration."

Photo credit: NASA

Those weren't Stackpole's words, but you can bet he believes them--his quest for a sub-$1000 exploration bot recently landed him on the cover of Make Magazine, and OpenROV was back at this year's Maker Faire. Last August, Stackpole and his partner David Lang raised over $100,000 on Kickstarter for the OpenROV. What's surprising, considering how successful OpenROV was in 2012, is just how far the ROV has advanced in the past year.

"Even when we were doing that expedition to the Hall City Cave that ended up in the Times, we didn't really have a robot that was fully functional," says Stackpole at Maker Faire 2013. "You know, this is a maker product. It was on its way, there were some things that could work. We could drive it around, but the video feed wasn't reliable. Now we're at a point where we have everything we had dreamed of. Live video streaming, we can do high definition, it's going up to a computer. It's functional. This is the part where it really gets exciting. This is where we're going to start exploring, really exploring, places that haven't been seen before."

Photo credit: Make

Stackpole is a fountain of enthusiasm, but he's earnest when he says things like "this is the part where it really gets exciting," he means it. His obsession with ocean exploration came while he worked at NASA as a mechanical engineer, and last year he reduced his hours to devote more time to OpenROV.

Just in the past few months, the OpenROV project has made a major breakthrough.

In 2012, Roy the Robot was one of the most eye-catching projects on exhibit in Maker Faire's expo hall. Half of Roy's draw came from his Terminator-like skeleton, with laser-cut wood standing in for shiny metal. He owed the rest of his appeal to a red Hawaiian shirt that Hunter S. Thompson and Bruce Campbell would've fought over. This year, the Hawaiian shirt hangs in the corner of Roy's booth, because he's no longer wearing it--he's got a brand new laser-cut chest to show off. 11 months after concluding a successful Kickstarter, maker Brian Roe is drawing a constant crowd to show off the new and improved Roy.

"At Maker Faire last year I had the arm and the hand and just the head, basically, the eyes and the jaw," says Roe, who's a mechanical engineer by day. "It was all mounted on a PVC frame kind of representing the shape of a human body, but nothing underneath the shirt. That's why he had a Hawaiian shirt on. I wanted to cover up all the PVC. This year I decided I really wanted to try to finish out the arms. So I got working on the arms, but then of course, if you're going to build the arms, they have to attach to something. So then you need the chest. Well, if I'm going to put the chest in there, I might as well do a cool neck because I've got the chest there to hook the neck to. So it got a little crazy. Now he sits with 48 servos, 16 servos in each arm. It's crazy. There's a ton of servos."

Roe started Roy as an animatronics project before Maker Faire 2012. The scale of the robot quickly spun out of control, but in a good way--Roe kept adding degrees of articulation, laser cutting parts in his home workshop, and suddenly his robot had a hand with individually servo-driven fingers. Roe launched a Kickstarter the first day of Maker Faire in 2012, offering Roy arm kits for backers to assemble, and eventually raised about $15,000--double his goal of $8,000.

There was enough money and interest in the project for Roy the Robot to grow even more complicated. But first, Roe had to deal with laser cutting some 10,000 parts for his backers.

Japan's Tokyo Institute of Technology has been working on a system called SOINN, or Self-Organizing Incremental Neural Network, for several years. The idea behind SOINN is to develop a learning system that doesn't need predefined inputs to acquire more knowledge. In a recent Diginfo video, researcher Osamu Hasegawa shows off some cool object recognition that's new to SOINN. It looks at objects through a webcam, and after a human-entered keyword, can search the Internet for identifying characteristics of that object. It learns how to identify that thing all by itself, by picking out common characteristics between the scanned object and a simple image search.

With...face recognition by digital cameras, it's necessary to teach the system quite a lot of things about faces," Hasegawa says in the video. "When subjects become diverse, it's very difficult for people to tell the system what sort of characteristics they have, and how many features are sufficient to recognize things. SOINN can pick those features out for itself. It doesn't need models, which is a very big advantage."

Hasegawa also predicts that SOINN will be able to pick identifying characteristics out of video and audio in the future, which would be a big deal for object recognition. Currently, humans entering keywords for SOINN to search objects limit its usefulness, but with a big enough database, the AI could theoretically identify virtually any object.

Check out Diginfo's video with SOINN:

Robert Downey Jr. owned the screen in all of his scenes in 2008's Iron Man, but the next-most popular characters in the film weren't human beings--they were robots. Tony Stark's robotic assistants, which he constantly chides and quips at, are imbued with a ton of personality through simple sound effects and exaggerated mannerisms, drooping sheepishly when they fail Stark. Those are emotions--not real ones, because Iron Man is a movie. But a very interesting, and very detailed, article from science publication Nautilus questions whether robots may be capable of the kinds of emotions Iron Man's robots exhibit. The answer starts with reconsidering how we define emotions.

Having feelings, we usually assume, and the ability to read emotions in others, are human traits," writes Nautilus' Neil Savage. "We don’t expect machines to know what we’re thinking or react to our moods...Special and indecipherable, except by us—our whims and fancies are what makes us human. But we may be wrong in our thinking. Far from being some inexplicable, ethereal quality of humanity, emotions may be nothing more than an autonomic response to changes in our environment, software programmed into our biological hardware by evolution as a survival response."

Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux compares emotions to survival circuits ingrained in living things, from humans down to amoebas. A stimulus in the environment flips that circuit and makes us react in a certain way to encourage survival. "Neurons firing in a particular pattern might trigger the brain to order the release of adrenaline, which makes the heart beat faster, priming an animal to fight or flee from danger. That physical state, LeDoux says, is an emotion."

Obviously not all organisms share the same circuitry--our brains, and emotional reactions, are more complex than an amoeba's or even another mammal's. But there are other elements of how we express our emotions (and how we're coming to understand them) that bring us a step closer to seeing how robotic "emotions" could be real.

You might not be able to afford Suidobashi Heavy Industries' $1.35 million Kuratas mech, but here's a $20,000 alternative that's still pretty cool. Sakakibara Kikai is a company that makes industrial machines for food processing factories, but in the past few years, they've also dabbled in manufacturing small mechs for amusement parks. The Kids Walker Cyclops, seen below, is the latest in Sakakibara Kika's line of kid-friendly robots, which also includes a pilot-able boxing machine (not quite Real Steel). The Cyclops is a battery-powered exoskeleton with two controllable arms--one equipped with a clawed grip and the other with a spinning "drill." And if $20,000 sounds like a silly price to pay for a mechanized amusement park robot, consider that the company has reportedly sold eight of its mechs already--presumably to the eight luckiest kids in the Japan.

Photo credit: sakakibara-kikai

Despite being named the Kids Walker, this robot also doesn't really walk, but has wheels under its two legs that allow it to spin in place and roll forward. Watch the mech being tested (by a small child, natch) in the videos below.

The machines that roam the grounds of MakerFaire spread a wide-ranging gamut. We've encountered R2D2 droids, human-scale cupcake go-karts, and even an honest to goodness giant mechanical spider. The Mondo Spider, which we first saw in 2010, has been a mainstay of maker gatherings like Burning Man and MakerFaire since its creation. It even made its way to Las Vegas for this year's CES, where I had the pleasure of driving it. Sitting in its cockpit and controlling it is transformative--you feel physically connected to the 1700 pound machine as it clanks and stomps across the pavement, rocking from side to side as eight steel legs simulate the gait of a walking spider (courtesy of a Klann linkage design mechaism).

Image credit: Jonathan Tippett

But for the team that built the Mondo Spider--a collective of makers based in Vancouver, it was only the precursor to larger ambitions. Jonathan Tippett, one of the Mondo Spider's co-creators, has been working on its follow-up for the past six years. That project is Prosthesis, a four-limbed walking machine that's more exo-skeleton than mech--as least in concept. In an email exchange, Jonathan explained to us the genesis of both the Mondo Spider and Prosthesis, and why these robotic art projects are both great learning tools and mediums of expression.

How did you get started making ambitious robotic art projects? Where did you learn your skillset in mechanical engineering and technology?

I've always lived, and breathed machines. I think they are beautiful and expressive. It started when I was about five or six, taking apart anything I could get my hands on. That turned into [an interest in] LEGO, which blossomed into a 1/10th scale electric RC car obsession. In those days there was no internet, no YouTube, and no Wikipedia. You had no alternative but to learn by doing. In high school I took metal shop instead of an elective. When I graduated, it was straight to Mechanical Engineering at The University of British Columbia. There, I built race cars, autonomous blimps, jousting cars and devoured engineering theory. [It's also where] I met all my crazy engineering friends.

Photo credit: Jonathan Tippett

It was through these connections that I came to participate in the annual Vancouver Junk Yard Wars events [inspired by the TV show of the same name]. We built tree climbers, frisbee throwers, music makers, wave generators, and of course, during the watershed year, a walking machine. I built my own 150 sq ft metal shop in my garage and filled it with as many machines as I could afford. I bought my own TIG welder, mill, lathe and took a six week TIG welding course. People would ask "What are you building it for?" to which I would just say "I dunno yet, I just need a shop..." And like the Field of Dreams, the project came. It was The Mondo Spider. That shop became a nucleus of creation for the Mondo Spider legs, and is where I actually began to hone my craft at building giant robots, along with "The Leg Team", Ryan Johnston and Sam Meyer.

Roboticists have two compelling reasons to turn to real animals for inspiration. As the brainiacs at Boston Dynamics study the musculature and motion of humans, cheetahs, and other animals, they're able to replicate the delicate, precise balance we take for granted every time we walk or run. And then there's the spy game: Using the form of existing animals to disguise robots as innocent creatures. Sometimes this shows up in the movies--who can forget a naked Jim Carrey squeezing his way out of a robotic rhinoceros in Ace Ventura?--but it actually seems more common in reality.

Case in point: Grad students at Virginia Tech won a five year grant from the US Office of Naval Research to work on underwater robots, and their current prototype, dubbed Cyro, is a 170-pound robo jellyfish. Cyro is an autonomous robot that mimics a real jellyfish's propulsion with a set of articulated metal limbs; it's designed to be tossed in the water and left to its own devices, its motion guided by a sensor package, for days or weeks or months on end.

The prototype isn't ready for that kind of long-term usage yet--it can only swim for about four hours on a rechargeable battery. But it's easy to imagine the robot improving over the next three years as the team continues to work with the Navy's grant money.

The jellyfish's "jelly" is a simple silicone covering lain on top of the robotic frame. While Virginia Tech's students are optimistic that Cyro could be used for oceanographic research, monitoring oil spills, and other academic causes, it's one of several robots being designed with military spy applications in mind. Drones are the least of our worries--check out the Air Force's Micro-Aviary plans for another example of nature feeding into robotics research.

The study of terradynamics, or how things move across granular surfaces, is a popular topic for researchers and professors at Georgia Tech. In 2011 they created snake-like a wedge-shaped robot that could burrow through sand, studying the physics of how a minor tilt of the head could control its motion through a granular environment. This year the focus has shifted from snakes to lizards, but the natural world's influence is still present in Georgia Tech's new miniature running robot.

Photo credit: Gary Meek for Georgia Tech

The robot's design is inspired by lizards who are easily able to scamper over the loose sand of desert environments. Georgia Tech's researchers studied the legs of these lizards to understand how the angles and lengths of their legs and the amount of force applied to motion affect their ability to move fluidly across uneven, shifting surfaces. The team then prototyped different leg designs on a 3D printer and tested them out on a miniature running robot.

Crescent- or C-shaped legs had the robot skipping across a thick sandy surface with ease, but flatter, shorter legs left it bogged down and moving much more slowly. Unsurprisingly, long legs, which covered more surface area, performed better than shorter ones.

The small lizard bot is cute, but scaled up this could be an important study. It could pave the way for new designs in reconnaissance robots that currently rely on wheels ill-suited to desert terrain. And deserts are hardly the only granular surfaces on the planet--this could improve robotic exploration in tons of scenarios, and perhaps even give robots like Boston Dynamics' LS3 surer footing.