Use Microsoft Surface to Control a Swarm of Robots With Your Fingertips
A sharp-looking tabletop touchscreen can be used to command robots and combine data from various sources, potentially improving military planning,
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Use Microsoft Surface to Control a Swarm of Robots With Your Fingertips
Image: Mark Micire/UMass Lowell Robotics Labmore>>
Tomb-Bot Will Be the First to Enter Final Secret Chambers of the Great Pyramid
Image: Michael Studt via Heritage Keymore>>
Video: Robot Arm Wants Nothing More Than To Master the Art of the Flapjack-Flip
via Make:Onlinemore>>
03.09.10
Video: Charming PR2 Robot Draws a Self-Portrait
Everyone loves the beer-fetching Willow Garage PR2 robot. Evidently, it even loves itself. When developers at Bosch Research gave it a pen, it drew a handsome self-portrait.
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Surena, Iran's Asimo-Like Humanoid, Performs Strange Dance On Television
The last time we saw Surena-2 (aka Sorina-2), it was hanging out with Mahmoud Ahmedinejad in its first public appearance last month. Now it has made its debut on television. In the somewhat mystifying clip below, it bops past silent humans seated at brightly
Read more...
Google is Flying a Quadcopter Surveillance Robot, Says Drone Maker
There's no question that the future of warfare, espionage, and clandestine operations is moving rapidly toward reliance on drone aircraft. But should citizens grow restless when this technology moves into the private sector? A German drone maker claims Google is
Read more...
Tomb-Bot Will Be the First to Enter Final Secret Chambers of the Great Pyramid
Egyptologists are hoping some 21st-century tech will help them unlock secrets from 4,500 years ago. They're using a robot to explore
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New Japanese telepresence robot pushes the boundaries of creepy
Maybe it's just us, but some Japanese robots are a special brand of creepy. The moaning mouth was bad enough, but now there's this tadpole-shaped telepresence robot, hereby christened Larvabot.
The Telenoid R1 is meant to be a minimalist human, so details are restricted to its eyes and face,
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Are we in the future yet? A robot astronaut is tweeting
R2 was developed through a Space Act Agreement by NASA and General Motors. It is faster, more dexterous and more technologically advanced than its predecessors and able to use its hands to do work beyond the scope of previously introduced humanoid robots.
Robonaut-2, NASA's robot astronaut,
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Video: Robot arm wants nothing more than to master the art of the flapjack-flip
This pancake-flipping robotic arm is definitely one of the more endearing helper ‘bots we've seen. After a handheld lesson from its programmers, it just tries so hard to flip a pancake. And it fails, again and again.
After about 50 attempts, the arm is finally able to perfect its wrist-flipping
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REX, the robotic exoskeleton, gives paraplegic man a bionic set of legs
We've seen robotic exoskeletons before -- there's Lockheed's HULC that's designed to augment soldier performance, and then there's Raytheon's XOS that's more like an actual Iron Man suit -- but this one is different. REX, the Robotic
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ROILA, a New Spoken Language Designed for Robots
Image: Pito loki wikute tuji! That's ROILA for "I like fruit." These Lego Mindstorms NXT robots are learning ROILA, Robot Interaction Language, as part of a team of robots donated by Lego. The next step is to allow the NXT
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You built what?! A real Iron Man suit
Anthony Le, 25, has been a fan of Iron Man since he was a kid, but when he heard that the comic-book superhero was hitting the big screen in 2008, he was inspired to build his own Iron Man suit. That version was more of a costume, but his new one, finished just in time for
Read more...
Google is Flying a Quadcopter Surveillance Robot, Says Drone Maker
There's no question that the future of warfare, espionage, and clandestine operations is moving rapidly toward reliance on drone aircraft. But should citizens grow restless when this technology moves into the private sector? A German drone maker claims Google is
Read more...
Video: Charming PR2 Robot Draws a Self-Portrait
Everyone loves the beer-fetching Willow Garage PR2 robot. Evidently, it even loves itself. When developers at Bosch Research gave it a pen, it drew a handsome self-portrait.
Read more...
Adorable Laundry-Folding Robot Gives Your Towels Fastidious Attention
This laundry-folding robot may not find many fans at the local laundromat, but only because it takes so long in holding up each towel for scrutiny before folding. Still, its fussiness speaks to a special care for laundry -- or painstaking programming routines -- that
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Robots Made Out of Mobile Phones Dance, Cry, Throw Tantrums, and Talk to Each Other
Canadian researchers trying to integrate robots into our lives have come up with a pair of dancing, crying mobile phone 'bots. The robots, called Callo and Cally, are mobile phones with limbs.
Cally stands about 18cm high and walks, dances and mimics human behavior. Callo
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Surena, Iran's Asimo-Like Humanoid, Performs Strange Dance On Television
The last time we saw Surena-2 (aka Sorina-2), it was hanging out with Mahmoud Ahmedinejad in its first public appearance last month. Now it has made its debut on television. In the somewhat mystifying clip below, it bops past silent humans seated at brightly
Read more...
DARPA Wants Roving 'Smart Cameras' That Understand What They See
The problem with surveillance cameras is that they can see but they can't think, which means there always has to be a human on the other end making cognitive sense of what's right in front of the camera. But if we meshed machine vision with visual intelligence,
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DARPA Spills Details on its Plans for the Transformer TX Flying Car
DARPA didn't reveal much at first about its "Transformer TX" program aimed at developing a flying car for the military. But now the full proposal has been published, and shows that the Pentagon agency hopes to get a prototype airborne by 2015, The
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Use Microsoft Surface to Control a Swarm of Robots With Your Fingertips
A sharp-looking tabletop touchscreen can be used to command robots and combine data from various sources, potentially improving military planning,
Read more...
Video: Perching Drones Learn How to Land Vertically on Walls
Moth-like drones could quietly conduct surveillance or creep closer to targets, while recharging or ducking inclement weather
High-rise dwellers and office workers might someday see aerial drones join the usual pigeons and other birds perched outside their windows. Stanford University's
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New Robots Build Prototype Solar Cells in 30 Minutes, Then Evaluate Their Own Work
One squat multitasking robot can build semiconductors for solar cells on six-inch-square plates of glass, plastic or flexible metals in just over half an hour. Six of these tireless mechanical workers, chugging away at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Colorado, will
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Autonomous Roving Robot Seeks Out Polluted Water to Sustain Its Onboard Plant Symbiotes
What if we could use our pollution as fuel? That notion seems intractable within the current energy paradigm, in which so many of our pollutants are byproducts of our fuels. But it's precisely that idea that inspired Mexican artist Gilberto Esparza to create "Nomadic
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Helper Robots We Desperately Need: the HRP-2 Dishbot
For now, mechanised household servants are pretty much limited to floor-cleaners -- though they do hold a special place in our hearts.But what if a robot, after a long dinner party, could bus the table and head to the sink? Now there's a relationship we can build
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Efficient New Object Recognition Software Uses Smarter Piece-By-Piece Approach
A new visual recognition program developed at MIT uses a process of elimination to identify objects much more efficiently than the matching techniques used by existing software. Line by line, piece by piece, it identifies commonalities between everyday objects, resulting in line drawings that
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Video: Willow Garage robot learns how to play pool in just one week
Proving that robots really do have a place at the pub -- time to change your archaic anti-droid policies, Mos Eisley Cantina -- the team over at Willow Garage has programmed one of its PR2 robots to play a pretty
Read more...
You built what?! A real Iron Man suit
Anthony Le, 25, has been a fan of Iron Man since he was a kid, but when he heard that the comic-book superhero was hitting the big screen in 2008, he was inspired to build his own Iron Man suit. That version was more of a costume, but his new one, finished just in time for
Read more...
REX, the robotic exoskeleton, gives paraplegic man a bionic set of legs
We've seen robotic exoskeletons before -- there's Lockheed's HULC that's designed to augment soldier performance, and then there's Raytheon's XOS that's more like an actual Iron Man suit -- but this one is different. REX, the Robotic
Read more...
Robots To Clear Baltic Seabed Of WWII Mines
In a dangerous legacy of the world's deadliest conflict, 150,000 World War Two-era sea mines
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Video: MIT's Flyfire Turns Swarms of Autonomous LED Copters Into Floating 3-D Displays
Meet the next generation of art installations. Together, the SENSEable City and ARES Labs at
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Wiimote-Controlled Robot Drum Circle Makes Human Hippies Obsolete
Robot or human, Berkeley residents still have to put up with the noise
A musician has harnessed
Read more...
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