When the humanoid Robonaut takes off for the ISS next week aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery, his days as the sole humanoid in orbit may already be numbered. JAXA, the Japanese space agency, has announced that it plans to send its own humanoid
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The campaign to buy Detroit a Robocop statue, seemingly halted last week by Mayor Dave Bing's lack of enthusiasm for the idea, has finally prevailed,
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Last night, after Watson swept the floor with the human race, we asked Dr. David Ferrucci, head of the Watson team, about him. It. The brainmachine is really good at analyzing and assimilating data, so it seemed that, when it comes to feeding it data, who would know more
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In Japan, robot-led weddings, robot factory workers and even squeaky robot pets
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Well, we've seen this movie before (literally speaking). A group of robotics engineers at the University of Technology in Eindhoven are developing an Internet for robots; a kind of online database from which robots can download instructions and to which they can upload
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Bats - you know we love ‘em - have a remarkable ability to turn, swirl and dive on a dime while in mid-flight, dodging obstacles and grabbing food from the air. Engineers would like to give robots and autonomous
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Taiwan's animated news service thinks it just might happen
Will 2011 be the year we finally welcome robots into our lives? We're already well on our way, as the brilliant animators at Next Media Animation show us in this video. And their proof comes straight
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Meet DARwIn-OP, America's newest humanoid robot, unveiled this week at IEEE's Humanoids 2010 conference. He is 18 inches tall, weighs 6 pounds and is ready
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The strangely named Dalu Rebot Restaurant, in the northeastern Chinese city of Jinan, is a 100-seat hotpot restaurant with a very peculiar staffing choice: It features two robot receptionists and six robot waiters who wheel around drinks and food on large indoor pedal-driven
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Since their introduction into hospitals, robots have sliced up and sponge-bathed
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Human skin is primed for touch - even minuscule pressure from a fly is enough to make you flinch. This ability does not yet extend to artificial limbs, however, and robots are a long way from having sensitive tactile abilities.
Now two California research teams have announced
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A new opera produced by the lab behind Guitar Hero technology includes robotic singers, interactive instruments and a focus on technology that could change the way we experience live performances.
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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
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"Independent mobility is crucial in the development of typical infants," says the research
A baby transporter for mobility-impaired children would ensure confidence, independence and proper cognitive development, researchers say. So they recommend babies start driving
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In Japan, robot-led weddings, robot factory workers and even squeaky robot pets
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With shuttle launch postponed, our hearts go out to a passenger
NASA has just announced it will postpone the 39th and final launch of space shuttle Discovery until November 30 at the earliest, after a hydrogen gas leak stalled this afternoon's scheduled liftoff.
Meanwhile,
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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
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At Carnegie Mellon University, one robotics student estimates that there are more robots than students in the department, but in a shameful display of mammalian arrogance, the precise number and type of said robots is unknown. That realization led the student, Heather
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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
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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...
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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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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In a dangerous legacy of the world's deadliest conflict, 150,000 World War Two-era sea mines
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Meet the next generation of art installations. Together, the SENSEable City and ARES Labs at
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