Spiders, scorpions, feelings of regret — I venture to guess these are all things most people don’t want crawling up their leg. But what about Clothbot?
For me, its name evokes the unpleasantries of moth balls and blood clots, but I promise, this itsy-bitsy bot is so adorable you’ll be happy to see it climbing up your trousers.
Paralyzed woman uses thoughts to sip coffee
Clearing the muck from an oil spill is tough enough without having to worry about collateral damage, but designer Hsu Sean is looking to create a Roomba-like Bio-Cleaner drone that degrades oil while keeping animals out of harm’s way.
A senior executive at a top U.S. robotics firm once told P.W. Singer, America’s foremost expert on modern warfare technology, that before September 11, 2001, “we couldn’t get anyone to return our calls.” After the attacks? “We were told, ‘Make them as fast as you can,’” the exec claimed. And so it’s gone. (via P.W. Singer’s Robots of War | Motherboard)
Humans are generalists. We’re adaptable. If there’s a task we can’t do on our own, we find ourselves a tool to help us. Robots aren’t usually like this, because it’s very hard to design a robot that implements all the different tools that might conceivably be useful to it. Roboticists at ETH Zurich are trying to get around this problem by designing a robot with just one tool, but the tool they’ve chosen is a hot glue gun that their robot can use to manufacture any other tools that it needs to.
Willow Garage introduced the TurtleBot in April of 2011 as a low-cost personal robot kit running open-source software. A year later, it’s been an incredible success with researchers and hobbyists, and it’s time to meet the next generation platform. Fans of the original TurtleBot needn’t worry: TurtleBot 2 is intended to be just like the TurtleBot you already know (mostly) and love (when it works), except with a brand new full-featured base and a sinister flat-black color scheme.
The future is here and this is not a butterfly on your wall, as Israeli drones are getting tiny. Their latest project – a butterfly-shaped drone weighing just 20 grams - the smallest in its range so far – can gather intelligence inside buildings.
Two weeks ago, we posted about quadrotors that were able to autonomously navigate outdoors, relying solely on IMUs and simple vision systems. What we found notable was that the robots didn’t need either GPS or a motion tracking system, implying that they could go out and do their thing in what some people like to call “the real world.” At ICRA 2012 yesterday, MIT’s Adam Bry presented a paper (and video!) demonstrating a micro air vehicle capable of the same sort of self-contained navigation, but indoors and impressively fast.
HyQ - IIT’s Hydraulic Quadruped Robot - Balancing and First Outdoor Tests
How To Survive A Robot Uprising (aka Robopocalypse)
Last month, we broke the news that DARPA had decided to award the contract to produce a standard simulation environment for its Humanoid Challenge to the Open Source Robotics Foundation, which nobody had really ever heard of. Notably, we’re just getting a press release today that the OSRF has been officially formed or launched or spun off or what have you, and we now have details on the board of directors (which includes some very big names) as well as a bit more information about how everything is going to work.
For some reason, roboticists seem to enjoy testing their creations by kicking them, punching them, shoving them, and even striking them with baseball bats and heavy pendulums. All in the name of science, of course. It wasn’t different with this Japanese pair of robot legs, which as you can see from the photo above, is about to get kicked in the gut.
Does anyone doubt that it really is just a matter of time before human assembly line workers are a thing of the past? And automakers are doing their best to gain a competitive edge by roboticizing their manufacturing plants. Here’s a glimpse of some of the robots that have recently stepped onto the assembly line floor.
Robot Microwaves a Meal
Been dreaming of a having a robot at home but want something more than Romo the iPhone robot and can’t afford to lease an Asimo? Thecorpora may have just the robot for you. After six years of work, their cute and cuddly Qbo is finally ready to roll into our open source hacking and hardware tinkering arms. The company just put Qbo on pre-order.
