Its designed purpose remains to get technologically creative types to exchange ideas and opinions in panels and presentations. But thanks to past SXSW tech breakouts like Twitter’s explosive growth in 2007 and Foursquare’s take-off in 2009, the festival has evolved: Marketing types now flood Austin with happy hours, receptions and parties and stage increasingly elaborate PR stunts to try to cut through the clutter.
Robot blackjack at automate 2013
Humans aren’t good at following sharks. We’re noisy in the water, need to breathe air and the animals generally get disturbed when we’re around. So a group of California universities put together a project to use autonomous underwater vehicles, or AUVs, to do the job.
Scientists have developed robots with a new sense — lateral line sensing. All fish have this sensing organ but so far it had no technological counterpart on human-made underwater vehicles.
Devon Carrow was born with eosinophilic esophagitis, an allergic inflammatory disease in which white blood cells build up in the esophagus that makes exposure to common foods such as peanuts, milk and eggs life-threatening. He also has anaphylactic shock syndrome, respiratory distress syndrome and asthma. The major risk of a deadly allergic reaction had prevented him from going to school with other children and forced Devon to be home schooled – that is, until VGo came along.
Taking blood is a fine art. Even the most experienced practioner may require more than one stab to find a vein—seems only natural to wonder, might a robot do the job better? Mountain View’s Veebot thinks so. Veebot wants to take the art out of needlework with their robotic venipuncture machine.
It doesn’t matter if it’s called a BBQ, a grill or a Barbie; those char-grilled steaks leave a thick layer of grease and grime behind. And while cooking is fun, cleaning is not. What you need is a neat little R2D2 to scrub the filth away, leaving you to crack a beer and get ready to fire up the next BBQ. Enter the Grillbot, a cute, single button operated bot that perches on your grill and lives to clean. It works automatically on both gas and charcoal grills (hot or cold).
Hybrid materials made of cardiac cells and carbon nanotubes might patch damaged hearts and provide muscle for robots made of living tissues.
Robot seeing itself for first time
A team of Japanese scientists has built a tiny robot that is driven by a male silkworm moth to find a female moth’s seductive pheromone smell. The idea is to somehow engineer the same kind of natural mechanism the moth uses and translate that into a device or sensor that could help autonomous robots track hazardous smells or environmental poisons, for example.
British troops in Afghanistan are now using 10-centimeter-long 16-gram spy helicopters to survey Taliban firing spots. The UK Defense Ministry plans to buy 160 of the drones under a contract worth more than $31 million.
The remote-controlled PD-100 PRS aircraft, dubbed the Black Hornet, is produced by Norwegian designer Prox Dynamics. The drone is a traditional single-rotor helicopter, scaled down to the size of a toy. British troops use the drones for reconnaissance missions, sending them ahead to inspect enemy positions.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise may have just released its seventh installment this month, but here’s some inspiration for an eighth: What if the killer were a robot capable of using a chainsaw for a precision of slicing and dicing that no human is capable of?
Stroke survivors, as well as patients suffering from other serious conditions, may have to deal with the partial or complete inability to move one or more of their limbs. In the most severe cases, the sufferer may become fully paralyzed and in need of permanent assistance.
The TOBI project (Tools for brain-computer interaction) is financed by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme for Research (FP7) and is coordinated by EPFL. Since 2008 it has focused on the use of the signals transmitted by the brain. The electrical activity that takes place in the brain when the patient focuses on a particular task such as lifting an arm is detected by electroencephalography (EEG) through electrodes placed in a cap worn by the patient. Subsequently, a computer reads the signals and turns them into concrete actions as, for instance, moving a cursor on a screen.
They may not be replacing doctors and nurses just yet, but robots could be providing bedside care in hospitals across the United States sooner than you think.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given the go-ahead for the “Remote Presence Virtual Independent Telemedicine Assistant,” or RP-VITA for short. It’s the first autonomous navigation remote presence robot to receive FDA clearance.
Just ahead of CES next week, iRobot has announced a brand new pool cleaning robot, the Mirra 530, as well as international availability for the little Looj 330 gutter cleaner.
I’ll be honest with you, here: I don’t have a pool, I know nothing about pools, and I have no idea whether anybody actually needs a pool cleaning robot. But iRobot seems to think that there’s a market, because the Mirra 530 is the third model that they’ve come out with, after the Verro 300 and the Verro 500. At $1,300, it’s also the most expensive, but I guess if you have your own pool, you’ve got money to throw into a hole in the ground. If you can afford it, it looks like this robot will probably keep your pool squeaky clean without you having to lift much more than a finger or two.
