The WatCleaner is a newly designed robot that proposes helping us to clean up the marine ecosystem by intelligently and autonomously removing pollutants such as floating garbage and oil slick. Read the rest of this entry »
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File this under super cool! Based on Lego System’s Mindstorm NXT kits, this sphere uses the magic of geometry and gravity to move with a surprisingly simple construction! Check out the specifics here, and maybe make one to freak out your dog or cat! Read the rest of this entry »
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Last week, from June 29th to July 5th, Robocup 2009 was held in Graz, Australia. The Robocup project brings together robotics, AI and programming enthusiasts from all over the world and pits them against each other on the same playing field… literally! Above, we see the winners of the middle size league, Universität Stuttgart (Germany). In the finals, they took on Tech United from Eindhoven (The Netherlands) for the win with a dominating score of 4:1 (in Germany’s favor). The ultimate goal of the Robocup is to, “by the year 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can play and win against the human world champion soccer team.” source Read the rest of this entry »
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Imagine you are walking downtown in the middle of rush-hour. You make your way down the crowded sidewalk, easily moving side to side to avoid a collision with another person or object. It comes naturally to us, this ease of motion, and even as toddlers we can do it. It may shock you, then, to discover that the achievement of such autonomous, intelligent motion in robots has been one of the most challenging problems in the history of robotics. But that nut may have just been cracked! Read the rest of this entry »
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Granted, this is not a real robot. We understand that. We respect that. We don’t expect anyone to believe that Lego’s “Robo Attack” set is anything more than a toy robot. It is not a robotic toy.
That being said… Read the rest of this entry »
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Thought the iRobot Roombas were only good for collecting dust bunnies? Think again! At MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intellgence Laboratory (CSAIL for short), Roombas have been reimagined so that they now can collect fruit! These are no ordinary Roombas, though. As you can see above, they have been severely tinkered with to produce the above gardening robot. At this amazing garden, a protype for a larger and more comprehensively autonomous greenhouse, the robots can water and polinate plants, locate and gather the fruit, and most amazing of all, respond to requests from the plants. Yes, I didn’t mistype: the plants can actually communicate to the robots!
“Networked sensors help the plants ‘request’ water or nutrients from their robotic gardeners… giving each plant the ability to monitor and broadcast its own physical state allows the robots to distribute resources and care on demand.” source
We may be looking at the garden of the future! But we’d better not tell any of this to Meticulor. He might get jealous.
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To mark the 30th anniversary of the first television broadcast of “Mobile Suit Gundam”, a life-sized Gundam statue (imagining that Gundam were actually a real thing, that is) has been erected in Tokyo!!! WOW! It does “weigh nearly 35 tons, move its head and emit light or mist from 50 points of its body. The statue will be on display to the public at the [Shiokaze Park in Tokyo's Odaiba] from July 11 to August 31, free of charge.” source
Check out this video to see it in all its glory: Read the rest of this entry »
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This past week, the International Robots and Vision Motion Control Show (whew, that’s a mouthful!) was in Rosemont, IL. One of the featured guests was the above robot, Toyota’s Partner Robot. I cannot find any footage of it playing at the International RVMCS, but here it is tooting it’s stuff in Nagoya, Japan (by the way, it can apparently play many different songs, and has companions who can play other instruments such as the violin!): Read the rest of this entry »
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One of the participants from the first session of our first workshop was unable to attend the second session. We crunched respective calendars and arranged a time to meet with him independently so that he could finish his bot, name it and write a story for all of you to enjoy! We would like to point out that this young man also chose the orangutan model of the Jungle Robot to build, and in regard to the race, very well could have taken home the gold himself. We present his story: Read the rest of this entry »
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The robot named Madeline is pictured above. She is one of the robots currently being studied at Vassar College’s labs to further students’ understanding of the kind of evolution that took place over 500 million years ago. By mimicking subtle changes in the animal’s skeletal structure or appendages, the students are observing which changes are working better in a simulated predator/prey environment, and thus modeling the process of natural selection. Read the rest of this entry »
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