Archive for the 'Robots' Category
Company Presents a Boyish Robot
By MATT SLAGLE, AP Technology Writer
(AP) – David Hanson has two little Zenos to care for these days. There’s his 18-month-old son Zeno, who prattles and smiles as he bounds through his father’s cramped office.
Then there’s the robotic Zeno. It can’t speak or walk yet, but has blinking eyes that can track people and a face that captivates with a range of expressions.
No commentsRobot walks on water
Published: 08:41 EST, July 11, 2007
By Lisa Zyga
Water striders, insects that walk on the surface of the water, may never set foot on land in their lives, and yet they’re not swimmers. Over the past million or so years, this insect—sometimes called a water skater—has optimized its use of surface tension to balance its 0.01-gram body on lakes, ponds, and even oceans.
Researchers Yun Seong Song, a PhD student in mechanical engineering, and Metin Sitti, assistant professor in mechanical engineering, both from Carnegie Mellon University, have recently built a robot that mimics the water strider’s natural abilities. The first water striding robot, with an appearance and design closely resembling its insect counterpart, doesn’t ever break the surface tension of the water, and is highly maneuverable.
Three-armed robot to work on space station
- 18:26 10 July 2007
- NewScientist.com news service
- David Shiga
A three-armed robot that could autonomously clamber around the outside of the International Space Station and help astronauts with maintenance work has successfully completed a round of tests on the ground.
Eurobot is being developed for the European Space Agency (ESA) by an industrial consortium led by Thales Alenia Space, which is based in Cannes la Bocca, France.
It has three arms similar in size and strength to human arms. But Eurobot’s arms boast seven joints, making them more versatile than human ones. Each arm is also equipped with a camera.
No commentsMiniature Robots Play Nano-Soccer
Published: 15:09 EST, July 08, 2007
By GREG BLUESTEIN, Associated Press Writer
(AP) — Exploding from the other end of the field, a silver robot glinted under the light of the cameras and burst toward the lone defender standing between it and the goal.
That’s when the “Whirling Dervish,” as its creators call it, lived up to its name, spinning furiously in a show of razzle-dazzle. But suddenly, the robot stopped dead in its tracks, hopelessly mired as if it were stuck on superglue.
A metal arm appeared to rescue the wayward robot, but it was no crane - it was an acupuncture needle. And the field it plucked the robot from was hardly the size of a grain of rice. Read more
No commentsSelf-aware robot turns mirror on humankind
- 16 May 2007
- Celeste Biever
- Magazine issue 2604
Nico gazes into the mirror in front of him. Looking back is his reflected self, wearing a grey Yale University sweatshirt and a baseball cap cocked at a jaunty angle. When Nico raises an arm, he recognises the arm moving in the mirror as his own.
It may not sound like much of a feat, but Nico is a humanoid robot. He has just become the first of his kind to recognise his own reflection in a mirror.
No commentsGuessing robots predict their environments, navigate better
Published: 17:13 EST, June 12, 2007
Engineers at Purdue University are developing robots able to make “educated guesses” about what lies ahead as they traverse unfamiliar surroundings, reducing the amount of time it takes to successfully navigate those environments.
The method works by using a new software algorithm that enables a robot to create partial maps as it travels through an environment for the first time. The robot refers to this partial map to predict what lies ahead.
The more repetitive the environment, the more accurate the prediction and the easier it is for the robot to successfully navigate, said C.S. George Lee, a Purdue professor of electrical and computer engineering who specializes in robotics.
No commentsScientists Create Robot Toddler
By The Associated Press
posted: 08 June 2007 11:29 am ET
OSAKA (AP) — A group of scientists in Japan have developed a humanoid that acts like a toddler to better understand child development.
The Child-Robot with Biomimetic Body, or CB2, was developed by a team of researchers at Osaka University in western Japan and is designed to move just like a real child aged between one and three years old.
CB2, 4.3 feet tall and weighing 73 pounds, changes facial expressions and crawls on the floor.
No commentsSimplicity may be key to robotic self-reproduction
Published: 12:11 EST, June 05, 2007
By Lisa Zyga
“Self-reproduction is one of the remarkable feats of biological systems which has remained largely outside the scope of capabilities of traditional engineered systems,” explains Victor Zykov and his colleagues from Cornell University in a recent study in IEEE Transactions on Robotics.
Zykov, Efstathios Mytilinaios, Mark Desnoyer, and Hod Lipson have examined the meaning of such concepts as “self-reproduction” and “evolution” when applied to non-living machines.
No commentsRobot Claims to be Sick
By Bill Christensen
posted: 17 May 2007 09:40 am ET
A robotic “sick patient” has been created by researchers at Gifu University’s Graduate School of Medicine. They claim that this is the first robotic female patient that is able to both respond verbally to questions about how it feels, as well as move its body in ways that exhibit the symptoms of disease (see photo).
The intent is to provide students with an opportunity to have the closest thing possible to hands-on experience with rare medical conditions. For example, when suffering from myasthenia gravis–an often misdiagnosed neuromuscular disease leading to muscle weakness and fatigue–the robot tells the doctor its eyelids are heavy, and it changes its facial expression, slowly relaxes its shoulders and hunches forward.
No commentsScience beats fiction in Robot Hall of Fame
By Candace Lombardi, CNET News.com
Published on ZDNet News: May 15, 2007, 10:58 AM PT
BOSTON–Real science is finally beating out science fiction when it comes to the Robot Hall of Fame.
Carnegie Mellon University on Tuesday announced its 2007 inductees into the Robot Hall of Fame–comprised of both real and science fiction robots–here at its RoboBusiness 2007 conference. Three of the four robots selected by a jury of 25 leading roboticists were built by actual scientists.
“For the first time, the jury selected more robots from science in fact than science fiction,” said Matt Mason, the director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon.
“Perhaps it’s a trend that we are finally beginning to fulfill expectations,” he said.
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