You might have tried to balance a ping-pong ball floating above your mouth or you might have seen a demo in a classroom or science museum where a jet of compressed air keeps a ball floating above the ground, seemingly defying gravity. A pair of grad students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have… »
Professor Hirotaka Nakayama and his students at Kobe’s Konan University Faculty of Intelligence and Informatics have created a guide robot called ii-1. It is able to perform Q&A tasks by using natural language for communication and querying an internet database to find the answers to asked questions. The project began in 2008 when four of… »
In an effort to plug gaps in knowledge about key ocean processes, the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s division of ocean sciences has awarded nearly $1 million to scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. The Scripps marine scientists will develop a new breed of ocean-probing instruments. Jules Jaffe and Peter Franks will… »
Developed by EU researchers, the Smart Hand is a complex prosthesis with four motors and forty sensors designed to provide realistic motion and sense to the user. Te sensors enabled it to become the first device of its kind to send signals back to the wearer, allowing them to feel what they touch. Phantom limb… »
In our previous article we noted that we’re describing one of the Boston Dynamics new robots, and in this article we’re going to write about a robot that served as a base for their next robot in development. Boston Dynamics, the developer of advanced dynamic robots such as BigDog and PETMAN, has been awarded a… »
Boston Dynamics, makers of various robots, have announced their newest projects. One of the projects is their development of a bipedal humanoid robot called PETMAN (Protection Ensemble Test Mannequin). As part of a $26.3M Army contract, PETMAN will be the first human-like robot that moves dynamically as humans do. While we currently look to robots… »
The AIDA project (Affective, Intelligent Driving Agent), a collaboration between Volkswagen of America and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (SENSEable City Lab and Personal Robots Group of Media Lab), is a platform comprising of a personal robot and an intelligent navigation system that aims to bring more pleasant driving experience. Its developers envision it as… »
In our previous articles we’ve written about robot cooks and dozen of robots which mimic various animals in order to benefit the features some animal offers. Researcher Bojan Nemec, from the Jožef Stefan Institute in Slovenia, decided to construct a skiing robot. He isn’t the first who thought of the idea, but his robot differs… »
