The main subject of our website is related to robots. After robots conquered the industrial applications, they are being developed to aid humans in their daily habits. The robots that are currently available for usage at home are either too clunky, or too expensive. Luckily, there are some cleaning robots that are affordable and useful,… »

There is no doubt that future computers and robots need to understand us better in order to make the interaction with them more pleasant and productive. Some examples we already wrote about are Kismet robot from MIT, or FEELIX GROWING project based on Aldebaran robot Nao platform. A team of researcher from the University of… »

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology IPK, in Berlin, have been working on a human-sized manufacturing robot that could bring greater flexibility to industrial mass production process. Unlike the specialized assembly line robots, the human sized pi4-workerbot is being developed as a multi-purpose robot with a wider range of potential… »

By allowing aircraft to quickly sense which way is “up” by imitating how honeybees see, engineers and researchers at The Vision Centre, Queensland Brain Institute and the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at The University of Queensland, have enabled planes to guide themselves through extreme maneuvers, including the loop, the barrel roll and… »

Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation (IPA) in Stuttgart have successfully performed a process of genetic robotics where a moving robot was automatically designed without the intervention of a designing engineer. Genetic Robots are moving robots that can be created by using genetic software algorithms and additive manufacturing. The important role… »

The ability of elephant’s trunk to be flexible, transmit large forces, and serve as a precise gripping tool, has inspired researchers to come up with the Bionic Handling Assistant. It was developed by Festo in cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation (IPA) and within the framework of the Bionic Learning Network… »

By using information about specific ethical dilemmas supplied to them by ethicists, computers can effectively “learn” ethical principles in a process called machine learning. A team of researchers programmed Nao robot (toddler-sized robot we wrote about in our article about RoboCup 2009) with an ethical principle that was discovered by a computer. This learned principle… »

Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) robot called Tethys spent most of October crisscrossing Monterey Bay as part of Monterey Bay Aquatic Research Institute (MBARI) CANON experiment where oceanographers used it to track patches of microscopic algae that were carried around the bay by currents. During this experiment, the robot showed that it could travel fast enough… »