While most of us can easily manipulate with everyday objects around us and place them at a desired place by using a series of judgments requiring vision, stability and careful movement, creating a robot able to perform a similar task is a bit of a challenge. A DARPA-funded research led to a hovering unmanned aerial… »
A couple of years ago I stumbled onto news about EcoBot – a robot able to operate within an enclosed environment by using food, water and air found around it. However, the idea of robots which consume unrefined biomass in order to operate didn’t allure me from the ethical point of view and that news… »
Researchers from the University of Illinois are making tracks in synthetic biology by designing non-electronic biological machines. They used a 3D printer to combine hydrogel and heart cells to create bio-robots. These functional machines are biocompatible and soft, and they are able to move by themselves. Once perfected, these bio-bots could be altered and specialized… »
Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have devised a new robot used for explosive tests in the National Explosives Engineering Sciences Security (NEXESS) Center. The platform they chose as a base for their robot is iRobot Packbot 510 – a robot manufactured by the same company that created the Roomba vacuum-cleaning robot –… »
Over a year ago we reported about a smart lower-limb prosthetic developed by researchers at the Vanderbilt University, and they recently presented a powered exoskeleton that enables people with severe spinal cord injuries to perform tasks such as standing, walking, sitting and climbing stairs. Although these exoskeletons haven’t yet been approved for home use, their… »
Development of small flying machines able to patrol recon or search and rescue missions has been around for a while now. While small flying machines which use GPS in order to find their way to their destination are already common, there is a need for development of other systems which enable maneuvering around obstacles in… »
A collaboration between U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) resulted with a project named Programming a Robot (PaR-PaR) – a simple high-level, biology-friendly, robot-programming language that allows easier robot training. PaR-PaR could provide the researchers with ways to train the liquid-handling robots with greater ease… »
Back in June 13th 2009, during their 5th Anniversary, Kondo Kagaku released the KHR-3HV humanoid kit robot. Although it’s been a while since they released the robot, its abilities and price make it ideal for hobbyists as well for use in advanced educational purposes. Hence, we decided to publish an article about this great humanoid… »
