Materials scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have created a new type of transistor that mimics the behavior of a synapse. The synaptic transistor simultaneously modulates the flow of information in a circuit and physically adapts to changing signals. The technology could lead to creation of a new kind of… »
While photos and videos of the robot have been presented at scientific conferences in robotics and in infant development, the general public recently got the first glance at the expressive face of a robot named Diego-san. The project is led by a researcher from University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and it will be used… »
It seems as if last year’s news and articles were dominated by unmanned aerial vehicles and algorithms developed for their autonomy in different environments. We got a couple of new and affordable robotic toys to play with, there were numeral examples of robots whose design or locomotion principles were inspired by nature, and ASIMO turned… »
Aside making enemies out of robots, science fiction also depicts them as our helpers. While most of the robots in use today are used to help us in manufacture, explore or entertain us, various research groups around the world are developing algorithms and models of robots which can be safely used along humans by performing… »
Japanese electronics maker Sharp Corp. recently unveiled two versions of a new robotic vacuum cleaner named Cocorobo (a play of words that combines “heart” and “robot” in Japanese). While they are expected to be more expensive than iRobot’s popular vacuuming robot Roomba, the Cocorobo vacuuming robots do come with additional features that might become popular… »
Although Festo primarily represents a supplier of automation technology, our loyal readers have been introduced to them with various interesting biomimetic projects we covered through the years. On a recent Hanover Trade Fair 2012, Festo exhibited a couple of their new concepts, and in this article we’re going to write about human-machine interaction, music being… »
Dr. Ganesh Kumar Venayagamoorthy, a power engineering expert at Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T), has recently published an article in the latest issue of IEEE’s Smart Grid newsletter where he wrote about plans to develop a smart grid which could autonomously learn and adapt to new situations, from power outages along the… »
Researchers from MIT combined two innovative algorithms developed there to build a new robotic motion-planning system that calculates much more efficient trajectories through free space. Although such tasks seem intuitive and simple to us, most of the existing path finding algorithms rely to collision avoiding rather than finding more efficient paths between the robot’s initial… »
