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… »
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… »
Japanese robotics researcher Masahiko Yamaguchi, who represents himself as Dr. Guero in other robotics projects, modified a Kondo KHR-3HV hobby kit robot and created a robot dubbed PRIMER V4. This two-legged hobby-kit robot was modified in a way that allows it to balance and cross over a 4-mm (0.16-inch) thick and 1 meter (3 feet)… »
Everyone has probably experienced the phenomenon where their footsteps are unconsciously synchronized with their friends during a stroll. Understanding the mechanisms behind this synchronization could help people with a disturbed gait. Researchers from the Tokyo Institute of Technology have decided to demystify the process and as a result developed a new walking support device named… »
Inspired by earthworms, snails and sea cucumbers, which use the muscles along their bodies to creep along the ground by alternately squeezing and stretching them in a mechanism called peristalsis, researchers at MIT, Harvard University, and Seoul National University, have engineered Meshworm – a soft autonomous robot that crawls across surfaces by contracting segments of… »
After deciding to switch from autonomous helicopters to a fixed-wing vehicle, MIT Robust Robotics Group researchers have completed a series of flight tests in which an autonomous robotic plane successfully threaded its way among pillars in the parking garage without the use of GPS information. The state-estimation algorithm developed for this purpose relies on other… »
Most flying robots aren’t built to recover from shocks after a collision, but a group of researchers from EPFL decided to construct a robot which is suitable for navigation in cluttered indoor environment. Named AirBurr, the flying robot acts like some flying insects and takes advantage of collisions in order to find its way around… »
