After their work on Whiskerbot, a group of researchers from the University of Sheffield and the Bristol Robotics Lab has created the SCRATCHBot (Spatial Cognition and Representation through Active TouCh), which uses its plastic whiskers in a sweeping back and forth motion to find its way round, much like a real rat. Many rodents have… »
A number of robotic fish are going to be used in an experiment in the port of Gijon in Spain in order to evaluate how effectively and cost-efficiently they can detect water pollution. The carp-shaped robots are part of a three-year research project of Huosheng Hu and his robotics team at the School of Computer… »
The students which made RoboSwift based the project on the findings of their supervisor, David Lentink of Wageningen University. In April 2007, with several co-authors he published a about the aerodynamic properties of the swift. During its lifetime, single swift flies a distance comparable to five roundtrips to the Moon and can remain in the… »
Cecilia Laschi, of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, and her colleagues are attempting to build a robot with arms that work in the same way that octopuses’ tentacles do. Having no solid skeleton, it will be the world’s first entirely soft robot. Their goal is to use the knowledge related to the principles that give… »
It is a trend around the world to cancel the production of projects which bring the joy to our children or the child within us all. Sony stopped producing the lovable doggy AIBO and the development of their very agile dancing robot QRIO in the beginning of the year 2006. Ugobe, the Idaho-based consumer robotics… »
BigDog is a legged robot under development of BostonDynamics, with funding from DARPA. Their goal is to build unmanned legged vehicles with rough-terrain mobility superior to existing wheeled and tracked vehicles. The idea system would travel anywhere a person or animal could go using their legs, run for many hours at a time, and carry… »
Folks from German company Festo keep creating bionic marine animals which float in air. Penguins are fascinating creatures which have lost their ability to fly in the course of their genetic development as marine birds, but Festo engineers managed to create an artificial penguin and taught it “autonomous flight in the sea of air”. Named… »
The Stenzel Ltd. from Poland is a unique commercial-scientific venture in the Central Europe area. They are developing HeXoR, a mobile didactic robot which has been designed as a teaching aid for schools and research institutions. It can be lots of fun if you are an enthusiast, who is keen on robotics, informatics and electronics… »
