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Brendan I. Koerner has an excellent article up on WIRED about the development of the LEGO Mindstorms NXT kit. It's a sneek peek at the February issue of WIRED, that will feature Mindstorms NXT. The article tells the story of how John Barnes, David Schilling, Steve Hassenplug and Ralph Hempel becam…
The other exciting news from CES, relating to LEGO's big announcement, is that they also want you, the Mindstorms fans, to help develop the product further. They announced, ... a call for entries to secure one of 100 seats on the newly expanded LEGO® MINDSTORMS™ Users Panel (MUP), an ex…
How do you improve something that's almost perfect? That remains to be seen, but LEGO is going to try with it's New Version of LEGO Mindstorms, the LEGO Mindstorms NXT! Tom Atwood, at Robot Magazine, was lucky enough to spend some time with Soren Lund and asking him about the new NXT (pictures and …
Have you visited The Robot Directory lately? It's a great place to post your robot projects. Myself and the most excellent Chris Jorgenson created the site. Unfortunately, Chris had to leave the project, so, I'm looking for someone interested in helping out bringing The Robot Directory into the We…
Last week Honda announced the new and improved version of the Asimo. What's the main improvement? It's actually useful now. Well, at least Honda says so. Asimo, can now interact with human beings by delivering objects, or holding someone's hand. Asimo can also locate and track said human provided …
Have you been to the SheekGeek robotics store yet? The company, run by an aquaintance of mine, Adam Harris, sells educational robotics kits. Adam says, I started a company and am now making and selling robot kits among other electronic and educational products (still developing products actually.) …
IEEE Spectrum magazine has an excellent article detailing the current status of exoskeletons worldwide. The article is from last month, so, as of this writing the HAL-5 Exoskeleton from Cyberdyne Labs should be available in Japan. It has two control systems: one reads from the wearer's body to dete…
This isn't strictly robot related, but have you seen the South Leicester Aeronutz website? There's some really amazing radio controlled creations on there. Most of the creations use very thin (2mm) foam walls and tiny pager-type motors to turn the prop. You can purchase super-small (under 1cm squ…
In continuation with our first post about the International Robot Exhibition 2005 (IREX), here's some more cool robots from the exhibition. Breakdancing robot - I'd really like to see some video of this one.Also check out the exploding robot.Here's a small humanoid robot that can be controlled via …
Joe Engelberger, called, "the father of modern robotics", because he started the first company to use robots, has called the robots featured at the International Robot Expo, "toys," reports the Sidney Morning Herald. "These are toys that are being made," h…
The International Robot Exhibition (IREX) is going on right now in Tokyo, Japan! The 4 day long exhibition is featuring over 200 companies and some really cool robots. It looks like about the only site really covering the event is Akihabara News. The PacMan robot at IREX (with video) is cur…
Hansen Medical just raised $30 million dollars in its third round of funding. Vanguard Ventures lead the funding. The company has raised about $58 million so far. According to their website, Hansen Medical: ... marries robotic technology with computed movement and is designed to enable …
And you thought all that business about synthentic hands replacing real ones, viz Star Wars, was Hollywood trickery. Well, you thought wrong! It would appear that the Cyberhand Project is bringing a long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, to the here-and-now. Each of the five fingers is arti…
I predict 2006 will be the year of the RoboOne robots. First, Hitec gets into the action with its RoboNova robots, and now Volks Inc. is selling their very slick "Robofie" robots. Just from looking at the movies, it would appear that the Robofie is a bit more dexterous than RoboNova (here are some …
You may have seen the new Manoi robot from Kyosho featured on Akihabara News or Engadget, the the thing that sruck me, was its uncanny likeness to Chroino, which made big waves at this year's RoboNexus 2005 conference (photos). Engadget claims they're built around the Kyosho KHR-1 robot body, but …
Fully transformable robot costumes. It made its way from BoingBoing to Engadget and then here. Be your favorite Transformer character next halloween and transform, while you're wearing it. Engadget says: Since 1993, Canadian aerospace worker De Repentigny has been creating one-of-a-kind, stri…
