The Air Force no longer wants Boeings X-45 unmanned airplane. The Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems program has been scrapped by the Pentagon, along with the $800 million set aside to build and purchase three of the X-45Cs. Boeing will now probably try and compete against the Northrop Grumman X-47 …
There is a video on New Scientist that shows a robot climbing a tree and other vertical surfaces. This is from the RiSE initiative, a descendent of the BR MURI project. BR MURI, Biomimetic Robots Multi-University Research Initiative, focused on building legged robots that ran. The goal of RiSE, Rob…
Pack animals have a long history in the military. The US was reminded of this fact in 2002, when it had to pull in horses and mules to move gear across the Afghanistan wilderness. TACOM responded by giving grants to two robotics companies, Yobotics and Boston Dynamics. Their mission: to produce a m…
A group of students and faculty at Dartmouth University College have created a robot to function in arctic weather and is solar powered. Such a robot was comissioned by NASA to aid in research in the antarctic. NASA's goal is to use the robot to search for evidence of bacteria in Antarctic snow. T…
Have you ever wondered who created the Predator drone? If so, then you'll want to check out this piece by Red Herring about General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GAAS), the creator of the Predator, and it's plans for the future (including Predator B and C!). The company is privately owned by a 55 y…
Remember the sub-launched robotic plane we talked about before? Well, here's some more information on it, courtesy of Popular Science. The plane will be released from a Trident missile tube on an Ohio-class U.S. submarine, surface, then take off. "The [missile] tubes are as long as a semi tr…
From houseflies to honeybees, insects inspire us with flight skills just beyond the grasp of our technology. Z. Jane Wang, a professor at Cornell University, is working to close this gap between inspiration and implementation. Wang’s recent work is on dragonflies, and here she has found some…
Here's an insightful article from the Wall Street Journal about Lockheed Martin's foray into the robot done market. Lockheed, which helped develop the Dragon Eye, and the Desert Hawk is trying to play catch-up to larger robotic drone makers, like Northrup Grumman and Boeing. There're working on inn…
iRobot and John Deere are continuing work on their R-Gator autonomous vehicle. According to a recent press release, they have selected LynuxWorks to provide an embedded Linux RTOS. One wonders why the R-Gator team selected LynuxWorks over Wind River, maker of the software running on the M…
Need a break from the 6-wheel boggy design? Looking for a Martian rover that offers something new? Then take a look at this month's Popular Science, which poses the question "Is This the Machine That Will Finally Find Life on Mars?"The machine is the latest from Carnegie Mellon Universit…
There's something extremely unnerving about the thought of a tiny robot (rc controlled) driving around the inside of my abdomen. It seems very akin to the robot that too up residence inside of Neo on The Matrix. Regardless, Dr. Dmitry Oleynikov and colleagues at the University of Nebraska Medical …
By now, most people have heard of Ken Gracey's amazing 3.5" tall Penguin robots. He wrote an article on them in last month’s Servo magazine. The CNC drawings were published also and some in the robotics community have already built their own (for example, click here).Max Kurz at the Uni…
Dr. Scott Banks, an engineer at The University of Florida has developed a robot that shoots xray videos of moving patients. This will allow doctors to view the bone structure of their patients as they move. This is especially important for persons with orthopedic injuries. “Our goal is come…
It seems to be pretty self-evident that pets are good for their owners. But, what about robot pets? Some scientists at the Center for the Human-Animal Bond at Purdue's Veterinary school say yes, robot pets do benefit humans. Petting an Aibo caused the human stress hormone cortisol to decrese in pat…
For her PhD thesis, Edurne Barrenechea Tartas developed a new twist on artificial vision: add fuzzy sets or noise. This is somewhat akin to the edge detection used in the Leaf Project, described by Robin Hewitt in Servo a few months back. The noise is used to dither the image, thereby increasi…
MachineDesign has an article on DARPA's foray into the world of exoskeletons, specifically the Bleex exoskeleton's created at Berkeley. DARPA has invested over $50 million dollars in exoskeleton research. One of the more successful groups working on them is at Berkeley. Their suite, called the Blee…
