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…
Here's an audio presentation by Theo Jansen at PopTech 2005. Jansen is the creator of the amazing beach creatures that we've covered before (which happens to be our most popular post). Jansen talks about his creatures and how he started creating them. Unfortunately, there seems to be a significant …
Apparently bombs are becoming more and more of a problem for Israel (and other places) and in response, InRob Tech Inc. is beefing up it's lineup of bomb-disposal robots. Information Week says: [InRob] will begin developing a larger version of its bomb-disposal robot. The beefed up system wil…
ZMP, the Makers of the Nuvo robot have created an educational version called, "eNuvo" for use in schools. Robots-Dreams.com has some video and more information about it, in addition to the video on ZMP's site. [The] 12 weeks course includes: Coordinate systems of link structure, Motor Driver circui…
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 …
