Oddwerx Ike And Lucy Oddwerx, produced by OLogic Inc is a very impressive and very capable smartphone robotic platform. The platform is compatible with all the major software development platforms including MyRobots.com, Android, IOS and ROS. This robot even won the California Cloud Robotics Ha
Swarmanoid Swarm robotics -using several simple collaborating robots to accomplish very complex tasks, instead of using a single very complex robot- is becoming increasingly popular. The Swarmanoid project is a perfect example of what can be achieved by using a swarm of small robots. As
Jedi Bot is a robot arm wielding a foam "lightsaber" that will try to attack or defend itself from human opponents. This system used the Kinect in order to track its opponent and was put together by students from Stanford. Of course, this is not the first robot wielding a lightsaber, but
In previous posts, we reported on the aggressive quad-rotors from the University of Pennsylvania which are capable of doing amazing things quite effortlessly. Achieving such impressive results required a lot of hard work, testing and trial-and-error. The video below focuses on the "error" part
As we reported in the past, DLR is the proud creator of Justin a very advanced humanoid robot. Lately they have been working in a very robust robotic arm and hand system. The videos below show how they punish their robots with hammers and baseball bats in order to demonstrate how well they e
As a leading robotics distributor, RobotShop often gets requests from inventors and developers to help them bring their products to market, but due to lack of resources, we only accepted products ready to be distributed. This is about to radically change. RobotShop Technology Accelerator We are l…
IBM Watson Watson, a super computer from IBM is challenging the human Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in the first Man vs. Machine Jeopardy! competition. Below you can see a nice teaser for the competition. The first round already took place on Monday, February 14th 201
SaRTrE Volvo Auto Train Volvo is testing their new Safe Road Trains for the Environment, which basically means, cars that drive autonomously. The system is intended to be used on highways where a lead (human driven) truck will be followed by autonomously driven cars. The cars will receive instr
So far Robots have been programmed to avoid things when navigating in their environment. Sébastien Lengagne of Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan developed a method for robots to use objects (which would otherwise be seen as "obstacles")
Heartland Robotics, a company founded by Rodney Brooks (founder and former Chief Technological Officer at iRobot, and MIT professor) is developing what should constitute a true robolution. Their main objective is to change the way we currently view robots by making them ubiquitous. Heartland R
Inverted pendulums (i.e. balancing a stick on a moving platform) never ceases to fascinate humans, especially when it is done by a robot. Pencil Balancing Robot The robot illustrated in the video below is capable of balancing a pencil on its tip. The motion of the pencil is tracked by two im
About a week after the Open LiDAR project was announced, the Neato XV-11 has been hacked and now its juicy LiDAR data can be used by everybody. This effectively makes the Neato XV-11 not only one of the most advanced vacuum cleaner robots in the market, but also, the cheapest LiDAR available.
Kinect Hacked The Kinect was quickly hacked a few weeks ago and now, the development around this sensor is advancing very fast. The Kinect is a 3D camera made by Microsoft that not only senses a full colour video, but also sees the depth of objects and scenes. [vimeo 17007842] In the robotics …
For quite some time now, Festo, a leading pneumatics company, has been innovating in the robotics field by creating impressive and very unique robots inspired by nature. The video below, is a good summary of their innovative work. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X5KdVS1LFk Make sure you also hav
iRobot and the University of Chicago released a video of their universal robotic gripper. This gripper that can conform to the shape of seemingly any object. Once it conforms to an object it uses vacuum to become rigid and grip it. This exploits the property of granular materials such as coffee to …
The University of Pennsylvania GRASP Lab has been doing pretty amazing job with their quad-rotors UAVs. University of Pennsylvania Aggressive Quad-rotors UAVs These robots can do pretty impressive manoeuvres that humans would have a very hard time to imitate. They fly trough free-falling ho