Read robotic news about Robotshop and the robotics industry.
Yen-Wen Lu and Chang-Jin Kim at UCLA have created the World's Smallest robotic hand . The hand, which is capable of grasping an object 1mm across, has four fingers made of silicone and polymer joints. The hand operates pneumatically when the balloon joints are inflated. The hand is seen in th …
The HAL-5 exoskeleton suit is nearing "mass" production. Engadget reports that professor Yoshiyuki Sankai at Tsukuba University is hoping to have the suit ready for 400-500 units by 2008, with a mere 20 units produced in 2007. The suite allows its user to double his lifting abilities.It…
VeraTech Aero, a Minnesota USA based company, has invented an aircraft that is nearly invisible to the naked eye. The secret to this technology is the concept of persistance of vision, or the lack thereof. The aircraft is uniquely created so that as it spins, its center of mass is in open space. T…
Caterpillar, the international maker of heavy machinery and eqipment, is seeking to enable it's bulldozers and eather movers to operate autonomously. Using a system of sensors and GPS navigation, the equipment would navigate around a building site while being cooridnated from a remote central l…
National Instruments announced today that it has created a LEGO Mindstorms NXT toolkit for direct interfacing between the kit and its powerful LabVIEW software. If you're one of the lucky few to own a copy of LabVIEW (most folks don't want to drop the $4k for it), then you will have the …
Reader David Aliaga, who's a member of the ZMP Inc. Education Team, sent us a note telling us about ZMP's latest product, the e-Nuvo WHEEL robot. The robot is based on Nuvo, but this time it's an inverted pendulum. Just to add up to the news, ZMP has launched what we called the…
Here's a quick link dump to catch up on my lack of posts.Jim, over at The NXT Step, pointed out that the New Yorker is doing a cartoon caption contest with a robot theme. Go and submit your idea, let me know what you think up.Here's a story I picked up about a suicidal man being subdued by a SWAT t…
A new South Korean startup, D2E Robotics, plans on releasing a two-legged hobbiest robot in October. In what appears to be a move to compete with other companies, such as Kyosho, Kondo, and Hitec, the robot, dubbed D2V-ZN, will have simple voice recognition and a vision system. Though, strangely
A new Japanese robotics magazine, Robot Life, has polled 500 Japanese females to ask them who was their favorite commercial robot. The grand winner was the PaPeRo robot, pictured at left, built by NEC. Also making the top 10 list (though, at a dismal 10th), is our friend Robonova. Wakamaru and Mano…
Here's a round-up of the latest news relating to Ugobe's robotic dinosaur Pleo, courtesy of our sister-site, PleoBot.com.Exclusive ROBOT Magazine Interview with Pleo’s MakersUgobe Announces Release Date for Pleo!Forbes Says Pleo One of 7 Robots That Will Change Your LifeMore News from Ugobe …
It seems the Japanese are always one step ahead of us. This time it's the opening of a combination robot museum and department store. The store plans on stocking about 1,000 different robot goodies, and will feature the Nuvo robot as its main attraction. In order to create a market for its expens…
We've talked about robotic blimps before, but not for this kind of application. This time a Californian entrepreneur, Bob Jones, is floating the idea of having large fleets of autonomous blimps provide wireless communication coverage for large areas. The blimps could take the place of both te…
Ugobe seems to be facing a bit of controvery over its new Pleo toy. Hot off the heels of a big story on Digg about Pleo, came another, even bigger story, about how the dino wasn't all that smart after all. Somone took the two released videos of Pleo and compared then, noting that they were almost i…
Servo Magazine is giving away a Robonova. Just fill out their reader's survey and you'll be automatically entered to win. Click on the picture of the Robonova on their website. They survey has 23 questions and took me under 10 minutes to fill out. Questions range from how much of the magazine you …
Kyosho has announced the release of the Manoi AT01 robot. He's set for a full release in September for around $1,300 USD. He has more abilities and a longer battery life than the original Manoi. Lem, over at Robots Dreams, has a whole list of information and videos of Manoi AT01 in action.There's …
Here's the final standings for the 9th Autonomous Underwater Vehicle competition:University of Florida Duke University Ecole de technologie superieure University of Rhode Island University of Texas at Dallas Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cornell Uni…
