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
Everybody knows that robots take jobs that are simply too dangerous or that human do not want to do, filming and taking pictures of bikini models is definitely not one of them. Nevertheless, a very lucky hexacopter UAV got this highly coveted job. UAV Photographing Bikini Model If you want to…
RobotShop is putting together a list of the most noteworthy and outright coolest robots for 2010 and we need your help. You can participate by voting in a poll on the RobotShop Forum that will decide which are The Ten Coolest Robots of 2010. We have selected twenty of the coolest robots from a c…
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
Microdrones Fleet Wiwo.de and The Register, and Fortune report that google has acquired a md4-1000 from the German company Microdrones GmbH. That type of UAV can fly for roughly one hours on a single charge and could photograph pretty much everything on its way. Maybe Google is seeking a cheaper
Little Bird Unmanned Full-sized Chopper The Little Bird, a full-sized autonomous helicopter made its first flight last June. For the first time, a full sized autonomous robot performed an entire flight (including take-off, obstacle avoidance, and landing) by itself. The helicopter is a modified
BAE Taranis UCAV The Taranis is an Unmanned Combat Aircraft System (UCAS) developed by BAE Systems for the UK military. This stealth "swept delta" aircraft is intended to be fully autonomous and look utterly awesome. Although test flights are programmed to start in 2011, it is important to note th…
French company Parrot has just announced the prices for its AR Drone. It will be available to buy for 299 dollars from September in the United States. As a reminder, AR Drone which has been presented at the CES in Las Vegas then at E3 2010, is a quadricopter controlled by an iPhone. It has 2 v…
Here's a prototype of an autonomous helicopter with four engines (quadrotor) capable of carrying out extreme movements in confined areas. Daniel Mellinger, Nathan Michael and Vijay Kumar from Grasp Lab at the University of Pennsylvania have designed this ultra easy to use UAV (Unmanned Aerial Ve…
The Micropilot MP-Vision Glider is an unmanned air vehicle. It can be preprogrammed with specific flight plans in advance. This drone can be optionally equipped with a camera to take snapshots of crops or forest areas, for example. The MP-Vision has a radio control but can also fly autonomou…
Stanford University's Biomimetics Laboratory has developed a drone which is able to cling on walls and stay fixed. The airplane clings on walls thanks to small spines on its front feet. The main difficulty with this technology is being in a position to be able to make the plane land on a vertic…
Drones come in various sizes and with various functions (transport, surveillance, combat) but often the existing planes and helicopters are still rather on the large side. Fortunately at RobotShop we've already taken a step further in surveillance with our Skybotix helicopter drone. In terms of…
What a wonderful idea to send a Drone to scan the Tyrolean Alps. This drone is equipped with a High Definition camera; the pictures taken show the beauty of this magnificient landscape. It skims the trees and the summit of the mountains while flying. This is very daring since its prototype coul…
The Robust Robotics Group at MIT has created a QuadCopter which can travel about according to vocal instructions. The technician in the video below gives the following order to a helicopter robot: "Go across room 124, then face the windows and go up." This drone carries out the order without di…
The Skybotix CoaX UAV Drone is an autonomous micro helicopter. It is a coaxial helicopter robot ideal for research and education. It features two brushless motors for the rotors and two servo motors for guidance. To communicate, the Skybotix CoaX uses a Bluetooth connection and also an optiona…
