White Box Robotics has finally started shipping its first run of PC 914 robots. By now the first run should be completely shipped, sans the attractive outer shell, due to delays in manufacturing. You may also notice that two small vertical parting lines were added to the bottom of the robot to brin…
Our friends over at Robot Magazine sent us a note that they'd gotten an exclusive shot of the new Vex Robotics Development system that is in the works. The new system will be jointly created by Revell Monogram LLC and Innovation First, Inc. (the original developers of Vex). Innovation First will
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…
iRobot issued a press release this morning detailing some of their new products . Of special interest is the new 250lb Warrior robot. Warrior, which is about six times the size of the packbot, can move at over 12mph over rough terrain and can carry a payload of up to 100 lbs. This annoucement coin…
This story lands in today's "very cool, yet very scary" category - South Korea develops a machine-gun equipped robotic sentry. The sentry robot is equipped with two cameras, one for day-time and one for infrared night vision, zooming capabilities, a speaker for notifying the intruder…
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 …
Instead of having a robot crawl through your intestines, how about it gliding along on a trail of slippery mucus? A group of researchers from Delft University of Technology, in the Netherlands, is taking this novel approach to inter-body exploration in order to protect the delicate lining of the in…
The Visual Lego software project allows you to gain full control of your NXT brick via .NET (Visual Basic, C#, etc.). This software wrapper allows you to access all the bricks functionality over the serial bluetooth link. The library, written by Bram Fokke, is almost complete. It can be downloaded…
I get a lot of emails and comments posted from folks asking questions about robotics. Unfortunately, most of them are rather specific and I just don't have the time to answer them all individually. Thankfully, that's where a few cool products, books, and websites come into play. Back when I first …
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…
First it was Jesse Sullivan, the first man to receive two bionic arms that are controlled via his own brain impulses, now it's Claudia Mitchell, the first woman to receive such an arm. Mitchell is the 4th such person to receive such an arm, which is controlled via nerves which originally went …
A group of scientists at MIT are working on a gas engine about the size of a quarter. Better yet, it's made out of sillicon. The device, who's individual pieces are all working, still needs to be fully assembled and tested. The engines components, like a combustion chamber, compressor, and turbine,…
Robot hobbyists (with a hefty wallet) rejoice! The long awaited 9-Series PC Robots from White Box Robotics are officially soon-to-be-shipping. The robots, manufactured by Frontline Robotics, which merged with Tom Burick's brainchild, White Box Robotics, are first being released in a low quantity, …
