Get the heartbeat of the robotic industry by learning about events, new developments in private companies, government projects and more.
Bob May, the actor that played "Robot" from the original Lost in Space TV show has died. He died at the age of 69 from congestive heart failure. Lost in Space debuted in 1965, and is a retelling of the Swiss Family Robinson story, in space. Apparently May got the part because, " .…
The Robot Hall of Fame honors the highest accomplishments of robots in science and science fiction. Their first group of robots inducted into the Hall of Fame in November 2003 represents the best of imagined and real robots. The Hall of Fame celebrates landmark scientific achievements as well as ap…
Arduino, the very popular open source microcontroller from Italy, is making headlines again. This time, its own documentary has been released and is free for everybody to watch. Arduino Documentary The documentary was independently made and depicts the origins, the philo…
Minds + Machine TV Add General Electric has released what might be the most epic robot-themed TV ad ever. Take a look below. The ad features many well known real robots as well as robots from science-fiction. The fictional robots include Robbie, B-9 (Lost in Space), the original K.I.T.T.
MakerBot Replicator 2 3D printers are types of robots that are revolutionizing the manufacturing sector. They make product creation accessible to (almost) everyone by taking care of the precise and often cost-prohibitive work involved in building a physical object. In the same way regular com…
Autom Diet Robot Autom is a small companion robot created by Intuitive Automata. Its main goal is to encourage people to have a healthy diet, and exercise regularly with the objective of loosing weight and staying healthy. This robot uses its social capabilities, which include speech and eye-
Heartland Robotics, founded by Rodney Brooks as reported before, changed its identity to Rethink Robotics. And rethinking robotics they do as they recently released Baxter, a robot with common sense as they brand it. Baxter overview Baxter redefines industrial robots since it allows small an
ALIZ-E Project Nao Human-Robot Interaction The Forbes web site started a new column about the future of robotics. Unlike other news sources, instead of focusing on the latest technological advances and research, they are interested in the real-world application of robotic technology. In other
Kinect@Home Discerning shapes and recognizing objects takes humans several years to learn and it is an essential skill to survive and interact with the world around us. Machines also need to learn this important skill and although some researchers have made progress in recognizing objects, shap
It has been years in the making; hundreds of engineers and scientists and debate after debate of where and how to land - but the rover Curiosity has finally touched down and is working properly. Image from Curiosity - Courtesy of JPL The rover, equipped with not only a multitude of cameras (1…
Not many robots enjoy full autonomy; humans often prefer to supervise them and make sure they are doing their job right. However, there are some situations where direct supervision is impossible. For instance, when sending robots to explore space, the communication latency increases as they get far…
Heartland Robotics Heartland Robotics (covered before) is a company that promises to bring the robotics industry to North America by creating a low-cost robotic manipulator that will make complex-robotics available to everyone. But... you probably knew all that already. What is new and exiting i…
Smart Pebbles 2D Duplication An MIT research group created tiny robots called "smart pebbles". Although individually these robots do not have a lot of intelligence, they can collaborate and function together in order to replicate simple objects as shown below. The video below shows only
For those of you who could not attend ICRA 2012, here is a video compilation of all the awesome robots that were present including, DARPA, ARM, NASA's Robonaut2, Willow Garage PR2, ReconRobotics Scout and Intuitive DaVinci. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6MZV88AvXo#! Via IEEE Spectrum.
The BrainGate2 technology allowed a tetraplegic (or quadriplegic) woman to control a robotic arm using her brain as shown in the video below. This technology uses a brain implant that broadcasts the neurons' signals to a computer interface and although the prospect of poking electrodes into your br…
Arduino is fast becoming one of the most popular microcontrollers used in robotics.There are many different types of Arduino microcontrollers which differ not only in design and features, but also in size and processing capabilities. In this article, you’ll understand the differences between the
