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Ugobe is busily preparing for an October launch of its dinosaur artificial-lifeform, Pleo, by releasing a series of "Behind the Scenes" videos on the making of Pleo. Also video that has popped up online, is a parody of the Budweiser "Wassssup" commercial featuring Pleo. Yo…
Keepon, a robot designed to study, "dance-oriented nonverbal play with between children and the robot" gets his big debut in a music-video featuring the music of Spoon. The robot, designed and built by Hideki Kozima, and programmed by Marek Michalowski, has four degrees of freedom, two…
The 10th annual, international, AUVSI sponsored, autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) competition wrapped up Sunday. For the third straight year it looks like University of Florida's SubjuGator has taken first place. UF is followed by University of Central Florida with their year-old, rapid pr…
RoboCup 2007 is going on right now (July 3rd - 10th) in Atlanta GA, on the campus of Georgia Tech University.This international competition pits teams of robotic soccer players against each other.This year will see the addition of the brand new "Nanogram Demonstration challenges",…
Here's an interesting post from Engadget . Disney has rolled out an interesting muppet mobile in its Disneyland themepark. The very Segway-esc creation is supposed to be the invention of Professor Bunsen Honeydew and his talkative sidekick, Beaker. The vehicle roams around the park and entert…
If you've ever need a digital servo but have balked at the price, the Open Servo Project should be an attractive option. The project seeks to develop software and hardware to replace the internals of standard servos like the Futaba S3003 and the Hitec-HS311. OpenServo is an open community-based pr…
To break our month of silence (Masters Thesis research, sorry) I thought I'd throw in some humor, via Engadget. Listen as a caller to the San Francisco Chronicle go berzerk over the phrase "pilotless drone". There's also some humorous remixes.The moral of the story? Some folks ne…
Starting Saturday, February 3rd, Ugobe will offer it's robotic dinosaur, Pleo, for preorder. The price is expected to be around $250, and Pleo is expected to ship sometime in the 2nd Quarter of 2007 (April - June).Pleo features over 30 sensors, a video camera, SD and USB ports, a 2hr battery ru…
WowWee Toys, probably one of the largest robotic toy manufacturers, has announced three new additions to it's robotic lineup at this year's CES show. In addition to the hugely popular Robosapien line of toys, you will soon be able to get a robotic panda, RoboPanda and spider-like robot, Ro…
The folks from the DARPA Urban challenge have issued a press release (PDF) detailing the prizes for the competition. The top three finishers will now be awarded $2,000,000 USD, $1,000,000 USD, and $500,000 USD respectively. Originally, they were only going to offer trophies to the winners due to …
Lem from Robots-Dreams has written an excellent article for ROBOT Magazine on the first ever Kyosho Athlete Humanoid Cup. The event took place on December 10th in Tokyo, Japan. The robots competed in 5 meter sprints and in a 2 minute performance/demonstration category. The fastest human controlle…
Hanson Robotics , the creators of the Albert Einstein and Philip K. Dick robots are hoping to break into the home robot market. David Hanson, the companies founder, likes to create life-like robots that blur the line between man and machine."If you make it perfectly realistic, you trigger th…
The Chicago Police department runs into a few snags while showing off its latest bomb disposal robot . Moral of the story: always rehearse before going on camera!Zou Renti creates a robotic copy of himself . Creepiness ensues.Here's a video of the scariest rubics-cube solving robot you'll e…
It looks like everyone's favorite, under appreciated, robotics company, Evolution Robotics, has teamed up with a, "large appliance manufacturer" to create a competitor to iRobot's smash-hit Roomba. The main claim-to-fame of the new soon-to-be sucker'bot is that it will be …
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 …
