A hospital in Scotland will be the first in the United Kingdom to be equipped with robots for staff. They will not carry out medical tasks but rather hospital staff chores. The Forth Valley Royal Hospital will welcome these new robotic employees who will carry food to rooms, be able to dispense…
Justin is a German humanoid robot created at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics in Wessling, Germany. The robot comes in several versions, including one particularly intended for space with super easy to use arms and hands, a head and a torso. The aim of Justin is to go and repair satel…
We already talked about Octavia, the Navy's android, a couple of weeks ago. Today, here's Octavia again in a video alongside a magician. The conjuring trick requires the robot to guess under which cup the object is hidden after they've been mixed up. The humanoid guesses correctly without any …
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…
The manufacturer of the Kuka industrial robotic arm has unveiled a mobile platform with open interfaces and open source software. It's a first: a manufacturer of industrial robots heading towards consumer robotics. The arm has a multidirectional mobile platform, a hand with 5 degrees of freedom…
The company, Adept, a leader in industrial robotics has just acquired MobileRobots Inc, a specialist in mobile robotics. This is a significant take-over because it's unusual. MobileRobots, a New Hampshire company with annual revenues of 5 million dollars, provides autonomous robot and self-guid…
Here's yet another example of what you can do with LEGO: an exoskeleton to make a robotic hand. The designer is David Hyman from MOC pages. His prototype uses 3 rotation sensors for the fingers and two touch sensors for the wrist. It's not a whole hand but rather a hand with two fingers: the t…
This robotic hand is quite amazingly accurate. By the Ishikawa Komuro laboratory at the University of Tokyo, this hand prototype shows very promising reflexes and speed. With only three fingers, the hand can juggle with a straw, throw then catch a flying object (a cell phone here), hold and move…
Robonaut R2 is almost ready to take off for its space mission. The astronaut robot which will take off for the International Space Station at the end of 2010 is almost finalized and ready for liftoff. Robonaut R2 weighs 300 pounds, or about 136 kg. It is able to manipulate objects and perform…
It will have taken one year, 4 people and 30 000 dollars worth of LEGO to achieve this giant robotic chess game. 100 000 LEGO and NXT pieces have been used here to carry out this project. The giant chessboard measures about 16 m2, or 4 meters by 4 meters. There are 3 game modes: human against …
RobotErectus is a robot prototype of a soccer player which seems visibly ready for the soccer World Cup in South Africa :-) It shoots the ball, it can even pick the ball up from off the ground and throw it in, it jumps, it can move to the side and it can even bow to the crowd (surely after it's sc…
Japan has just unveiled two new humanoid robot prototypes, M3-Kindy and Noby. -M3-Kindy is a 5 year old android weighing 27 kg with 42 degrees of freedom. The M3-Kindy robotic child is packed with sensors: more than 109 in total (including video camera eyes). It was developed with the aim of stu…
Myon is a new humanoid robot designed by the industrial design studio, Frackenpohl Poulheim (in Cologne), and developed by the Neurorobotics Research Laboratory at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. The size of a 12 year old, Myon has the special ability to continue to operate even if some …
The Laboratory of the Institute of Advanced Technology of Chiba in Japan is showing many videos of their prototypes on Youtube. There you can find a strange giant spider which transports a man sitting, a robotic mini crab as well as a flying butterfly species. It's exciting to discover: http:/…
Belvedere the Buttlerbot is a DIY robot based on the iRobot Create platform (Roomba base). It was made by a robotics enthusiast for his family and mainly for his son, Ethan (dancing in the photo above). Belvedare can avoid obstacles, serves food and drinks, talks, tells jokes and plays music. …
Qbo by The Corpora, an open source robot project that we told you about recently now has its own video channel on Youtube. An address to remember: http://www.youtube.com/user/QboRobot As a reminder, the Qbo by Francisco Paz aims to bring artificial intelligence to the home. http://www.youtube.…
