A group of students and faculty at Dartmouth University College have created a robot to function in arctic weather and is solar powered. Such a robot was comissioned by NASA to aid in research in the antarctic. NASA's goal is to use the robot to search for evidence of bacteria in Antarctic snow. T…
From houseflies to honeybees, insects inspire us with flight skills just beyond the grasp of our technology. Z. Jane Wang, a professor at Cornell University, is working to close this gap between inspiration and implementation. Wang’s recent work is on dragonflies, and here she has found some…
Need a break from the 6-wheel boggy design? Looking for a Martian rover that offers something new? Then take a look at this month's Popular Science, which poses the question "Is This the Machine That Will Finally Find Life on Mars?"The machine is the latest from Carnegie Mellon Universit…
There's something extremely unnerving about the thought of a tiny robot (rc controlled) driving around the inside of my abdomen. It seems very akin to the robot that too up residence inside of Neo on The Matrix. Regardless, Dr. Dmitry Oleynikov and colleagues at the University of Nebraska Medical …
By now, most people have heard of Ken Gracey's amazing 3.5" tall Penguin robots. He wrote an article on them in last month’s Servo magazine. The CNC drawings were published also and some in the robotics community have already built their own (for example, click here).Max Kurz at the Uni…
Dr. Scott Banks, an engineer at The University of Florida has developed a robot that shoots xray videos of moving patients. This will allow doctors to view the bone structure of their patients as they move. This is especially important for persons with orthopedic injuries. “Our goal is come…
It seems to be pretty self-evident that pets are good for their owners. But, what about robot pets? Some scientists at the Center for the Human-Animal Bond at Purdue's Veterinary school say yes, robot pets do benefit humans. Petting an Aibo caused the human stress hormone cortisol to decrese in pat…
For her PhD thesis, Edurne Barrenechea Tartas developed a new twist on artificial vision: add fuzzy sets or noise. This is somewhat akin to the edge detection used in the Leaf Project, described by Robin Hewitt in Servo a few months back. The noise is used to dither the image, thereby increasi…
Here's an audio presentation by Theo Jansen at PopTech 2005. Jansen is the creator of the amazing beach creatures that we've covered before (which happens to be our most popular post). Jansen talks about his creatures and how he started creating them. Unfortunately, there seems to be a significant …
