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Eelume company developed a snake-like robot for underwater maintenance tasks. The deceptively simple robots could drastically reduce operating costs for deep sea rigs.
Awesome? Undoubtedly. Useful? Well, according to Kagome, which claims to be Japan's largest supplier of ketchup and tomato juice, people taking part in the Tokyo marathon really need this.
Unfortunately, most people would, even when they've been shown it's not functioning properly.
The focus point of prosthetics today is, understandably, restoring ability, function and form to those who have lost a limb. But the same technology can be used to augment a healthy body, allowing a person to perform tasks outside of our body's limitations.
Pushing around Atlas actually has a purpose, besides annoying the robot.
Such a program might prove effective at training simple robots to be less awkward around humans and, most importantly, make sure they don't hurt anyone or break social norms.
Cockroaches are nasty and annoying, but you've gotta hand it to them - if there's something they're really good at, it's surviving.
It may be possible to observe the presence of an advanced alien civilization by the effects produced if that civilization were to self-destruct through nuclear war, biological warfare, nanotechnological annihilation, or stellar pollution. Each case would generate unique detectable signs that could be identified by earth-based telescopes.
In what seemed impossible just a few years ago, a computer has beaten a Go champion.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a United States agency responsible for developing new technologies, mostly with military applications. They work with advanced prosthetics, holograms, robots, drones, and more robots. They’re at the cutting edge of technology, and I’d bet quite a few pints that they have groundbreaking classified projects. Now, in a new […]
Researchers at Tufts alter the laws of robotics to teach robots to say "no".
While everyone from Google, to Tesla, to BMW is engineering driverless cars, gearing up for an impeding auto revolution, a Chinese company went directly for a niche market: driverless buses.
A couple of quadrotors wove a bridge out of polyethylene fiber rope in an intricate dance. Some 120 meters of rope were used by the quadrotors to bridge the 7.4-meter gap, neatly tying knots, links, and braiding. Ultimately, the final test was passed after an ETH Zurich’s Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control student crossed the robot-manufactured bridge.
A new report created by Dr Carl Benedikt Frey and Associate Professor Michael Osborne from the University of Oxford assesses the probability of jobs being taken over by robots in the next 20 years.
Picture this: A city under siege. Many of the outlying buildings are old, dry, lifeless shells of their former beauty as nearly 50 percent of the population is wiped out, consumed by ravenous invaders. And the only hope of lifting the siege lies with a poison injecting, yellow robot.
Robotics has developed tremendously in recent years, and will almost surely continue to do so in the future. We have surgical robots, hotels run by robots, robots that learn, even samurai robots! After all, it makes sense we finally got some bartender robots, right? After MIT showed off its "Beerbots" that bring you beer while you're on the couch, we have HoLLiE, a robot bartender that did a fantastic job at a party in Berlin, making and serving over 280 cocktails!
An European initiative founded in 2012, dubbed RoboHow, comes to take up the challenge of improving the way robots work and interact with humans by creating a database that should help robots learn and share information with each other (even by using actual language), mimicking human learning processes.
Nanoengineers from the San Diego University of California used innovative, self-developed 3D printing methods to create multipurpose, fish-shaped microbots - that they call microfish - which can swim around efficiently through liquids, powered by hydrogen peroxide and are magnetically controlled.
A robotics team lead by Cambridge University engineer Fumiya Iida have designed a robot that archeologists of the future (they will all be robots) will recognize as the moment the machines started to take over. They built a "mother" device that can create smaller, "baby" robots, and programed it (her?) so that experience obtained building them would be used to improve upon further generations.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is on the brink of revolutionizing relaxation with their recent breakthrough: they have programmed two robots that can deliver beverages.
A very large number of scientific and technological luminaries have signed an open letter calling for the world's governments to ban the development of "offensive autonomous weapons" to prevent a "military AI arms race."
Evenwin Precision Technology, an electronics processing company, sacked 90% of its employees, replaced them with robots and saw productivity soar. Previously, there were 650 employees at the factory, now there are 60 - mostly engineers and accountants that oversee the production lines - and the number should go down to 20, according to company officials. The robots have produced almost three times as many pieces as were produced before. Quality has also improved. The product defect rate was 25%, now it is below 5%.
Taking inspiration from nature, scientists in South Korea hijacked millions of years of evolution and devised their very own robotic version of a water-strider - insects that can jump on water. Their tiny droid mimics the water-strider in both its water balancing acts and jumping on water, which is a lot harder than it sounds.
Tesla Motors’ Elon Musk has said that our civilization is dangerously close to encountering AI problems within a “five-year timeframe, 10 years at most.” He made the comment on the website Edge.org shortly before deleting it. His point was that, sometime soon, we may actually create a form of artificial intelligence that decides to rise […]
Elon Musk, the mastermind behind Tesla Motors, SpaceX and Hyperloop, will offer $10 million in grants to fund 37 research projects dedicated to keeping artificial intelligence “beneficial” and “under control”. With the mind blowing explosion of computing and the ever-growing interest in AI, we’re growing closer to the point where we have to ask ourselves whether we’ll […]
Earlier this month, Megabots Inc issued a video challenge on Youtube to Suidobashi Heavy Industries, to pit the company's' biggest, baddest robots against each other in a duel of giant robots. And grab the popcorn, put the beer on ice and get your geek on, because Japanese robot manufacturer has accepted the challenge from its US competitor, Efe news agency reported.
Seemingly small and delicate, seahorses are actually much more resilient than they look. Engineers have demonstrated that the seahorses’ prism-like tails are mechanically superior to the cylindrical ones; the discovery could lead to the development of more resilient robots. There are 54 species of seahorses, and while they may be significantly different one from the other, […]
Over the weekend, Amazon - a company that employs more than 50,000 people in its warehouses alone - organized a contest where engineering teams from all over the world were invited to present a robot that can fulfill simple warehouse duties. Though some of the bots were quite impressive, all of them failed miserably at some point, even at a task so simple as grabbing an item from a shelf and placing it in a tub. It's not that they couldn't do this, rather they were so slow and clumsy that any warehouse worker witnessing the display might think he's a superhero and his job is safer than the pope in the Vatican. Well, that may be true ... but who knows for how long. After all, any repetitive task can be automated, eventually.
At the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) conference, a team from MIT, in collaboration wit the Technische Universitat in Germany, presented an incredible origami bot that can perform various complex motor tasks. Weighing only 0.3 grams, the bot can scuttle at about 4 cm/sec to crawl up an arm, carry twice its load, dig through a pile of foam, climb a ramp or push a tiny puck along a planned trajectory. At the end, the researchers demonstrate how the entire bot (apart from its magnet) can be dissolved in acetone. Later on, it's easy to imagine a similar origami bot traveling through your body where it performs various tasks like deliver a medical payload, diagnose for diseases or even perform surgery. It would be designed to be much smaller and with all its parts dissoalvable inside the human body after a while or when emerged in a certain bodily solution.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has funded a project which promises to become the quickest two-legged robot in the world. Using technology inspired from pogo sticks, the robot could be useful for getting in and out of areas too dangerous for human rescuers.
In a breakthrough in robotics, researchers have programmed a swarm consisting of a whooping 1,024 members which can assemble in programmable 2-D shapes. The demonstration might provide insights in how natural self-assembling swarms operate, like ants who join up to form bridges for the good of the colony.
Inspired by the ancient Japanese art of Origami, engineers at Harvard and MIT have developed an amazing robot that stats off as one single sheet, then folds itself into a complex shape in under four minutes, before making a gentleman’s exit. The potential applications of this display are numerous. For instance, launching payload in space […]
Designed by the world’s foremost social robotics expert, MIT’s Cynthia Breazeal, Jibo looks like a cross between HAL 9000 and Eve from Wall-E. The robot seeks to become the first in a line of truly intelligent robot helpers that not only assist the family with chores, but become part of it as well. Is this cute, […]
Rashid Bashir, the head of bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is one of the pioneers leading a new field of robotics which deals with bio-bots. These tiny robots, less than a centimeter in size, combine biological and mechanical components to meet a certain purpose. Recently, Bashir and his team demonstrated a bio-bot […]
The 65 year-old iconic Turing Test was passed for the very first time by a supercomputer program named Eugene Goostman. Eugene managed to convince 33% of the human judges that it too was human. The Turing Test The Turing test is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, […]
Hugh Herr, head of the Lab’s Biomechatronics research group, spoke at TED 2014 on March 19 about his group’s work in creating bionic prosthetic limbs, and their goal to eliminate human disability through technology. For Herr, his work and involvement is deeply personal, having lost both his lower limbs in a climbing accident 30 years […]
Isaac Asimov, the father of the three laws of robotics, made some startling predictions many years ago about how thet future might look like. He’s been dead on in some respects, however the writer miscalculated how advanced robots would be in 2014 and how integrated these would become in human society. You see, before robots […]
A freak accident left Jason Barnes without his left arm below the elbow – a disheartening matter by all means, made worse when considering he also used to be a drummer. The young man did not despair, however, and as an Atlanta Institute of Music and Media student he sought to fill in his missing arm as best […]
What’s possibly the most advanced humanoid robot ever built was recently unveiled by Boston Dynamics – one of the most impressive and renowned robotics company. Named ATLAS, this 6′ 2 tall, 330-pounds powerhouse has all the agility and strength of the Petman, only this time it also has a head. Mounted inside the head are a LIDAR sensor […]
Scientists at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC) demonstrated a type of peripheral interface called targeted muscle re-innervation (TMR), part of DARPA’s Reliable Neural-Interface Technology (RE-NET) research program which seeks to develop effective brain interfaces. The prosthetic is simply amazing, as one can see in the video below featuring former Army Staff Sgt. Glen Lehman, injured in Iraq. The […]
There are all kinds of robots nowadays that are here to assist humans with their daily chores, both at work and home alike. I think a lot of us have dreamed and even spoken out loudly, of course jokingly, how cool would it be to have a robot walk along side you and reach out […]
In a society where overqualified, but desperate for work individuals are forced to take low-paid jobs to make means, it’s rather humorous that the smartest computer in the world, IBM’s Watson, has now been tasked as a call-center agent. Just a few years ago, IBM made the front page all over the world after its supercomputer […]
When you think of robots, the first thing you might think of are anthropological-looking tin cans that beep around and perform various tasks (you have SciFi shows to thank for that) or familiar modern day industrial robots that toil away day and night producing goods. As such, a puck-sized robot that doesn’t look like much might […]
Just recently European scientists have released the first part of the Rapyuta program – a global world wide web for robots. Now, don’t get this wrong. This isn’t a place where robots can chat, surf websites or browse facebook. On Rapyuta, robots will have access to open data like a massive database, as well as additional […]
For some time now, researchers have been experimenting with the idea of an aircraft that operates with flapping wings, just like insects or birds do, instead of conventional flat and long wings. The idea is that flapping wings allow a much greater degree of control and stability, allowing the aircraft to perform maneuvers otherwise impossible. […]
Cockroaches are maybe the most amazing insects in the animal kingdom – they’re simply made to survive. These little buggers can survive in sub-zero temperatures, can withstand a lethal dose of radiation up to 15 times of that for humans, can live without food for a whole month and … they can live with a […]
Chances have it, if you’re working in the field of manufacturing, medicine, research or even sales, that some of your co-workers are robots. Which is no wonder, since robots today are a lot cheaper and efficient than most humans when simple or repetitive tasks are required, or on the contrary when high precision and delicate […]
Researchers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have developed a three-legged silicon robot that uses chemical reactions to help it leap up to 30 times its own height. Combustion is typically used in hard systems like internal combustion engines where the heat generated by the chemical reaction can be withstood, but this latest demo proves that […]
The whole point of technology is that of aiding mankind, and it has done so since the advent of fire and will continue to do for a long time. In today’s fast pacing world, however, technology is evolving so fast that it has caught the workforce by surprise. Of course, we’re primarily referring to robots, […]
A team of scientists at University of Colorado Boulder is currently working on self-assembling robots the size of a ping-pong ball that may fit together to serve various purposes. The researchers envision swarms of such tiny robots could assemble to build or repair satellites in space, contain an oil spill or form into other complex systems. Nikolaus […]
