Tokyo department store Takashimiya installed a lifelike fembot — capable of 60 different facial expressions — in its display window to attract shoppers for Valentine's Day.
Forget the Blue Angels — this swarm of nano quadrotors from the University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Laboratory can fly complicated patterns in three dimensions, avoid obstacles in its path and coordinate to fly a figure-eight.
Berthold Bäuml from the German Aerospace Center has created something that might interest quite a few MLB teams: a robot that can throw and catch a baseball.
When you attend the Consumer Electronics Show, you’re going to get asked one question more than any other: “Seen anything cool?” I usually fumble a bit and then come up with a few products. But if anyone had asked me at this year’s show if I’d seen anything weird, I wouldn’t have had to search for an answer. I saw Autom.
Introducing the Robot App Store, slated to launch in the next couple of weeks. The idea is that you’ll be able to download apps written by approved developers, just like you do for your iPhone or iPad, and they’ll introduce new functions to your robot.
Imagine: Your vacuum cleaner’s power cable isn’t long enough to reach out the front door, across your driveway and into your car’s backseat. What do you do?
All the research in the world can’t beat millions of years of evolution. Today’s roboticists are increasingly looking to nature for inspiration, creating robots that move and behave with uncanny similarity to living animals. We’ve pulled together 10 of the most fascinating.
This is what it looks like when a crawling, 35-foot electro-mechanic snake meets a walking, 1,700-pound mechanical arachnid.
People tend to think of ASIMO as a Honda mascot; a cute, harmless looking mechanical man that appears in car commercials and even has its own show at the Disneyland Resort. ASIMO, however, is no robotic Mickey Mouse. What started in 1986 as a pair of legs that took five seconds between steps can now do everything from perform sign language to autonomously detect and avoid obstacles while walking down a busy office hallway.
Foxconn, pressured by the stresses of rising labor costs and negative media attention over employee suicides, could be reshaping the landscape of manufacturing forever. How?
I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords. Yes, those geniuses over at Boston Dynamics have finally done it: created something even creepier than their last robot, BigDog. The Protection Ensemble Test Mannequin (a.k.a. PETMAN) is finally reporting for duty after a 13-month design phase and 17-month build phase.
