Robotics posts

With California having major financial woes, the Google Driverless Car may be enough to tank the entire state since ID cards cost $6 less than driver’s licenses. This and many other satirical consequences of the looming possibility of having driverless cars on the road fill this clever graphic. If Google is seeing this, they need to address it soon before people start rebelling against the possibility of hurting the taxi industry. Click to enlarge. From: Chicago Toyota….

Steve Mahan is just like everyone else with a car. He likes to hop in the driver’s seat on a sunny California day and hit the drive-thru for a taco on his way to the dry cleaners. Unlike most drivers, Steve Mahan has lost 95% of his vision and is legally blind, but thanks to Google he is on his way to not being restricted the way he has been for much of his life. Using a carefully pre-programmed route and with the help of a large technical team, Steve and the Google team performed the routine driving that many people take for granted. They grabbed their tacos. They picked up Steve’s dry cleaning. They did it in…

The Tek Robotic Mobilization Device developed by Istanbul, Turkey-based AMS Mekatronic, bridges the gap between bulky wheelchairs with the inherent problems that come with them and mechanical engineering that will give many paraplegics more and easier access to their world. The idea is brilliant in its simplicity to the point that one wonders why something like this is new. Using a combination of balancing mechanisms, manual attachments and pulleys, and robotic engineering, the AMS team has reduced the horizontal size of mobility devices while solving other challenges such as mounting…

There have been many innovations in recent months that have blown us away from the world of robotics. If there’s one common theme between the Smart Bird and other robots that have gone from our dreams (or nightmares) to reality in recent months is the constant embracing of natural movement and style when creating movement. The same can be said about DARPA’s “Cheetah” which recently broke the speed record for legged robots. At 18mph, this machine will both amaze you and possibly scare you in a Japanese horror movie way. …

If this is the future of retail, I’ll be shopping online more often. Takashimaya, a department store in Tokyo, is working with Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro from Osaka University to demonstrate their concept of the next generation of retail merchandising. The timing couldn’t be better – the female mannequin is pushing their Valentine’s Day promotion as its first target. Ishiguro is known as the master of lifelike robotics and is best known for his work on the incredibly realistic Geminoid line of androids. This is the first time his work has been applied for commercial purposes. “I see this as the future…

Quadrotor technology developed at the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) lab at the University of Pennsylvania is able to fly with better accuracy than anything we’ve seen to date. Their ability to run complicated formations is both beautiful and terrifying. The beauty is obvious. They may sound like bugs and look exceptionally creepy as they do flips and run tight formations (the figure-8 is amazing), but they are “geek beautiful” in ways that few robotic devices have achieved. They are terrifying because the possibilities are endless. When possibilities are…

There’s a fine line between technology that enables a better world and technology that makes us head in the wrong direction. Movies like The Matrix, Terminator, and iRobot have given us a fiction view of what could happen if technology connected us all and eventually had the ability to take over. Such a vision has been a distant whimsical threat until very recently. Today, it all seems possible. We’re On the Brink of amazing things in society, as Ericsson puts it. The telecom gear maker has put a lot of effort into communicating their dream of the near future with their Networked Society website….

In the movies, it always start innocently. They are designed to help humans, to do the mundane or difficult tasks that are better suited for non-sentient robots rather than men and women. In the end, they always turn on us. Hopefully, the folks at the Swiss Federated Institute of Technology in Zurich are keeping that in mind as they develop the system for the Flying Machine Enabled Construction project. The video below displays where they are as of now in this first public demonstration: “The installation, called “Flight Assembled Architecture”, was conceived and built by teams led by my colleagues…

The Tom Cruise-driven vision of a future (almost) completely without murder worked with the concept that if we could use precognition to know when a murder was going to happen in the future, we could prevent it from ever happening. It was a science fiction concept that has tantalized the imagination on different levels with other concepts introduced in the film. Floating visual computer interfaces and iris-recognition technology aside, the crime-fighting components are well out of reach. Or are they? According to this infographic, we may actually have somewhere to go with all of this using…

Robotic science is intended to create devices that can aid humans in activities. In some case, it’s to help perform tasks that are too difficult or dangerous for humans. In other cases, it’s to relieve us of mundane tasks. Then, there are cases of robots that do little more than invade our nightmares. Such is the case with this robot designed by Harvard. This flexible device is able to wiggle and writhe it’s way through tight spaces. There are uses for such a device, we’re sure. We just don’t what those uses are yet outside of possible the defense department having some diabolical plans for it. https://twitter.com/#!/girimedia/status/144931103797547008…