Robotics posts

Necomimi, a mashup of the Japanese words for cat and ear, is a new device that lets you express yourself visually through your thoughts. The ears, which you wear on your head, are connected to a strap that touches your forehead. By reading the electric impulses in your mind, the device attempts to express your current mental state through the position of the ears. When concentrating, the ears spring up. When you relax, the ears droop. They can also read other emotional states and move back and forth to match. While the practical use of the device is purely aesthetic, the technology itself has applications….

Man has been able to achieve flight for over a century, but we have never truly mastered the art and science that propels birds and other flying animals through the skies. The team at Festo has brought us one step closer with the “SmartBird,” an ultralight flying robot that achieves and maintains flight on its own power without assistance from other devices. Here are the specs and designs that make it fly: Wingspan: 6.4 ft Weight: 15.87 oz Wings: Include a lever mechanism increasing the degree of deflection Directional Control: Achieved through opposing movement of the head and torso Tail: Produces…

I sense a theme coming on: people create robots, robots destroy robots, and robots destroy humans? Well I’m a believer after what I just watched. In the above video, there is a four-legged robot called BigDog that is capable of walking in a freakish but effective fashion, which is entertaining to say the least. However, it’s all about to get a bit more awesome. There is a new bot on the block, and it has one goal in mind — speed! It is named Atlas. It looks more like a cheetah than a four-legged freak of nature, like the BigDog mentioned above. And it is going to be fast, according to Boston Dynamics, the…

There are some things worth watching in life: a revolution for freedom, a Jersey Shore escapade, and, now, a slow-motion take on the destruction of a BattleBot. These hunks of destructive metal used to be all the rage on Comedy Central in the 2000s, but it eventually fell through. Since then, the world has gone without seeing robot destruction (unless you have watched the new Terminator movies). But it has come to my surprise that BattleBots has a renewed vigor, and tournaments are being held. Someone just so happened to record some footage of a battle in 60 frames-per-second. Enjoy….

If Google has AdSense, let’s just call this NonSense. A new advertising campaign for people-what-make-cars Alfo Romeo is (we desperately hope) not the future of advertising, as you’ll doubtlessly agree by watching this video. ‘There’s no getting away from an offer this good’ proclaims a motorized billboard, as it chooses unwitting pedestrians and gives chase, urging them to purchase a car. I can’t imagine this is the best way to sell cars – and obviously, this video was created with humour in mind  – but still, there’s a deeper concern here. Given the pervasion of advertising in our everyday…

IBM’s Watson supercomputer had its first shot at Jeopardy last night, and, overall, it went well. Watson had a few moments that made me scratch my head — and it was clear near the end that Watson was having some trouble understanding the questions — but he did manage to tie with one of his human opponent. The oddest part, though, is that they refer to Watson as a “he” instead of an “it.” A few moments that stood out to me was that when Watson had his moment to choose his first question, he picked the Daily Double from the start. (Considering the odds of doing that, I think there might have been a glitch in…

Not content to robotically emulate any and all members of the animal kingdom, humanity has turned to another branch of the Tree of Life for inspiration: that of plants. Japanese artist Akira Nakayasu has developed plant (no, really, it’s just called ‘plant’), an interactive robotic installation that does little but look beautiful. Then again, what else would a plant-bot do? The installation is designed to resemble grass blowing in the wind, and reacts to nearby objects – for instance, a human hand. 169 shape memory alloy actuators control 169 artificial leaves, which bend and sway independently,…

Surely you remember the giant 1:1 Gundam Japan erected in 2009. Built by Bandai, the monolithic robot has stood watch ovef Tokyo and spawned many imitators in the last year and a bit. Some of you probably take a sort of ‘so-what’ attitude here. That’s understandable: Gundams are practically space-faring robot ninjas in the show, and this guy can barely turn his head. So what indeed, right? Well, check out this time-lapse video, directed by ‘darwinfish105′, which is a beautiful testament to the epic stoicism of the statue….

How cool is this? The answer, before you read any further or watch the video for additional information, is this: really cool. The Biological Cybernetics Lab at Tsukuba University here demonstrate a robotic arm that mimics a user’s movement via Kinect-like camera. It can recognize over 100 different hand shapes (after all, some of us, myself included, have pretty weird hands), and checks over one hundred times per second what position your hand is in, so it can adjust itself accordingly. The idea is not only to provide a real-time robotic control solution, but also an intuitive way to program…

Am I the only one who finds this terrifying? Like, sure, it’s not quite as immediately scary as Boston Dynamics’ BigDog, but imagine what it’ll look like a couple decades from now when several of these things are sprinting over a hill at you with guns for heads after the military buys them up? Can you say Judgment Day? Of course you can. The bot, called Athlete, is the brainchild of Ryuma Niiyama, a post-doctorate student at MIT, and uses pneumatic artificial muscles to simulate human legs. Currently, it can only run three steps before toppling over, but it’s only a matter of time before the current…