Robotics Category - Page 5

You know we love robots here. Robots that lift, carry, help people to walk or move in their wheelchairs…all of these are great. It’s hard not to love a robot, even when its function is, well, decidedly stupid. And that’s the whole thrust behind the Bacarobo competition, which just released [...]

It may well be every downtrodden geek’s dream to build a girlfriend, which is likely to be a disturbing concept to most. And it certainly didn’t help matters when Yamaha exhibited the HRP-4C Girlbot, which fueled the fires of possibility stoking in their minds. Today, we toss a little more [...]

Admittedly, as human beings, talking to two people at the same time isn’t exactly difficult. I once kept four IM conversations going at the same time while calling my grandmother. But for a robot, this is something else entirely, and thus why I’m telling you today about a recent success [...]

It’s the kind of thing you might well expect to see in a science fiction movie, or even a video game, but the folks at Northrup Grumman have unveiled what might well (and frankly, hopefully will) prove to be a replacement for human soldiers–the CaMEL.

You’ve got to hand it to the folks at DARPA–they’re always looking for something new and interesting to build, which in turn may well make it to us at some point. And now, they’ve figured out a whole new way to get a robot to grab things, and it’s done [...]

Ever see those job listings advertising for package handlers and such, where it says in no uncertain terms that you must be able to lift 50 pounds and do so on a regular basis? Well, those kinds of jobs might be opening up to a whole new class of people [...]

Precision is the hallmark of machinery–humans may be adaptive as all get out, but their hands shake almost imperceptibly (even some times, perceptibly) due to things as simple as their pulse moving through their hands. And the folks out at McGill University have shown just how precise a robot can [...]

Robot news is always great, even when the robots in question will be staying almost entirely in a factory, building the things we use every day. And whether you think they’re a boon to the world economy or the single greatest evil since Karl Marx, the one thing that’s hard [...]

It’s a great day when I can actually start with robot news, because I’m terribly fond of robots and they usually make for good stories. And today I’ve got a real beauty to bring up–the Sofie (Surgeon’s Operating Force-feedback Interface Eindhoven) surgical robot.

If you were anything like me growing up, you were absolutely enamored with Legos. Why? Because Legos did most anything, that’s why. If you got sick of your Masters of the Universe Air Raider or your Barbie Dream House or what have you, you were still stuck with it. But [...]