Robotics Category - Page 8

A robot that “hunches its shoulders when it feels sad” and “holds its arms out for a hug when it feels happy” is one of those things that I greet with great hope and trepidation. It could be really exciting, or a huge disaster. We’re talking today about the Nao, [...]

Any time I hear about a strange new development involving robots, my first impulse is always to wonder, is it Japanese? It seems like Japan is getting to be the world’s go-to guy when it comes to automatons. And now, the Saitama University Human-Robot Interaction Center has brought me something [...]

You’ve really got to hand it to robot designers–no seriously, you do–because they take their cues from just about anywhere. And now, one of the stranger cues comes our way via the robotic bee eye.

Sounds killer…where do you put the quarter? Seriously, though, the folks out at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics have taken a giant robot arm and turned it into the CyberMotion Simulator, which may well be the best Formula 1 simulator ever built.

If you remember the disastrous period in video game history that was Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, then you’ll likely also remember one of the handful of games it produced: Teleroboxer. Thanks to a recent contest sponsored by Texas Instruments, Teleroboxer is no long a lousy red-tinted game almost no one played, [...]

A day without robot news, folks, is like a day without sunshine–they happen, but it’s never very pleasant. Allow me to put a sunshiny punch in your day by offering up the ROCR, a robot that takes “climbing the walls” to a whole new extreme.

You may not be aware of this, but apparently, one of the hardest things a robot can do is climb stairs. Moving straight ahead, that’s one thing. Stopping, starting, picking things up–no problem. But a flight of stairs is about as close to robot-insurmountable as it gets. But for a [...]

As a person who 1. loves robots and 2. hates cleaning, I’m always happy to hear about the advances in the robotic sciences that will allow me to both be a lazy schmuck and yet avoid living in squalor. Thus I’m happy to hear about the Roboscooper from the folks [...]

And once again, we’ve made it to that grand and glorious time of year known only as Shark Week, the week that makes us all happy to be paying perfectly extortionate prices for cable or satellite so that we can watch hour upon hour of beautifully-filmed underwater footage of sharks, [...]

Anyone remember that Bruce Willis movie, Surrogates? Where you could buy a robot that looked like a really good-looking version of yourself, whereupon you could then send it out into the world to jump from rooftop to rooftop or just go party for days on end? Well, we’re a little [...]