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Feature Article #1

Formidable Consumer Robot Platform Gets Ready to Take the Stage

The South Korean company Roboware has a monumental hit on their hands with their robot E3–for Emotional, Entertaining, and Eductional.  The combination of a good technology architecture and a sound business model is what will make this robot a winner among personal and field consumer robots.
In an interview on Engineering TV, Roboware CEO Mike Kim [...]

Ray Renteria | January 5th, 2009 | Continued

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Feature Article #2

Welcome to Robot Central

The future of human evolution isn’t necessarily biological.  There are happenings in the field of robotics that incrementally evolve us in seemingly trivial ways.   To most, these events pass by as new toys or new features in our cars.    We at Robot Central observe these same events as milestones on a timeline that build on [...]

Ray Renteria | January 1st, 2009 | Continued

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Feature Article #3

SciVestor Video - Autonomous Vehicle Roadmap 2010-2020

SciVestor Executive Director Jonas Lamis narrates the Autonomous Vehicle Roadmap that was presented at RoboBusiness 2008. This presentation is based in part on Robot Central’s observations, research, and opinions of emergent technologies from the DARPA Grand Challenge series of competitions. It highlights progress and challenges in the technologies necessary to facilitate civilian [...]

Ray Renteria | May 16th, 2008 | Continued

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Feature Article #4

MIT’s Technology Awakens Mobile Devices–Robots Next?

The SynTactic Analysis using Reversible Transformations (”START”) system is a super information-finding technology that was developed by Boris Katz and his associates of the InfoLab Group at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It’s a system that’s been running since 1993–long before Google came along.
The system has two syntactic modules: One for [...]

Ray Renteria | April 25th, 2008 | Continued

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Feature Article #5

Colin Angle on the Business(es) of Robotics

Blogging from RoboBusiness in Pittsburgh this week. Much to my disappointment, the Convention Center does not have wireless access, so blog postings are coming out when possible.
Colin Angle, Co Founder and CEO of iRobot spent 45 minutes romping through robotics market business concepts. He presented 21 (I only captured 20 for some reason) [...]

Jonas Lamis | April 10th, 2008 | Continued

About this Site

About Robot Central
Robot Central is a research and analysis blog covering the emerging robot economy. The global robot marketplace is predicted to grow to over $50 billion in 2012, and Robot Central is dedicated to chronicling the bots, builders, and business models that will power that growth.
In the grander scheme we believe that the future [...]

Other Recent Articles

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Watch out Bad Guys, Here Come the Bots

The assurance of mutual destruction was a profoundly effective peace keeper between the USA and the USSR.  There is no equivalent threat today against the scattered terrorists deliberately embedded within innocent society across so many countries–a tactic that only works against their civilized enemies such as the USA.  Our effort to create and deploy robotic [...]

3Jan2009 | Ray Renteria | 1 comment | Continued
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Robot Fighter Thoroughbred Set to fly this Fall

Northrop Grumman unveiled the first of two aircraft of an unmanned combat air system (UCAS) during a ceremony for Navy officials, state and local government representatives, suppliers and Northrop Grumman employees.  The aircraft represents a milestone in the progress toward the development of an autonomous combat aircraft designed to be deployed from the deck of [...]

1Jan2009 | Ray Renteria | 0 comments | Continued
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Japanese ZMP Inc. Enters Autonomous Vehicle Space

The Japanese company ZMP Inc. has recently announced its intention to deliver a research tool called the ZMP Car Robotics Platform by April, 2009 at a meager cost of about $5.5K per unit.   The platform is a complete 1/10th scale vehicle.
The platform is comprised of a stereoscopic camera, NEC Corp’s image processing board, WiFi module, [...]

1Jan2009 | Ray Renteria | 0 comments | Continued
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Velodyne LIDAR HDL-64E demo

Bruce Hall, President of Velodyne LIDAR demonstrates the HDL-64E.  The 64E is a ground breaking laser vision system that crushed the competition at the 2007 DARPA urban challenge.  Today, Velodyne sells the 64E (list price $75,000) to organizations wishing to integrate 1″ accuracy GIS data at highway speeds.

31Oct2008 | Jonas Lamis | 0 comments | Continued
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Robot executives featured in SciVestor workshop

On Friday, October 24th, SciVestor and The Singularity Institute present the Emerging Technologies Workshop. This event is sold out, and is being held at The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA. The day’s agenda follows:
Schedule
8:30am Doors open
9:00am [...]

16Oct2008 | Jonas Lamis | 1 comment | Continued
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Readybot! Where have you been all my life?

Headquartered in Silicon Valley, the Readybot Challenge is a non-profit research group composed of senior engineers and designers from the networking, motion control, ergonomics, and software industries. Their mission: to build a robot that can clean a kitchen.

15Oct2008 | Jonas Lamis | 0 comments | Continued
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Skilligent Takes Siam UAV to the Skies

When scientists at NASA send a command to a robot on Mars, it can take between 8 and 42 minutes before the operator knows that the command was performed successfully.   Even here on earth, commands sent to local robots may still take up to a second to to be performed.   It doesn’t sound like a [...]

12Oct2008 | Ray Renteria | 0 comments | Continued
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Stereoscopic Computer Vision Just got a Leg Up

When Stanford University won the DARPA Grand Challenge in ‘05 the team made clear their philosophy that autonomous navigation should be treated as a software problem.  While other teams spent their resources on building custom hardware, Dr. Sebastian Thrun simply sent his Stanford team’s Volkswagen Touareg off to get converted to [...]

29Sep2008 | Ray Renteria | 0 comments | Continued
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