Archive for Ray Renteria
Welcome to Robot Central
Welcome to Robot Central. Really. Thank you for being here. I’m sorry about the mess–stale posts and overuse of the RC logo. I’m in the middle of reinventing the site in a way that I hope will be a little less formal and a lot easier for younger people to read. I’m also going [...]
Ray Renteria | 0 comments | Continued
Ever Seen a Packbot Fly? Check this out!
Okay, so the video isn’t exactly “fresh” but the real news is that iRobot recently kicked off a video channel on YouTube called iRobot iTube which I just read about on the ieee Spectrum site.
Ray Renteria | 0 comments | Continued
It’s Official: Japan’s Got a lot of Robots
Using data from the International Federation of Robotics and the International Labour Organization, the guys at ieee Spectrum Online put together a few visualizations that show what most suspect: Japan’s got more industrial robots than anybody–10 times the world average and more than 3 times that of the US.
Ray Renteria | 1 comment | Continued
Robot Birds You Can Shoot Down Again and Again
WowWee’s been accelerating its pace of product releases since the release of ith the Rovio with a new projector technology, a new upcoming RoboSapien called “JoeBot” (which has some mixed reviews), and my favorite, a robot bird you can shoot down again and again with an accompanying laser gun.
Ray Renteria | 0 comments | Continued
Have you Seen This Robot?
A robot was stolen from a Portland State University professor’s car earlier this week and he wants it back–no questions asked. The $5,000 robot was donated to the university by Parallax Incorporated. Poor little guy.
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Breakthrough: Tiny Fingers that Pinch
The biggest challenge nanotechnology is the mass-production of nano stuff. One-offs can be made but mass production is required to produce enough to make the technology practical or cheap. In a recent breakthrough, Peter Bøggild and his colleagues from the Technical University of Denmark have created a gripper that could be used in nanoassembly. Previously, [...]
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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 [...]
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Ingenious Device lets Robots See Over Walls
Imagine a little box just 4 inches tall squirting out a rigid mast 8 feet straight up! A configuration is available that will allow a larger unit that can lift 200lbs 20 feet. The unit is from GeoSystems Inc and is called a Situational Awareness Mast (SAM). Travis Deyle at Hizook brings several sources together [...]
Ray Renteria | 1 comment | Continued
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 [...]
Ray Renteria | 2 comments | Continued
Robot’s Portfolio Performs Worse than Human’s
It seems that a robotic stock trader isn’t as good as a knowledgeable human trader. James Daw writes about how his robot’s portfolio lost 40% of its value while investors in the stocks tracked by the S&P/TSX composite of the Toronto Stock Exchange “only” lost 33%. Check out his article here.
Ray Renteria | 0 comments | Continued