Archive for Ray Renteria
Elegant Hexapod Transcends Art, Technology
iC Hexapod is the coolest robot I’ve ever seen. Builder Matt Denton of Micromagic Systems designed and machined the parts, motherboard, controller, and algorithms required to bring elegant animate life to this gorgeous piece of creative engineering, as Denton calls it. Each leg sports three servos giving it 18 degrees of freedom. [...]
21May2008 | Ray Renteria | 0 comments | Continued
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 [...]
16May2008 | Ray Renteria | 0 comments | Continued
WowWee Nails Its First Useful Robot
Earlier this year, WowWee debuted its first practical (and really cool-looking) robot Rovio. The robot sports a complete mobile telepresence pack including camera, microphone, and speaker. It’s WiFi enabled and provides audio and video streams via a web interface it serves up over the internet. You can also control the robot over [...]
13May2008 | Ray Renteria | 0 comments | Continued
A Real-Life “Iron Man” Exoskeleton
Imagine being able to instantly multiply your strength a factor of 2 to 10. A company out of Japan called Cyberdyne has an exoskeleton suit on the market that does just that. It’s been described as a “wearable robot” that assists in performing everyday things like climbing stairs or carrying heavy things.
Like [...]
5May2008 | Ray Renteria | 0 comments | Continued
MoD Grand Challenge: Go Find the Bad Guys
In 2004 and 2005 came the DARPA Grand Challenges–competitions in which vehicles were expected to traverse hundreds of desert miles completely autonomously. In 2007, DARPA brought the robots into a suburban setting for the Urban Challenge.
Last August, we discussed ELROB, the European Land Robot competition in which robotic vehicles were challenged with [...]
They’re Here
This week, an attack by robots crippled a local business. The destruction made it impossible for customers to enter the attraction-based establishment. What’s worse, the robots systematically replaced revenue-generating advertisements with very inappropriate ones.
The business was forced to shut down while it fixed the wreckage and replaced the ads. Only time will tell [...]
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 [...]
Mechanical Works of Art Grace Air, Water
In an effort to improve the technology of bionics, Festo’s Bionic Learning Network has produced several proof-of-concept robots. Two such proofs are the AquaJelly and the AirJelly. The structure and kinematics of these projects are based on their biological model, the jellyfish. The results are nothing short of elegant. Watching these [...]
23Apr2008 | Ray Renteria | 0 comments | Continued
Artificial Companion Mitigates Alzheimer’s
Paro Robots U.S., Inc. will be distributing Japan’s Intelligent Systems’ artificial life form Paro in the US and Canada. Modeled after a baby harp seal, it is designed to provide therapeutic services to patients with Alzheimer’s disease, other forms of dementia, and emotional complications stemming from the prolonged recovery associated with severe injury [...]
22Apr2008 | Ray Renteria | 0 comments | Continued
The Wiimote Slices and Dices–Literally
If a soldier has to worry about which joystick controls steering and which controls speed he’s going to spend less time thinking about the bomb he’s trying to disarm. David Bruemmer and Douglas Few, both engineers from the US Department of Energy’s Idaho National Lab in Idaho Falls, have modified an iRobot Packbot [...]
8Apr2008 | Ray Renteria | 0 comments | Continued-
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