Researchers from the Hasegawa Group at the Tokyo Institute of Technology are developing a robot capable to think, learn and take on tasks it hasn’t tried before. By using Self-Organizing Incremental Neural Network (SOINN), the robot can think in a way similar to humans, because it can make educated guesses and decisions based on its ... »
A group of researchers from the University of Oxford is developing small aerial vehicles with flapping wings inspired by those found on insects. The researchers envision that their insect-size vehicles will be suitable for many different purposes ranging from helping in emergency situations considered too dangerous for people to enter, to covert military surveillance missions. ... »
Currently, nuclear powerplant inspectors use indirect methods to monitor buried piping by generating a voltage gradient to identify areas where pipe coatings may have corroded, and by using ultrasonic waves to screen lengths of pipe for cracks. A team of researchers from MIT is developing small, egg-sized robots designed to inspect nuclear reactor underground pipes ... »
Unlike other touch sensors we previously wrote about, a University of Tokyo spin-off company Touchence has designed ShokacCube – the world’s first soft and flexible touch sensor capable to detect changes in 3D. The technology could aid in robotics and present a major breakthrough in bionics where it could be used for better feedback and ... »
Virginia Tech’s Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory team dominated the international robot soccer competition known as RoboCup 2011 which was hosted this past weekend in Istanbul, Turkey. Team CHARLI took first place at the Louis Vuitton Humanoid Cup, the Adult Size class with the humanoid robot CHARLI-2, and the Kid Size class with the miniature-humanoid-robot DARwIn-OP. ... »
Automated helpers in industry today are usually enclosed by protective barriers. Industrial safety regulations permit contact between people and robots only under certain conditions, since the risk of injury to humans is too great. In order to allow safer collaboration, researchers at Fraunhofer-Gesellschaf are developing a projection and camera-based system able to prevent potential collisions ... »
A researcher from the University of Leeds has drawn inspiration from nature to build a robotic worm that can wiggle its way around obstacles. Dubbed worm-bot, the robot is modeled after the Caenorhabditis elegans nematode – a minuscule free-living worm that uses a very simple nervous system of just over 300 neurons to control the ... »
