From flies to fish to lobsters, small insects and animals have long been ideal models for robotic and computer scientists. Bees, for example, possess unmatched elegance in flight, zipping from flower to flower with ease and hovering stably with heavy payloads. A multidisciplinary team of computer scientists, engineers, and biologists at Harvard received a 10… »
We already wrote about modular and shape-shifting robots in our previous articles. Swarm robotics is inspired by the social insect behavior, and emphasizes aspects such as decentralization of control, limited communication abilities among robots, use of local information, emergence of global actions, and robustness. Most current studies in swarm robotic systems have focused on robotic… »
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Army Research Office awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to iRobot to create the flexible military robot. The maker of the Roomba and Scooba, along with University of Chicago researchers, develops the palm-size ChemBot as a mobile robot that can move over soft terrain and navigate through small… »
Robotic exoskeletons can be helpful in many ways as assisting the disabled and elderly in their daily tasks, or easing of any physically demanding task such as disaster rescue or construction. The HAL 5 exoskeleton helps the wearer to carry out a variety of everyday tasks, including standing up from a chair, walking, climbing up… »
A group of European companies and universities have collaborated to produce a series of multifunctional robots for urban hygiene tasks. With abilities ranging from door-to-door garbage pickup and transportation, to automated street cleaning, the DustBot robots recently demonstrated their skills at a station in the town of Atxuri, Portugal. During the presentation the team demonstrated… »
Conventional minimally invasive surgery (MIS) is performed through small incisions in the patient’s skin, preserving healthy tissue. The surgeon works with long slender instruments, and is separated from the operation area. This arrangement challenges the surgeon’s skills due to lost hand-eye-coordination and missing direct manual contact to the operation area. Therefore, many sophisticated procedures cannot… »
In one of our previous articles we started to cover the features of ASIMO – one of the most advanced humanoid robots of today. Besides footsteps planning, ASIMO can understand three humans speaking simultaneously (to some degree). Hiroshi Okuno at Kyoto University, and Kazuhiro Nakadai at the Honda Research Institute in Saitama, both in Japan,… »
Another great example of bio-mimetic robots is a solution many mariners, oil outfits, and the military have big hopes for. RoboClam, designed at the MIT, is meant to become the first “smart” anchor, a major departure from the prosaic piece of nautical gear that hasn’t changed much in centuries. Its present diminutive size is just… »
