Most of the robots we wrote about are made by corporations or research laboratories. In this article we’re going to write about a robot made by a single man. Loki, which takes its name from the Norse god of Mischief, is a robot build for hobby. It was made by software engineer David Shinsel, who… »
Engineers and scientists from NASA and GM worked together through a Space Act Agreement at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to build a new humanoid robot capable of working side by side with people. Using leading edge control, sensor and vision technologies, future robots could assist astronauts during hazardous space missions and help… »
The company which designed facial recognition and location awareness systems for some of the best known consumer robotics in history, including the now-departed Sony AIBO robot dog and WowWee’s line of toy robots, introduced their competitor for the robotic cleaning market at CES 2010. Evolution Robotics presented their cleaning robot named Mint which differs from… »
Contrary to the popular opinion, Karel Capek, the author of RUR is not the inventor of the word robot. The word which is derived from the Czech noun “robota” meaning “labor” is an accomplishement of Capek’s older brother, the cubist painter and writer Josef Capek. Today, robots are becoming widely applied for medical, military, exploring,… »
After writing about biomimicry of penguins, sharks, butterflies and bats, we’re going to write about cockroach biomimicry. Although the sight of a crawling cockroach dashing for cover may be repulsive, the insect is also a biological and engineering marvel. Cockroaches and guinea hens serve as bioinspiration to the researchers at Oregon State University where they… »
When we started this website we wanted to focus on robots made to aid us in various circumstances. Assisting the elderly is certainly one of the more noble jobs they can be given, and that’s just what Robovie-II, the creation of the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) has been programmed to do. For the… »
You might have tried to balance a ping-pong ball floating above your mouth or you might have seen a demo in a classroom or science museum where a jet of compressed air keeps a ball floating above the ground, seemingly defying gravity. A pair of grad students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have… »
Professor Hirotaka Nakayama and his students at Kobe’s Konan University Faculty of Intelligence and Informatics have created a guide robot called ii-1. It is able to perform Q&A tasks by using natural language for communication and querying an internet database to find the answers to asked questions. The project began in 2008 when four of… »
