Masaaki Kumagai and Takaya Ochiai at the Robot Development Engineering Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering and Intelligent Systems, Tohoku Gakuin University, Japan have developed a robot that can balance on a ball – even while carrying heavy loads. While this might at first just seem like a cool trick, it also shows [...]

A team at MIT build an aerial robot that has been programmed to read its surroundings, learn from them and fly the best path through them. It can map out a maze and even fly through windows barely larger than itself.
At a competition, the robot had to fly through a maze and locate a specific [...]

This fantastic 60 Minutes story shows how robotics can change life for the better right now for soldiers that have lost an arm. This incredible prosthetic, in part developed by Dean Kaman of Segway fame, allows soldiers to actually grip items in their hand – even breakable items – just by “thinking” about it. It [...]

iRobot, the maker of the Roomba vacuum for home use and the Packbot for military use is now showing off a brand-new robot: The Chembot.
This robot can shrink and expand according to what is needed for it to get around. If it needs to fit through a small hole, it can just shrink down, get [...]

Yesterday I wrote about how robots that are meant to mimic humans do not yet really look human. Well, while that is still true, Hanson Robotics has created robots that have faces that certainly look human. What makes these robots interesting, however, isn’t just that they look human, but that they are being trained to [...]

The huge Japanese IT and electronics show CEATEC had not only awesome electronic devices on display, but some very cool robots as well.
First up we have a pop-singing robot from Yamaha:

This robot can certainly sing – though as with most robots that have the artificial skin-look, they also look a little freaky. We are certainly [...]

Scientists at the University of the West of England are developing robots that are made out of mold. Rather than creating a traditional robot out of metal and wires, these scientists are building robots from a living organism. Physarum polycephalum is the type of mold that they are using.
The scientists are calling these biological robots [...]

Coming up in just a couple of weeks is NASA’s annual test, RATS (Research and Technology Studies). This will be held in the desert in Arizona and NASA will test out some of their new designs. On September 15 the media is invited to come and check out their innovations in action.
The tests are being [...]

This is a really cool and fun ad put out by Honda featuring their robot Asimo (you can read more about Asimo and other robots developed by Japanese car companies here). The robot acts very human-like in is ad, looking up when water drops on him, acting curious and more. While clearly these reactions were [...]

This incredible robot can fly around much like an insect – it can hover, move quickly and more. There are no attached wires and it carries its own power supply. Its wings move at an incredible rate (frankly, it reminds me more of a hummingbird than an insect). The downside is, it can only do [...]