http://robotsftw.com Mon, 10 May 2010 15:34:15 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://robotsftw.com/2010/05/this-robot-is-having-a-ball/ Meet Giger. This homebuilt robot stands at a very impressive 2 feet tall and can walk around as if he owns whatever room he is in. Which it might. Giger is controlled bia Bluetooth and runs on an embedded version of Linux knows as Buildroot. It also has a moving red eye like ... http://robotsftw.com/2009/11/homebuilt-walking-robot/ [caption id="attachment_337" align="alignright" width="299" caption="We're gonna do it! On the unemployment line. "][/caption] Back in the old days, a particular product would come down a conveyor. A person or people would take items off of the conveyor and place it in  a box or other appropriate packaging. This concept was so ... http://robotsftw.com/2009/11/adept-quattro-incredibly-fast-at-packing/ Using 7,000 bricks and a robot, architects Fabio Gramazio & Matthias Kohler constructed this "infinite loop" in about a months time. This structure is particularly impressive is not only that a robot constructed it, but that only a robot could have constructed it. To make this work each brick had ... http://robotsftw.com/2009/10/and-now-bricklayers-are-being-replaced-by-robots/ 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 ... http://robotsftw.com/2009/10/mits-autonomous-flying-robot/ Meet the Scarab. This robot is like the Roomba, but built for heavier-duty cleaning. This is designed to be used in shopping centers or urban streets. It sweeps and cleans up the trash, then locates the nearest trash receptacle that it can use and dumps the trash there. It has ... http://robotsftw.com/2009/10/lookout-street-sweepers-here-comes-the-scarab/ 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 ... http://robotsftw.com/2009/10/the-deka-arm-the-future-of-prosthetic-arms/ 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 ... http://robotsftw.com/2009/10/irobots-chembot-is-incredibly-cool/ 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 ... http://robotsftw.com/2009/10/robots-that-react-to-your-mood/ 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 ... http://robotsftw.com/2009/10/cool-robots-put-on-display-at-ceatec/