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A high school robotics club designs contraption for Flipper, a paralyzed cat with a twisted spinal cord. [To let her walk.]

Audi’s automatic driving for parking Audi’s automatic parking systems operate by means of either ultrasound or cameras, which display images via the onboard monitor. One particularly convenient solution is park assist. When backing into a parking space, it performs all the necessary steering movements; it can handle both parallel parking and parking perpendicular to the street. The system finds a parking space with ultrasound sensors that scan the roadside in two dimensions while driving at moderate speed. The system notifies the driver via a message in the display once the sensors have found a space which is large enough. If...

G.E. Hardiman I – Ralph Mosher (American) Hardiman is a name derived somehow, from "Human Augmentation Research and Development Investigation." and Man from MANipulator. Sometimes written as HardiMan, Hardi-Man, Hardi Man, Hardiman I. Said to also be officially called the "Powered Exo-skeleton." Note: some reports suggest that only one arm of Hardiman's was built. The above photo usually accompanies that comment, but it is incorrect. A complete Hardiman was built with both arms, but the comment refers to the earlier tests of just the single, upper manipulator. Later, even when the full machine was built, one side was made static,...

Engineer Dallas Goecker attends meetings, jokes with colleagues and roams the office building just like other employees at his company in Silicon Valley. But Goecker isn't in California. He's more than 2,300 miles away, working at home in Seymour, Indiana. It's all made possible by the Beam -- a mobile video-conferencing machine that he can drive around his company's offices and workshops in Palo Alto. The five-foot-tall device, topped with a large video screen, gives him a physical presence that makes him and his colleagues feel like he's actually there. "This gives you that casual interaction that you're used to...

Roboy is a tendon driven robot so it will move almost as elegantly as a human. University of Zurich is lead designer. Roboy has more than 1000 Friends on Facebook!

Machines have had a presence in the US Military for quite a while, with bomb disposing robots and sky drones becoming quite abundant in the US Military and to a smaller extent even local law enforcement. But those machines still rely a lot on human intervention that limits the actions they may take. That is why the US Navy has given a three year $900,000 grant to the Georgia Institute of Technology to work on what many are calling the “MacGyver bot.” The robot may not be able to start a truck with a pen and turkey baster, but the...

A competition to develop next-generation robots capable of saving lives in disaster zones has been unveiled by the Pentagon's advanced research laboratory. Darpa says it wants "adaptable robots with the ability to use human tools - from hand tools to vehicles". It plans to hold a series of emergency response physical challenges. A $2m (£1.3m) prize is being offered to the team with the best technology. The competition begins in October. The agency says it hopes software engineers, video game developers and other experts from fields outside robotics will take part "to increase the diversity of innovative solutions". Radiation-resistant

Flying robot quadrotors perform the James Bond Theme by playing various instruments including the keyboard, drums and maracas, a cymbal, and the debut of an adapted guitar built from a couch frame. The quadrotors play this "couch guitar" by flying over guitar strings stretched across a couch frame; plucking the strings with a stiff wire attached to the base of the quadrotor. A special microphone attached to the frame records the notes made by the "couch guitar". 1:40 video at the link

Congress is demanding drones in the air over the United States - without considering the civil liberties issues. Within the span of three days last week, the House and then the Senate passed a law - H.R. 658 - requiring the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to speed up, within 90 days, its current licensing process for government use of drones domestically and to open the national airspace to drone aircraft for commercial and private use by October 2015. While the law requires the FAA to develop guidance on drone safety, the law says absolutely nothing about the privacy or transparency...

The General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab, located at the University of Pennsylvania, is already well known for its work with quadrotors. In the past the quadrotor research team has managed to get a quadrotor flying aggressively, meaning it could land on angled surfaces and maneuver through small windows at high speed. Then the quadrotors were taught to work together to build a tower structure.A new video posted by the GRASP Lab shows that development of quadrotors isn’t slowing down. Alex Kushleyev, Daniel Mellinger, and Vijay Kumar have advanced the quadrotor’s behavior to the point where they now...

A jail in the eastern city of Pohang plans to run a month-long trial with three of the automatons in March. The machines will monitor inmates for abnormal behaviour. Researchers say they will help reduce the workload for other guards. South Korea aims to be a world leaders in robotics. Business leaders believe the field has the potential to become a major export industry. The three 5ft-high (1.5m) robots involved in the prison trial have been developed by the Asian Forum for Corrections, a South Korean group of researchers who specialise in criminality and prison policies. It said the robots...

For some time I’ve been trying to justify owning a robot without coming across as “that weirdo with the robot.” Now, I think I finally found my cover: A robot that bakes cookies! Mario Bollini and Daniela Rus of the Distributed Robotics Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have taken a PR2 robot, which is made by the robotics company Willow Garage, and programmed it to mix dough from scratch, make a giant cookie and then bake it in an oven. There are some caveats though (besides the giant cookie part). The PR2 robot costs about $400,000. In June,...

Several decades of using PCs and watching reality television have made us poor collaborators. I mean, look at me as a case in point: I sit in my office on most days typing away at my computer, perfectly content to be by myself and create articles and work on my next set of speeches and videos. I don't need any staff, I can do it all from the comfort and privacy of my desktop.Yes, I have a large group of people that I work with to produce my stories and arrange my meetings: editors, production people, and so forth. Sometimes...

The 2011 FIRST Robotics Competition Kick off will take place on January 8th, 2011 at 10:30AM EST. The Kickoff will be aired on NASA TV!

A quadrotor aircraft mated to a Microsoft Kinect sensor - the latest feature of the Microsoft Xbox360 video game platform - can hover around a University of California-Berkley lab, sense objects in its path, and then pause until the object is removed. The video also shows a simulated grid view through the Kinect sensor – looks straight out of a Terminator movie. [Watch the video ]

Unsuccessful in its latest bid to plug the oil leak off the Louisiana coast, BP on Sunday announced a new attempt to place a "containment cap" atop the gushing well one mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico. Robert Dudley, managing director of BP, said Sunday on CNN that the new remedy, which could take up to seven more days to take effect, is not a sure thing, and wouldn't capture all the leaking oil even if it works.

Governor Deval Patrick today joined NASA Administrator and former astronaut Charles Bolden to announce that Massachusetts has been selected to receive a $1,515,024 grant as part of the NASA Summer of Innovation pilot program. Beginning this summer, and continuing for a three-year pilot program, NASA will partner with six Massachusetts higher education institutions to use the agency’s mission and technology programs to boost summer learning, particularly for students who are underrepresented and underperforming in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Massachusetts was selected as one of only four states to receive grants. ... The six Massachusetts programs awarded funding were:...

Here’s another beef I have against my local paper: they glorify robots. Haven’t you seen articles in your paper, usually from AP, that talk about robots as the next big thing? Or they’re already here--wow!! Here is a headline that actually appeared in the Norfolk paper: ROBOTMAKER BUILDS AN ARTIFICIAL BOY. This is complete nonsense. The fact is, we have wonderful industrial robots assembling cars, etc. We also have a lot of ingenious remote-controlled devices such as drone aircraft. Conceptually, however, these are much like radio-controlled toys. If by robots you mean something more or less like a human, they...

I'm not kidding. I think that's a very positive title. Senario, known to enthusiasts as the distributor of Pleo the baby dinosaur, is rolling out a new remote controlled robot with a price tag of about $10. This is interesting. Think about DARPA's strategy for ubiquitous robotics. It needs a broad range of developments in the consumer market to drive further development and bring prices down. We now see a full spectrum of prices and capabilities emerging. If you want the most advanced humanoid robot on the planet, you could go for a REEM-B with Brainstorm software. I expect...

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced a major new initiative to create robotic autonomous manipulators that mimic the human hands, an agency program manager said. For the past several decades, the research agency and the robotics community have concentrated their efforts on programming ground robots to get from point A to point B, said Robert Mandelbaum, a DARPA program manager who focuses on robotics and autonomous systems. That challenge has for the most part been tackled, he said. The autonomous robotics manipulation program will take on a new goal, creating an inexpensive hand-like device that is as adaptable as...