New 2013 DARPA Building Real Life Terminators Military Robots. Robots that fly and cooperate.
PETMAN. Cheetah Robot runs 28.3 mph; a bit faster than Usain Bolt. Playing God -- BBC Horizon [COMPLETE IN A SINGLE FILE] Better Robot Muscles. Artificial muscles at MIT. Intricate robotic leg. Beautiful artificial limbs. The Robot Hiring Boom Has Arrived. The knock against many technology companies is they create too few jobs in their own countries. That complaint needs serious amending. Tech companies are creating plenty of jobs for robots. Foxconn, the leading manufacturer of electronics in the world -- which makes Apples iPhones and iPads, among other products -- plans to build 500,000 robots over the next three years to either replace or augment the company's human workforce. Foxconn currently supplements its 1.2 million human workers with 10,000 robots. In one regard, this investment will help the company's labor relations.
The official response to the media sounded every bit as cynical. Watch: What's the Big Idea? Foxconn has annual revenues of over $60 billion, and the company has put up an astounding compound annual growth rate of over 50 percent for the last decade. This could be a step in the right direction from both a business and humanitarian perspective. What's the Significance? Watch here: Image courtesy of Shutterstock. Mindboggling science. Robot Skin Can Feel Touch, Sense Chemicals, and Soak Up Solar Power.
When you meet your robot overlord, it may be wearing super-intelligent skin designed by a Stanford researcher--a solar-powered, super-sensitive, chemical-sampling covering that makes your meatbag covering look pathetic. Zhenan Bao is behind the advances, and the recent development centers on a stretchable solar cell system that can expand and shrink along two different axes, making it perfect for incorporation into artificial skin for robots, human prosthetic limbs, or even clothing. Bao's earlier successes with artificial skin have resulted in a highly flexible and durable material, which is part of a flexible organic-chemistry transistor, built on a thin polymer layer.
When the skin is subjected to pressure, the current flowing through the transistors is modified as tiny pyramid shapes molded into the polymer layer compress, resulting in a super-sensitive transducer that can apparently detect the pressure from a house-fly's feet.