Tokyo University of Science shows off robotic suit powered by pneumatic artificial muscles (video) Neurowear "shippo / brain controlled tail" concept movie（脳波で動くしっぽ） How Machines Will Use Social Networks To Gain Identity, Develop Relationships And Make Friends. Activity streams and social networks now represent a fundamental aspect of the modern application.
We use activity streams on Twitter to converse in 140 characters or less. We use the “like” gesture on Facebook to show approval for an update to a friend’s activity stream. In the enterprise, Salesforce.com Chatter uses activity streams to show application updates. Enterprise social network Tibco Tibbr users may create data hubs by geotagging places. For instance, an airport gate can be tagged to give agents, pilots and flight attendants relevant information as they approach it. These services represent what is to come as social networking becomes a way for humans and machines to orchestrate complex adaptive systems.
At VMworld this week, VMware’s Tim Young showed me how the company’s R&D department is using Socialcast’s enterprise social network to give hosts and virtual machines ways to communicate with each other. The VMware example points to an inevitable future. Cyborg flesh created by Harvard researchers in lab with nanowires and human tissue. Bioengineers at Harvard University have created “cyborg” flesh by growing tissue around nanowires and transistors.
Half living cells and half electronics, the human tissue is able monitor and transmit data like a heart rate. Working off a scaffolding of collagen interwoven with nanowires and transistors, the researchers grew neurons, heart cells, muscle, and even blood vessels with a built-in sensor network. The goal is to eventually “wire up tissue and communicate with it in the same way a biological system does.” While we're still a long way off from practical application, the team envisions a future where we could augment our physiology to repair damaged areas and detect internal inflammation, blockage, or tumors.
That could be great news for medicine … or, another tiny step in our ill-advised quest for immortality. Adorable real-life Wall-E robot is sure to tug at your heart strings. iRobot and InTouch Health announce RP-VITA 'telemedicine' robot. London bus does push-ups for Olympics using giant robotic arms. It’s something of a shame that the International Olympic Committee doesn’t run a little side competition for the most absurdly brilliant work of art inspired by the world’s biggest sports fest, for if it did, Czech artist David Cerny may well take the gold.
Cerny’s striking work, called ‘London Boosted’, involves one of the city’s iconic double-decker buses doing push-ups with the aid of giant robotic arms. This Robot Can Express Frighteningly Human Emotions. Robots just got creepier. The new FACE robot can express a range of human emotions that go beyond expressing happiness and sadness to show disgust and amazement, among other expressions. It can even adjust the intensity of each emotion displayed on a sliding scale. The robot relies on 32 gears in its "face" (compared to approximately 52 muscles in a human face) that control the expressions and show emotion. SEE ALSO: Human Thought Can Control This Robot Watch the video to learn how long it took developers to create this feat of robotics and how the FACE robot learns to mimic actual human emotions.
RoboZoo: Wired's Menagerie of Robot Animals. Students design underwater robot that does more than score points — University of Washington - washington.edu. Since he was 12 years old and successfully talked his way onto an underwater robotics club for kids aged 13 and up, Trevor Uptain has been building robots of the kind used by oceanographers and industry.
Now a sophomore at the University of Washington, he helped start a club that in just four months has already qualified to participate in an international underwater robotics competition coordinated by the Marine Advanced Technology Education Center and taking place in Florida next month. Speedy robotic lifeguards may save more lives this summer. Swiss scientists create mind-controlled robot for disabled patients. A team of scientists at Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne have developed a robot that can be controlled using only your mind.
The new technology was demonstrated earlier this week, and involved a quadriplegic man wearing a cap to record his brain signals, which were then transferred to a small wheeled robot that he could move left and right simply by thinking it. While the technology has the potential to give immobile patients the ability to see areas outside of their hospital bed, there are a few issues that still need to be addressed.
Chief among them is the fact that the system requires complete concentration — if you get distracted in any way the signal will degrade. In order to combat this the research team is hoping to make the technology work more like a human brain. So if you give it a command to walk, for instance, the robot will keep doing so until you either tell it to stop or it hits some sort of obstacle. Smartphone-enabled Hugvie adds physical sensation to phone calls. Meet South Korea’s new robotic prison guards. Video: A Robot With a Human Skeleton. Over at BBC, mathematician Marcus du Sautoy has examined what he's calling the world's first anthropomimetic robot--a robot that mimics in extremely high anatomical detail the movements and construction of the human body.
The robot, named ECCEROBOT, possesses artificial analogs of human bones, muscles, and tendons that endow it with human-like motions and--perhaps someday--will imbue it with human-like intelligence. Captured for a BBC show titled "Horizon: The Hunt for AI" (it airs tonight at 9 p.m., for any of our across-the-pond readers who may be interested), ECCEROBOT--for Embodied Cognition in a Compliantly Engineered Robot--serves three purposes. The first, of course, is to prove out the creation of a truly anthropomimetic robot. The second: figure out how to control it. Meet Cheetah, Boston Dynamics' Terrifyingly Fast Running Robot (Video)
Flying robots play James Bond Theme on real instruments (video) In today’s edition of pointless-but-awesome, we have another video from the ingenious folks at the University of Pennsylvania’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) laboratory.
GRASP produces some of the nation’s most innovative robotics research. And they’ve already impressed us/scared our pants off once with their swarm of militaristic nano quadrotors. So, what have they whipped up this time? Why, a band of musical flying robots, of course! Designed by engineers Daniel Mellinger and Alex Kushleyev, these robotic quadrotors have been programmed to play the James Bond Theme with the help of some modified instruments, and some nifty add-ons. Universal robot gripper sinks shots, throws darts, makes us feel inadequate (video)
Man Receives New Bionic Hand With Electronic Opposable Thumb. Wrist positioning is just one of many improvements that make the Michelango Hand feel more natural to amputees.
On January 12 Matt Razink received a prosthetic hand equipped with an electric opposable thumb. The Michelangelo Hand has given Razink so much added control that he no longer needs to change attachments according to the task. The new hand does it all. The Wisconsin resident had lost part of his arm in a rock-crushing machine six years ago. Lego robotic arm is grabby. My greatest Lego triumph was the creation of a miniature monorail that required pushing the car down a little Lego track.
YouTube user sumthinelse5790 (real name Max Shepherd) has blown my childhood creation out of the water with a Lego robotic arm. Admittedly, this isn't the first Lego arm on the planet , but it does show off a high level of sophistication. Shepherd went in with the lofty goal of accurately mimicking the full range of motion of a normal human arm and hand. The result is pretty successful. Lego pneumatics power the complex hand and wrist movements. Swarming Robots Will Fly Menacingly Towards Your Loved Ones In Perfect Formation. A moving experience – robotic mannequin debuts in Tokyo.
One might think that a mannequin in a store window that suddenly starts pulling a few moves would be enough to make shoppers jump out of their skin, but looking at a video of one that has recently appeared in the window of a department store in Tokyo shows shoppers appear to be unfazed.
Perhaps their nonchalant reaction should come as little surprise in a country where robotic technology is the norm. The android is the creation of Dr Hiroshi Ishiguro, famed for his work on Geminoid robots at Osaka University’s Intelligent Robotics Laboratory. Ishiguro recently got together with the folks at Takashimaya, a department store located in Tokyo’s Shinjuku entertainment district, to give the tired old mannequin a refresh in an effort to grab the attention of passing shoppers. What Humans Want: More Domestic Robots [STUDY] People would like to have their own Rosie the Robot — think The Jetsons — and would even borrow money to buy a robot that could complete domestic chores. A survey from the marketing analytics firm Persuadable Research shows that 68% of people surveyed would like to use a robot for domestic purposes such as cleaning windows, washing dishes and doing laundry.
"Moving things" topped the list of desired robot tasks, with 55% of respondents saying they would like a 'bot to help with this chore. Others said they would like a robot to act as personal assistant, reminding them of appointments and errands to run. Flying Robots Build A Tower Near Paris : Krulwich Wonders... Uh Oh. Construction workers please note: Somebody just built a 20-foot tower using flying robots. No people involved. The demo took place in a warehouse-like art gallery called FRAC, just outside Paris. As humans (none of them, I presume, in the construction trades) applauded and gaped, four helicopterish thingies swooped through the air, somehow avoiding each other, and one by one, settled on some "brick dispensers. " Using small plungers they then plucked one brick at a time, carried each to the "building site" and slowly created a wall. Chris Clarke's animatronic baby is a tiny wonder from the uncanny valley.
A video has begun making the rounds and it's, well, going to disturb you a little bit, sorry. It's an animatronic baby designed by special effects guru Chris Clarke, to be used in an unnamed UK soap opera. While your immediate reaction might be to think that this is merely the first in an all-out assault from the uncanny valley, Clarke explains in the comments that there's something much less ominous at play here: you simply can't put an actual, premature baby under TV studio set lights for hours at a time. Uncanny: L.A. Noire, Blade Runner, and gaming's quest to capture humanity. I'm sitting across from young Michelle Moller, whose mother I just found brutally murdered. The lead detective of the crime, I've been given the unenviable role as harbinger of bad news.
"I'm sorry to have to tell you this, Michelle, but your mother is dead. " DIY Fuzzy Robot Provides Therapy For Kids. Cubelets, A Modular Robot Construction System for Kids. Japanese Company Works On 13-Foot Robot With Built-In Cockpit. This isn’t like the robots we usually feature. Squishy Robot Can Move Under Obstacles. Now You Can Buy Your Very Own Robot Swarm. Robotic Bear Hits You When You Snore. Robot builds its own body from sprayable foam - tech - 19 October 2011. Video: Watch foambot in action as it sprays on its own body LIKE a sculpture that springs to life, a new type of robot makes its own body parts using spray-on foam. Such a design could one day be useful in situations in which the exact type of robot needed is not known beforehand, such as space exploration or reconnaissance. Created by Shai Revzen and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania Foambot consists of a wheeled "mothership" platform along with several simple joint modules capable of powered bending and flexing.
The platform has an on-board supply of chemical reagents and a spray nozzle; when mixed, the reagents expand into hard urethane foam. First the remote-controlled platform arranges the modules on the floor and then it sprays the foam to connect them into the required form.