Hasta La Gadget!

Facebook. Twitter. Google+. Those are just three of the many social networks out there these days, and it’s a daunting task to reply to everyone who engages you in the digital world. Google’s latest patent might just be the solution you need to keep up — it claims a technology that analyzes how you go about your social networking business and automatically makes personalized response suggestions to posts sent your way.

It constructs these automated responses by collecting social interactions, categorizing them and ranking their importance based upon prior posts to similarly labeled items. From there, it authors an appropriate reaction and provides you with the option of using it to reply, thereby saving you the countless seconds it would take to think of a response to all those cute dog and baby pictures coming your way. Google also claims that this robotic response technology can be used for email, instant messaging or texting, so it’s conceivable we could one day be having whole conversations with one another via a Google proxy. Thus ends the art of conversation.

Filed under: Misc, Google

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Via: BBC News

Source: USPTO

No one would characterize existing factory robots as especially warm and fuzzy: they’re usually disembodied limbs that are more likely to cut you than hug you. Rethink Robotics wants to put a friendly face on those machines, both figuratively and literally. Its about-to-ship Baxter worker robot carries a touchscreen face that’s as much about communicating its intent as giving humans something more relatable. Likewise, it’s designed to be easily programmed by its organic coworkers and react appropriately — you guide Baxter by one of its two arms to tell it what to do, and its combination of cameras and a quad-core processor let it adapt to real-world imperfections. Even the series elastic actuators in its arms give it a softer, subtler movement that’s less likely to damage products or people. While Baxter isn’t as ruthlessly quick as most of its peers, the relatively low $22,000 price and promise of an SDK for its Linux brain in 2013 should make it easier to accept than the six-digit costs and closed platforms of alternatives. We just hope we’re not being lulled into a false sense of security as lovable robots invade our manufacturing base ahead of the inevitable Robopocalypse.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Continue reading Rethink delivers Baxter the friendly worker robot, prepares us for our future metal overlords (video)

Filed under: Robots, Alt

Rethink delivers Baxter the friendly worker robot, prepares us for our future metal overlords (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Sep 2012 03:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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With all this talk about unmanned drones, it was only a matter of time before a couple of interesting projects would surface. Check out FishPi, an unmanned water vessel which will run a cheap Raspberry Pi computer to try and cross the Atlantic Ocean. Will it succeed?

Its creator, Greg Holloway thinks that FishPi will succeed. It’s currently in the proof-of-concept phase. The autonomous, slightly robotic, drone will also feature a 130 W solar panel that will power it. GPS and a servo controller board helps it guide through squalls. There’s a compass, motor and camera, which can capture video as well.

The prototype version measures 20″ in length, and wards off the elements thanks to a plastic sandwich container. I think that the final build will need to be a bit more refined than that, but if they ultimately set a whole bunch of these off on an Atlantic journey, then odds are that one of them might just make it.

[via Ubergizmo]