These tiny construction robots look like they’re doing a well-choreographed dance, working together to build a structure. Who’s driving? Nobody—these micro machines cooperate autonomously, using the same concept that guides termites and bees to build huge structures without a supervisor or blueprint. Look at them go!
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Inventors, designers and engineers are constantly cribbing from Mother Nature, building new-school robots inspired by old-school biology
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People attribute a lot of annoying internet stuff to bots. Twitterbot followers, bots that sneak past spam filters, bots that send weird gibberish on messaging services. It sounds kind of tired, but maybe the situation is exactly as bad as everyone thinks.
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Chances are that, if you’re visiting this page, you’re not a human. A new study reveals that 61.5 percent of all website traffic is generated by automated bots. Hi, robot!
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So BBM for Android and iOS
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Remember SmarterChild? That AIM bot that would answer all/most of your questions and get huffy and stop talking to you when you inevitably started swearing at it? Unfortunately SmarterChild is still dead and gone, but it’s got a Twitter descendant: @DearAssistant. More »
Captcha is the worst, and Tickmaster’s particular strain of the virus is especially, well, impossible. It’s changing that, though, to a system that will hopefully be more friendly to actual people trying to use it. More »
While Gangnam style was out racking up a billion views, channels owned by Sony and Universal have moved twice as far in the other direction. YouTube has stripped them of these views alleging a violation of the YouTube terms of service which prohibit the artificial inflating of view-counts. More »
It’s the sort of ceremony that’s so magical it can only occur on even-numbered years. Inventors, educators, entertainers, college students and media folk gathered at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, PA tonight for the 2012 inductions to the Robot Hall of Fame, a Carnegie Mellon-sponsored event created to celebrate the best of our mechanical betters.
This year, the field included four categories, judged by both a jury of 107 writers, designs, entrepreneurs and academics and the public at large, each faction constituting half the voting total. The show kicked off, however, with the induction of 2010 winners, the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, the da Vinci Surgical System, iRobot’s Roomba, the Terminator and Huey, Dewey and Louie, a trio of robots from 1971’s Silent Running.
The first ‘bot to secure its spot in the class of 2012, was the programmable humaoid Nao, from Aldebaran Robotics, which beat out the iRobot Create and Vex Robotics Design System in the Educational category. The PackBot military robot from iRobot took the Industrial and Service category, beating out the Kiva Mobile Robotic Fulfillment System and Woods Hole Oceanographic’s Jason. Boston Dynamic’s Big Dog ran over some stiff competition in the form of Willow Garage’s PR2 and NASA’s Robonaut to win the Research title. And WALL-E triumphed over doppelganger Johnny Five and the Jetsons‘ Rosie in the Entertainment category. Relive the festivities in four minutes after the break.
Continue reading Robot Hall of Fame inducts Big Dog, PackBot, Nao and WALL-E (video)
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Robot Hall of Fame inducts Big Dog, PackBot, Nao and WALL-E (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Oct 2012 23:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Everybody wants a better Captcha. Trying to type in those distorted words can be a serious pain, and it’s becoming less and less of an impedance to ever-more-intelligent spam bots. The Civil Rights Captcha takes a different approach; you’ve got to have a little empathy. More »
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