Hasta La Gadget!

There’s been talk for weeks of Boeing developing a fix for the 787 Dreamliner’s battery fire troubles. If the aircraft maker has its way, that should soon translate to action. The company’s commercial airplane chief, Raymond Conner, tells reporters that the company has a “permanent” fix that would place three layers of protection around the batteries and, theoretically, head off fires and their causes. It sounds like just the ticket — the challenge will be getting everyone else to feel the same way. American investigators believe the batteries are at fault, but their Japanese counterparts haven’t yet ruled out external factors. With this kind of ongoing debate, we’re not about to book a 787 to Tokyo for spring break.

Filed under: Transportation

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Source: New York Times

Kibo, the Japanese communication robot that will eventually join up with the rest of the crew aboard the International Space Station (ISS) later this summer, will also need to suit up and undergo some sort of “training”, if you will, just like any other astronaut worth their salt. Having said that, Kibo underwent some zero gravity testing of its own recently, which is part of the Kibo Robot Project that was organized by Dentsu Inc. after responding in kind to a proposal put forward by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

Kibo’s final design was also unveiled, where it received most of its design inspiration from a commercially-available kit known as Robi, standing approximately 13.4 inches in height, while tipping the scales over at 2.2 pounds. Toyota, a company that most of us would have associated with cars, has contributed natural language processing technology so that Kibo can understand Japanese speech. It will respond accordingly via a synthesized voice, and will boast of a camera which gives it facial recognition capability.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Jimmy The Robot Aids Stroke Patients, Japanese Robot Suit Gains Worldwide Rollout Approval,

Ever wondered how it feels like to wear a robotic suit on your daily walkabout? Japan, a country where robots rule (all right, I am saying that with extreme liberty. Robots do not “rule” there per se, but rather, the proliferation of robots in everyday life as well as culture is extremely well known), might soon help fuel an explosion of “robo mania” of sorts, by approving a new robot exoskeleton suit for a global rollout sometime down the road.

What you see above is a robot suit that is known as the “Hybrid Assistive Limb”, or rather, HAL for short, which has been specially developed to help and assist both the elderly and disabled to get around, and the mission to spread the wonders of HAL around the world has been aided by the receipt of its global safety certificate in Japan yesterday, which means a worldwide rollout is on the cards.

The Hybrid Assistive Limb comes across as a power-assisted pair of legs that were developed by Japanese robot manufacturer Cyberdyne (good thing it is not a company known as Skynet!), and Cyberdyne has quite a proven track record for robotic assistance tools, where they have come up with somewhat similar robot arms in the past, too.

A quality assurance body in Japan issued the certificate that was based on a draft version of an international safety standard where personal robots are concerned, and a full certificate for the finished product is tipped to be approved later The HAL holds the honor of being the first nursing-care robot that was certified under the draft standard, according to a ministry official. HAL is powered by batteries, where it is capable of detecting muscle impulses in order to anticipate and support the user’s body movements.

You cannot buy one off the shelf just yet though, as it remains on lease (some 330 of them) across 150 hospitals, welfare and other facilities in Japan since 2010, where it costs $1,950 thereabouts to rent a suit for the entire year.

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[ Japan approves worldwide sale of robot exoskeletons copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

When I was a kid, watching movies like Robotech sure got my adrenaline pumping. Imagine walking around in a giant robot suit which can transform into a jet fighter capable of defending the innocent against alien attacks, only to revert to an upright, humanoid form factor as and when required. Well, today we will see the possibilities of having more robot suits “walk” around us down the road, although these will be a whole lot smaller compared to what the Robotech universe offers.

The Hybrid Assistive Limb, better known as HAL, is actually a power-assisted pair of legs that was constructed developed by Japanese robot maker Cyberdyne, who has managed to successfully develop similar robot arms, too. HAL has received a certificate from a quality assurance body which will allow it to be sold worldwide later this year, although you will have to have rather deep pockets to wear one of these around, as they are leased at approximately $1,950 annually. Any takers?

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Robocop Would Be Proud Of The Robosparrow, Two Quadrocopters Seen Performing Pole Acrobatics,

This one’s a little puzzling. Japanese carrier Emobile has announced a new phone from Huawei, the memorably-named GL07S. The confusing part is that it looks almost identical to the black-colored Ascend P2, with the same three-line menu button differentiating it from another handset leak. It’s hard to say just yet, but Huawei might be readying two devices like it did during CES, where it unveiled the P2’s predecessor alongside an even thinner S model. This Japan-bound offering measures up a 8.6mm thick, which while certainly no porker, is a bit more than those promises of a 6.5mm smartphone. However, there’s still enough here to intrigue us, with a quad-core 1.5GHz processor, 13-megapixel camera, 32GB of built-in storage and a 2,350mAh battery rounding out a pretty respectable spec sheet. It’s also going to be an important phone for the relatively small phone network too — it’s their first LTE smartphone.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Via: Techblog.gr (Greek)

Source: Emobile (Japanese)