Hasta La Gadget!

If you have $16,000 lying around and I hankering to virtually cruise the halls of some distant office, Suitable Technologies has something suitable that it has just debuted. The company has new telepresence robot called the Beam Remote Presence System or Beam RPS.

The robot requires three components, the robotic device itself, the client software, and the Beam Docking Station. The docking station is where the remote user parks the robot to recharge. The bot stands 62-inches tall and weighs 95 pounds. It has a 17-inch screen that shows the operator’s life-sized face to be displayed – assuming your head will fit on a 17-inch screen.

The Beam’s internal rechargeable battery is a good for up to eight hours of use and the robot can cruise around at 1.5 m/s. The robot has an integrated wireless radios for control and has a pair of HD cameras providing a 170° field of view vertically and horizontally. The robot also has a microphone array with six microphone beams to eliminate background noise and echo. It also has an integrated speaker system with LED lamps for lowlight operation.

With much cheaper options coming in a few months, and others coming soon, I’m not sure of the market for a $16,000 telepresence ‘bot, but it’s just more evidence that with time we’re going to start seeing robots roaming the halls sooner rather than later.

It was more than a fortnight ago when we first laid our eyes on the cyborg cockroach that hailed from the North Carolina State University, and here we are with a video that details it further. It showcases Professor Alper Bozkurt’s love for these pesky insects known as cockroaches. I absolutely loathe these buggers, where no amount of bug spray seems to be able to work, and they tend to avoid my strategically placed roach traps after a while. Search and rescue operations seem to be the reason as to why these cyborg cockroaches were created in the first place.

You know what is worse for folks like me who loathe cockroaches, let alone cyborg ones? Best to stop here instead of performing further research and development on these pests, as I do not think that having zombie cyborg cockroaches hanging around planet Earth is such a good idea after all.

According to Alper Bozkurt, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering in said university, “We don’t believe that we induce any sort of feeling of pain to the insect with our stimulations. Many people may be thinking that we are zapping the insect and it tries to avoid the pain and it goes in the other direction but biologically, there are a lot of research publications and evidence out there which suggest that there is no concept of pain for the insect.” That’s nice to hear, isn’t it?

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Wall-Ye V.I.N. robot does the heavy lifting in vineyards, Robot reminds us of Michael Jackson in a dance,

Devon Carrow is a fairly normal kid, except for the fact that his allergies are so severe that he has been compared to David Vetter, the boy who inspired the film The Boy In the Plastic Bubble. His allergies make it impossible to attend class with all of the other kids around.

The slightest thing could send Devon to the hospital. However, that doesn’t mean that he can’t attend school. Devon has a VGo telepresence robot that can travel the halls, sit at a desk and even go outside at recess time. While he is doing all of this through the robot, Devon is safe at home 5 miles away.

He controls the machine’s movements and camera from home, and interacts through the hi-def monitor and indicator lights on the VGo. This is the perfect example of how technology can make a major difference in our lives.

[via The Buffalo News via Neatorama]

At a robot dancing competition in Bejing, this particular robot might remind some others of the late and great King of Pop, Michael Jackson, especially when it takes to the dance floor. Paraded at the first Beijing College Student Robotics Competition, 99 teams from Beijing and Taiwan participated in the two-day competition, where among the sports thrown into the mix included boxing, athletics, football and golf. Needless to say, the dancing category did have its fair share of ups and downs, where students programmed their metallic embodiments to dance out what is deemed to be a collection of difficult movements, especially where robots are concerned. While we would not be getting a robot that can dance like Michael in such a lifelike manner anytime soon, at least this is a start – and a good one, I am sure. It will still take a very, very long time for the field of robotics to have advanced to a level where a robot’s movement is so realistic to that of a human, and we cannot even tell the difference.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Robot snake detects tumors by slithering through body, Plant Host Drone seeks sunlight for your plant,

If you hate having creepy crawlies around, then you might be loathe to have this robot snake being inserted into your body as though it was some sort of Matrix nightmare come true. There is a very good reason for having this robot snake slither through your entire body though, especially when it is supposed to help you sniff out cancer. This cancer-sniffing robot was developed by engineers at Britain’s OC Robotics, where it can identify as well as remove hard-to-reach tumors. Of course, it will not run in an automated manner, but rather, the robot snake itself will be guided by a nearby surgeon, and the patient need not worry about being carved open – meaning there will be no scars to speak of, at least externally, after the procedure.

Right now, the robot snake remains as a prototype, where researchers remain optimistic concerning its potentially non-invasive qualities. After all, it is meant to be as minimally invasive as possible, enabling a surgeon to look and “feel” inside the body through the clever implementation of cameras and extremely sensitive equipment to provide feedback. Sounds like a medical “video game” of sorts, don’t you think so?

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Robots crawl through your body to perform internal surgery , Xenex robot decontaminates hospital room,