Willow Garage, a research lab focused on robotics with many notable achievements under its belt, shut down last month, reports Bloomberg. The business decision was made by founder Scott Hassan, … Continue reading
The Thalmic Myo armband promises to let you control pretty much anything computerized with simple hand gestures, and the videos that Thalmic itself has shown display impressive potential. But this new video from Waterloo-based robotics company Clearpath gives a glimpse of what it can do in the hands of outside developers. Outside developers who build awesome robots.
The Clearpath Husky Unmanned Vehicle is the lucky robot in the video above – what it lacks in opposable thumbs it makes up for in grit and stoic charm. The Myo has been mapped to its controls to allow it to direct forward, reverse and left/right turn movement, as well as velocity and braking.
It’s only a small step from here to full control of massive piloted combat robots created to fend off dimensional invaders from the depths of the ocean. Myo might need to come up with a Jeager-specific API first though I guess.
Robotic termites capable of building complex structures without requiring human supervision, prior programming, or even intercommunication could change the way construction, emergency services, or even space exploration are managed, borrowing … Continue reading
Robot eyes. That’s a terrifying sentence. But robotics vision is an immense area of research interest, and a key technological field in terms of building the future of a wide variety of devices. That’s why it’s very interesting that Dyson is putting a sizeable investment into robotics vision via a joint robotics lab being launched in collaboration with Imperial College London.
The investment is worth £5 million (or around $8 million U.S.) and covers a five-year period. The lab will be working on robotics vision systems that are designed to help the next-gen of robots not only see things the way that humans do, but also process that visual information in a manner that better approximates human understanding.
For those unfamiliar with the field, it covers a broad range of potential uses: A friend with a graduate degree in robotics vision engineering helps design systems for production lines that inspect the products being built for quality assurance purposes. Typically, these offer up margins of error that are tiny compared to the standards established by human inspectors.
Dyson is no stranger to conducting robotics research – the company has been exploring that area of interest for the past 15 years, according to the company. With Imperial College London specifically, it’s been working on developing systems that can view, interpret and “logically navigate” their surroundings. This applies to robotic vacuums in terms of Dyson’s business interest (the company mentions this product category specifically, so watch out Roomba) but it’s not their only goal in terms of applied robotics.
What this signals for Dyson is a graduation of sorts, as the company moves from thinking about robotics as an area of sustained but relatively light interest, into something it would like to ramp up on the production side. Hopefully at the end of these next five years, we’ll all be living with an army of Dyson home cleaning automatons, but at the very least we should see some advancements in terms of the ocular powers of our robotic friends.
Google can’t stop buying robotics companies. In the past two months, eight of the 12 companies the search giant has acquired have "robotics" in their name or descriptions. Here’s your complete breakdown of the robot army presently at Google’s command.
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Science fiction has given us a vision of the future where humans might one day enjoy super-strength and abilities while wearing a rigid robotic exoskeleton suit. But back here in reality, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a soft bio-robotic socks designed to assist those who have difficulty with something as simple as walking.
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The very fact that underground robots being used to patrol the U.S./Mexico border—a program now moving into its second decade—can be greeted with what amounts to a disinterested shrug is a good indication of how sci-fi our everyday lives have gotten. There are underground robots patrolling the edge of the country.
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Who says you need opposable thumbs to assemble objects or operate complex machinery? Empire Robotics has been working on the plush sphere of the future with their so-called "jamming-based robot grippers," otherwise known as the Versaball system.
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The DIY revolution means that people can now print their own 3D models, build their own websites and apps, and even build their own mobile devices and custom computers using things like Raspberry Pi. The Modbot team taking part in this year’s TechCrunch Battlefield at CES 2014 wants to do the same for robotics – not hobby robotics, but serious, full-fledged industrial and commercial robot building.
Modbot founders Adam Ellison and Daniel Pizzata identified a problem in prototyping and building robots for use in manufacturing, research and basically any other application: parts were unnecessarily complicated and expensive, when in reality they could be much more affordable and much simpler, too.
Ellison and Pizzata have created a simple system consisting of a servo, a link and a joint component, along with a base upon which to build your projects. The Modbot vision is one where people can combine pre-assembled parts that cost significantly less than their professional industrial counterparts in order to build a wide range of robots for any number of purposes, including small scale production. Imagine, then a future where entrepreneurs could not only create a concept for a hardware device and send that away to a production partner, but also build the thing themselves in-house.
Honda’s Asimo costs roughly $1 million just to make, according to Modbot’s founders, and most of that cost comes from actuators and hardware. By dramatically decreasing the price of this part of the process, Modbot is hoping to encourage innovation and make it possible for even the smallest companies to build anything from a giant robot death spider to a fully functional prosthetic arm.
Modbot is launching its Indiegogo campaign today, to produce its hardware and to develop its app, which is a rapid prototyping campaign that lets you design your robot in virtual space with just a few clicks, and then instantly click a button and order everything you need to build that design right from the prototyper and have it shipped to you directly.
Raspberry Pi has helped pave the way for a future where you could easily see kids coming to school with coding and electronics experience in hand. Modbot could offer the same sort of thing for robotics, albeit with pricing that while affordable, still reflects a target market of small business users and entrepreneurs rather than kids and hobbyists. But it could still be sort of equivalent to the 3D printing revolution, putting manufacturing capabilities once relegated to multi-billion dollar companies in the hands of five-person shops and startups.
It won’t be a superstar football player who takes the first kick of 2014’s Football World Cup in Brazil. Nope, instead, it will be a teenager, paralysed from the waist down, who will use the world’s most advanced mind-controlled exoskeleton to get things underway.
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