Jan 02
This robot may not look like much—it is, after all, just a cube—but despite its simple geometry, it’s capable of balancing, jumping, and even walking.
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Dec 22
The teams have broken down their robots and packed them up in crates and suitcases, loaded them into trucks and taken them on airplanes and gone home. Some will lick their wounds and rebuild to fight another day. The lucky ones will get a million dollars each from DARPA to continue developing their bots.
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Dec 21
The Google-owned Japanese robotics company SCHAFT has won the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials by a wide margin. It scored 27 out of 32 points, beating its nearest competitor IHMC Robotics … Continue reading
Dec 21
Gizmodo’s coverage of the DARPA Robotics Challenge continues with day two at the Homestead Speedway south of Miami. The weekend has arrived and the crowds are here with their kids, cheering on the bots.
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Dec 20
The DARPA Robotics Challenge, or DRC, kicked off today at the Homestead-Miami Speedway about 30 miles south of Miami. A total of sixteen teams from around the world are here to challenge each other today and tomorrow in timed trials, and to compete for funding from DARPA, the Pentagon’s mad science arm. A seventeenth team, from China, hit travel snags and hasn’t made it here yet.
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Dec 20
Today kicks off the two-day mechanolympics of the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials at Homestead Miami Speedway. With teams from around the world competing in eight tasks, only one will take home the purse. Just a few hours in—watch live here—it’s still any robot’s game. We’ve got your odds right here, so you can bet on the future.
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Dec 17
Amazon made waves with its Amazon Air drone delivery concept, and a video of a recent test flight really brought that concept to life. Now robotics startup and iPhone-enabled toy maker Sphero has a concept of its own to reveal, complete with a shot-for-shot remake of the original video by the online e-commerce giant – they call it Amazon Ground.
Sphero makes iPhone-controlled rolling spherical robots that light up and can play a number of app-enabled games using one or more units, and the video above, while created for laffs, does give you an idea of what they’re capable of. The company released version 2.0 of the Sphero earlier this year, and Amazon’s a key retail partner.
Using Sphero in this way is of course rife with logistical problems, not least of which would be the overwhelming urge to kick these diminutive delivery people clear across the street should you encounter them in the wild. Don’t get me wrong, I find Sphero very endearing, but a ball must needs kicking. This is a well-crafted parody tribute, but those spherical robots do look right at home in that warehouse and could conceivably be of some limited use in that specific setting, so who knows what the future will bring.
Dec 16
With the purchase of Boston Dynamics, Google has become the proud owner of a robotics company – for the 8th time. This is not Google’s first acquisition of a company in the robotics industry, nor will it be the last. What we’ve got instead is the continued efforts of the big G to collect the […]
Dec 16
Carnegie Mellon CHIMP robot to participate in DARPA Robotics Challenge trials this month
Posted in: Today's ChiliCarnegie Mellon University has been working on its CHIMP robot that will participate in the DARPA Robotic Challenge for a long time. The first time we talked about the robot was in March of this year when CHIMP was first announced. The university has announced that CHIMP will be taking part in the DARPA Robotics […]
Dec 15
Google has been doing its holiday shopping, and latest on the list is robotics specialists Boston Dynamics, known for its at-times terrifyingly life-like animal robots. The company has created ‘bots that can scale walls, jump like fleas, cross treacherous terrain, and outrun their human masters, but under Google’s roof – and with Google’s budget – […]
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