Amidst the wrath of Hurricane Sandy earlier this week, a seafaring robot bravely scoured the waters 100 miles east of New Jersey to monitor and transmit hurricane data. The robot, called Mercury, is actually built by Liquid Robotics, an ocean data service provider and developer of the Wave Glider. Liquid Robotics says that Mercury battled through Hurricane Sandy and successfully piloted through winds up to 70 knots while transmitting weather data in real time. Mercury’s sensors was able to gather a “dramatic” data from the surface of the ocean as Sandy neared landfall, with the barometric pressure of over 54.3 mbars to a low of 946 mbars.
“Mercury now joins the fleet of other Wave Gliders that have come through Category I hurricanes to successfully fulfill their missions,” said Dr. Edward Lu, chief of innovative applications for Liquid Robotics. “This is a testament to our robust and reliable technology and proof of its readiness for severe weather data collection.” The Wave Glider is an unmanned autonomous marine robot that features state-of-the-art with communication systems and computers. You can learn more about it here.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Solar-powered Wave Glider robot tracks down sharks, Wave Glider to network world’s oceans,
PhotoBot is a tiny robotic camera that is designed and built by Tommy Dykes, a British digital product designer. What makes the PhotoBot unique from the rest is its ability to scan a given area, locate people through its ultrasonic sensor, and automatically take pictures of them while instantly displaying the photos on a tiny screen. The robotic camera concept came to Dykes when he was exploring for other alternative ways of doing photography.
Some of us do wish that there are more hours in a day, while others wish we had more limbs so that we are able to get more things done throughout the day. Federico Parietti and Harry Asada of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have come up with this pair of semi-autonomous intelligent arms that ought to aid just about anyone in their jobs. All right, you will not quite reach the levels of Doctor Octopus of Spiderman lore just yet, but at least these semi-autonomous arms will extend in front of your body from the hips, where they are strapped to a backpack-like harness which carries the control circuitry. The prototype could be used to assist factory workers in performing tricky DIY tasks.
In July this year, we were looking into the 
Panasonic has come up with a prototype of a dry head spa robot, where there might be possible plans down the road that could see this prototype robot attached to a desk or bath. It will rely on robot hand technology which was used previously in their hair washing robot. Panasonic described the prototype this way, “For kneading the scalp while the hair is dry, people use dry head spas. So, we’ve added a robot hand we’d already developed for washing hair, and developed this, as a model for seeing how such therapy might feel.”