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,

While Alan Turing’s conversational test remains the gold standard for marking artificial intelligence, an annual software tournament called BotPrize has turned up a two bots which have convinced human judges that they were human. However, a Turing test involves a conversation where a person is fooled, but the winning bots from this year’s BotPrize only had to play first-person shooter Unreal Tournament.

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By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Romo smartphone bot can double up as a spybot, Unreal Engine runs in Flash,

Just as man-hacks can repair their trajectories as they whiz towards Gordon Freeman’s head, these little robots from the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems can now pick themselves back up when they crash. This little feature solves a problem that has long been the bane of flying robotics hobbyists everywhere as they watched their AR Drones and other bots fling themselves to pieces against walls and plant life.

Designer Adam Klaptocz said that he took his designs from nature and the prototypes he built can shoot out little legs that helps the robot right itself and take off again when it suffers from a hit. These robots could also fly in the dark because they are able to withstand a few wrong moves.

The robot, called the AirBurr, has a low center of gravity and a set of powerful propellers than can send the robot soaring again. I especially love the last part of the video where the thing falls into a box and gets itself out like a spider that mated with a radioactive eggbeater.

via RoboticsTrends

Something tells me that the real Wall-E might actually hire some of Apple’s lawyers in order to help it win a lawsuit against the Wall-Ye V.I.N. robot, although that would most probably not happen anytime soon. The ‘punny’ name best describes this 50cm tall robot that moves around on a quartet of wheels, boasting a pair of arms as well as half a dozen cameras. With those in its arsenal, the Wall-Ye V.I.N. robot is capable of pruning up to 600 vines each day, and the good news is, it will not report in as sick or laze around idly.

The Wall-Ye V.I.N. robot is the result of Burgundy-based inventor Christophe Millot, and will be one of the robots being developed worldwide that should be able to help vineyards ease the labor issues that they are facing at the moment. After all, working in a vineyard is no easy task, where it involves labor-intensive chores such as pruning and removing unproductive young shoots, in addition to collecting valuable data on the health and vigor of the soil, fruit and vine stocks.

The Wall-Ye V.I.N. robot will come with a sticker price of 25,000 euros ($32,000), but since it works all round the clock, and even on weekends, does not call in sick or chat idly, you’ve got a top notch worker here. Here’s hoping it does not meet its E.V.E.!

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Robot reminds us of Michael Jackson in a dance, Robot snake detects tumors by slithering through body,