Hasta La Gadget!

A night out at the local watering hole can be a pain sometimes, having to elbow your way through crowds and struggle to catch the bartender’s eye, all for a tasty beverage. If only we could leave all the hard work to a machine. Fortunately, Monsieur, the “robotic bartender” that we first met at TechCrunch Distrupt a few weeks ago, is back to deliver a Jetsonian experience to those who thirst for more than tech. It’s certainly not the first of its kind, but the delivery method employed here is of a subtler sort, downplaying the anthropomorphic angle and hiding away the mechanism inside a streamlined casing. The home-bound version is significantly more compact (and less expensive) than the enterprise edition seen above, and it should be making its way to consumers soon. Grab a glass and join us after the break to see what’s in store.%Gallery-slideshow90894%

Filed under: Household, Robots

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Source: Monsieur

One of those games I always saw in the arcade quite, but never quite understood was foosball. I get that it’s sort of like playing soccer on a table, but I always thought it was boring after just a few minutes of play. I might be able to get behind playing some 21st century foosball using these soccer playing robots from BeeWi.

The robot is called the BBZ150 and it uses Bluetooth connectivity and a smartphone application for control. Each of the little robots comes with numbers for its shirt, a little soccer ball, and a little soccer goal. The control app is available for Android, iOS devices, and Windows Phone.

If you’re not into soccer, you can just cruise the robot around like any remote control toy and you can play sumo wrestling with it using a downloadable sumo ring you can print at home.

The BBZ150 robot will ship in October for £29.99 (~$48 USD) each.

Nissan seems keen to give Google a run for their money in the autonomous vehicle technology category, and the Japanese giant is working hard at creating functional robot vehicles for 2020 and beyond.

Nissan has recently been able to pick up an official Japanese license plate to start testing smart driving systems in real world driving environments.

The car’s brains have been stuffed into an all-electric Nissan Leaf. Some of the features include automatic lane centering as well as adaptive cruise control. The vehicle will also support automatic exiting for freeways, automatic lane changes, and the ability to overtake slower or stopped cars as well.

Soon enough, we won’t even have to drive our cars, and maybe texting and driving will be okay.

[via Wired]

The folks over at the European Space Agency (ESA) have been doing some serious thinking lately, and they certainly have some interesting and creative ideas when it comes to exploring different planets. This time around, there will be nothing to do with a snake robot to explore the nooks and crannies of other planets, but rather, a CO2-powered hopping rocket robot which will be able to draw its fuel from the Red Planet’s atmosphere.

The idea of a rocket robot getting around Mars sounds idealistic, and there is the issue of having to find a way so that it is capable of refueling itself. The ESA has then set out to make this happen, where their idea is to rely on a rocket which will use carbon dioxide as a propellant. After all, this makes plenty of sense, considering how there is plenty of carbon dioxide over on Mars. This rocket robot will obtain all the CO2 it needs from the surrounding atmosphere by using a radioisotope thermal generator as a power source, before liquify it gradually. Once a critical mass of CO2 has been achieved, the thermal generator will heat up a hollow tube that has plenty of pebbles which were made from beryllium and boron carbine. Once said tube becomes extremely hot, CO2 will be injected within, firing out via a nozzle underneath the rocket robot to keep it going.

European Space Agency Works On Rocketbots To Explore Planets original content from Ubergizmo.

Tiptoeing on tulips – that is exactly what the folks over at Boston Dynamics are supposed to do with their LS3 mule robot. LS3 stands for Legged Squad Support System, where we have seen in the past just how it managed to make its way across some pretty rough terrain on all fours, without even falling down when it was kicked. Not only that, it boasted the strength to haul around 400 pounds of supplies over 20 miles at a time on a single tank of fuel. While the LS3 is capable of lasting throughout 24 hours on a mission, the existing model is way too noisy for battlefield operations, with the main culprit being the gas-powered hydraulic pump.

DARPA hopes that an injection of $10 million will be able to ensure that the LS3’s head area, where most of its sensitive electronics are placed, will be bulletproof, just like most of the rest of its body. Apart from that, DARPA also wants the LS3 to be a whole lot more stealthy than it already is at this point in time. Will the folks at Boston Dynamics be able to pull it off with the new round of funding? $10 million is a drop in the bucket especially when you consider it against the amount spent for the F-35′s program so far.

Boston Dynamics LS3 To Gain Bulletproof Capability original content from Ubergizmo.