Hasta La Gadget!

UPDATE: The links to the Russian site aren’t working; sorry! Hopefully the site will come back up.

This, hands down, is one of the most involved–and amazing–case mods I’ve ever seen. Originally posted on casemods.ru, few details about the project are available to those who don’t read Russian. (Google Translator to the rescue!)

Completely hand-built in just 18 days, this amazing mod began when a man named Valeri watched Wall-E, Disney and Pixar’s 2008 animated hit:

I was impressed by the
image of a small, very lonely robot who is struggling alone with a
whole army of fellow that I decided to make a computer corpus of my
favorite hero.

So he headed to the machine shop and got to work. There, he cut, milled, drilled, and filed every piece of the lovable little robot out of metal, paying remarkable attention to even the tiniest of details. The resulting 19 pages of in-process photographs show the truly astounding craftsmanship that went into creating the final piece.

Perhaps for his next project, an external-drive Eva is in order?

Oh boy, from the looks of that picture the only perquisites for using the updated da Vinci Si surgical system are video game skills, a preference for interacting with the physical world on a high-def display, and an abnormal interest in robots. Sound like anyone you know? Intuitive Surgical’s latest robotic system features two separate HD optical channels that the manufacturer claims will give “highly accurate depth perception” when merged. The surgeon console features touchpad control of the video, audio, and system settings while providing “precise, dexterous control” of a an extensive array of surgical tools held by the robotic flanges. Perfect for all your minimally invasive, WebMD-inspired home surgery needs when not performing transplants at county. Check the video after the break — amazing is an understatement.

[Via MedGadget]

Continue reading Video: da Vinci Si robotic system wants to be your surgeon

Filed under: Robots

Video: da Vinci Si robotic system wants to be your surgeon originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Apr 2009 05:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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All caught up on your sleep? Good. ‘Cause our old friend the “Child-robot with Biomimetic Body,” or CB2, has now returned to haunt your nightmares. As you might expect, the bot hasn’t simply spent its past two years of existence terrifying the staff at Osaka University, it’s actually been learning, and it’s now apparently able to make use of its 51 air-powered motors to move itself through a room “quite smoothly” — with a helping hand, of course. What’s more, the researchers behind CB2 are now also starting to talk about some of their future projects, including a new “robo species” that they say will have learning abilities “somewhere between those of a human and other primate species such as the chimpanzee.” Yeah, we can’t wait to see what that looks like either.

Filed under: Robots

CB2 “Child Robot” returns: smarter, creepier than ever originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Apr 2009 02:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Two teams of researchers said on Thursday they had created machines that
could “reason, formulate theories and discover scientific knowledge on
their own,” a development that could potentially signal a major advance in the field of artificial intelligence, according to Reuters.

At Aberystwyth University in Wales, researchers created Adam, a robot that can carry out experiments on yeast metabolism, reason about the results, and plan the next experiment, the report said. So far it has already uncovered something new about the genetics of yeast, in what is apparently the first time a robot has ever made an independent scientific discovery.

Meanwhile, Hod Lipson and Michael Schmidt of Cornell University in New York designed a computer program that can uncover the fundamental physical laws behind a swinging double pendulum, teasing out Issac Newton’s laws of motion along the way, according to the article.

Eventually both groups plan to put more robotic designs to work in discovering new medicines and uncovering new scientific principles, respectively. (Image credit: Aberystwyth University)

Sorry, that’s not actually Dark Helmet, it’s a researcher demonstrating the latest Brain Machine Interface (BMI) cooked up for robotics. While it’s not looking too portable, it’s a far nimbler setup than the original MRI Scanner first concocted by Honda to control robots in near real-time back in 2006. This time, Honda Research Institute in coordination with Advanced Telecommunications Research (ATR) and Shimadzu Corporation have achieved robotic thought control using a sensor cap to measure electrical potential on the scalp and cerebral blood flow. While we’ve seen much of this BMI tech applied to video games in the past, Honda claims its technology achieves the world’s highest accuracy at 90% without special training. Impressive, even though it’s clearly R&D work for now. Check the video after the break.

[Via Akihabara News]

Continue reading Honda’s ASIMO could be thought controlled in Spaceballs 2

Filed under: Robots

Honda’s ASIMO could be thought controlled in Spaceballs 2 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 31 Mar 2009 03:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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