Hasta La Gadget!

It’s been well over a year since we last saw the laser-guided, self-docking wheelchair developed by folks at Lehigh University, and now the team is back with an altogether more ambitious project. According to associate professor John Spletzer, the recipient of a five-year CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, the goal is to “extend the autonomy of the wheelchair so it can navigate completely in an urban setting and take you wherever you need to go.” This will be done by equipping robotic chairs with laser and camera sensors (which the team developed for the 2007 DARPA Grand Challenge) as well as exhaustive, Google Street View-esque maps of the city where they will be operating. Of course, these guys will be operating in a busy urban environment, so in addition to large-scale 3D maps, they must be equipped with motion planning features for operating in dense crowds and a changing environment. It’s too soon yet to say when these things might become available commercially, but if you’re a resident of the Good Shepherd Rehabilitation Hospital in Allentown, PA, you might have your chance to test one soon enough.

[Via PhysOrg]

Filed under: Robots

NSF backs development of laser-guided robot wheelchairs originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times, stop trying to make robots into “friendly companions!” MIT must have some hubris stuck in its ears, as its labs are back at it with what looks like Clippy gone 3D, with an extra dash of Knight Rider-inspired personality. What we’re talking about here is a dashboard-mounted AI system that collects environmental data, such as local events, traffic and gas stations, and combines it with a careful analysis of your driving habits and style to make helpful suggestions and note points of interest. By careful analysis we mean it snoops on your every move, and by helpful suggestions we mean it probably nags you to death (its own death). Then again, the thing’s been designed to communicate with those big Audi eyes, making even our hardened hearts warm just a little. Video after the break.

Continue reading MIT’s Affective Intelligent Driving Agent is KITT and Clippy’s lovechild (video)

Filed under: Robots

MIT’s Affective Intelligent Driving Agent is KITT and Clippy’s lovechild (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Oct 2009 04:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve seen our fair share of useful but ugly and pretty but pointless robotic concoctions, but nothing quite like this. The Power Loader suit, which was directly inspired by the mech outfits in Aliens, is in our humble opinion an exoskeleton done right. With two massive protruding arms, capable of lifting 220 pounds without a sweat, direct force feedback for intuitive control, and even powered legs, we’re inclined to believe what we’re seeing here is a tiny glimpse of the awesome mech-dominated future we’ve been waiting so long for. Also known as the Dual-Arm Power Amplification Robot, this is produced by Activelink, a Panasonic subsidiary, and you might be shocked to discover that there are plans afoot to commercialize it by 2015. Entrancing video after the break.

Continue reading Video: Power Loader has giant freaking robot arms!

Filed under: Robots, Wearables

Video: Power Loader has giant freaking robot arms! originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 01 Oct 2009 04:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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So you want something to look forward to in your fast approaching old age, eh? If robots playing baseball doesn’t quite cut it, how’s about a robohand that redefines what we understand by the word “dexterity”? The Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory is at it again, this time demonstrating robotic appendages with a reaction time of a single millisecond. Using harmonic drive gears and a (really) high-speed actuator, the three-fingered hands can tie your shoelaces, tweezer your brow, and even perform some kung fu pen spinning for the ladies. Video after the break — skip ahead if you must, but don’t miss out on the slow-mo action at 2:40 in the demo, it’s pure kinetic poetry.

[Via Hizook; Thanks, Thomas B]

Continue reading Video: Robot hand shows off amazing dexterity, speed

Filed under: Robots

Video: Robot hand shows off amazing dexterity, speed originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 22 Aug 2009 14:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The biannual International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence has this year shed light on a new effort to standardize robot instructions around a common platform, so that designers won’t have to “reinvent the wheel over and over” with every project. Presently, robot design is undertaken in an ad hoc fashion, with both hardware and software being built from scratch, but teams at Stanford, MIT and the Technical University of Munich are hoping to change that with the Robot Operating System, or ROS. This new OS would have to compete with Microsoft’s robotics offering, but the general enthusiasm for it at the conference suggests a bright future, with some brave souls even envisioning a robot app store somewhere down the line. Video after the break.

Continue reading ROS: a common OS to streamline robotic engineering

Filed under: Robots

ROS: a common OS to streamline robotic engineering originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Aug 2009 01:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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