Hasta La Gadget!

Honda Motor is set to unveil two robotic walking and lifting assistant exoskeleton devices in New York tomorrow. The company preannounced the prototypes today, giving the world a glimpse in video and photos of these two wearable technologies.

The same company that brought the world the ASIMO Humanoid  robot, American Honda Motors, has used what it learned about human locomotion to build the Stride Management Assist and the Bodyweight Support Assist.

The first prototype is a lightweight, wearable device intended to help the elderly and those with weakened leg muscles walk. In photos, users wear the Stride Management apparatus around their waists, hips and thighs. An internal computer actually regulates the user’s stride and walking pace to make it more consistent and, ultimately, effective.

The Bodyweight Support device is a more extensive apparatus. It extends from the waist and hips to the feet and even has a built-in seat that wearers straddle. That extra gear is necessary because the Bodyweight is not only intended to help those who have difficulty walking, but to assist the able in strenuous tasks, such as lifting heavy weights.

Honda plans on showing off these intelligent exoskeleton prototypes later this month at the  Automotive Engineers (SAE) World Congress at Detroit’s Cobo Center (April 20 – 23). However, Gearlog should have a hands-on report sometime tomorrow.

More photos of the prototypes after the jump.

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)

Emergency personnel need the latest in radio, GPS, wireless, and cellular connectivity to do their jobs. Now researchers at the Ilmenau University of Technology in Germany have developed flying quadcopter robots that join and assemble an ad-hoc wireless network in the event of a disaster, Engadget reports.

When joined together, the robots can offer both Wi-Fi and cellular access to emergency people on the ground. They’re built with off-the-shelf parts, including a GPS radio and a VIA chipset, and come in a kit that includes everything but the battery for about $380 each, the report said.

The battery is a killer, though—it costs about $1,200 and only lasts for 20 minutes of flight time, although once the thing finds a place to land, it can work for hours after that on the same charge. A robot will be on display in FutureParc hall at CeBIT, according to the report. This is easily the coolest thing I’ve seen all week.

The numbers are in and it seems South Korea is well on its way to make history by building the first ever robot theme parks. While this project has been in the works for quite some time, the recent $1.05 billion total funding by the government secures the parks’ future. In fact, in a slew of press releases, the Korean news sources confirm that the first of the two parks to be built in the South Korean city of Incheon will begin construction later this year.

The first park aptly albeit blandly named “Robot Land” will be finished by 2013, while the second part in the city of Masan will be finished by 2014. Although it’s obvious that it will be good news for us with a hankering for robots, it will even be better news for the country’s economy. These two robot theme parks are expected to boost tourism and South Korea’s robotics industry as well as create 18,000 jobs.

Radio-controlled cars are cool and all, but you know what’s even cooler? Radio-controlled cars that turn into Robots. B2X’s RCRC switches from a sports car to a truck to an upright robot.

The RCRC has fairly basic controls, moving forward, up, down, left, right, and spinning in place. Users can control it up 1o 100 feet away. Check out a full video of the RCRC transforming, after the jump.