Title: How To Survive a Robot Uprising Author: Daniel H. Wilson Genre: Humor Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Release Date: November 1, 2005 Pages: 176 There’s a discussion on Slashdot today regarding this article by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about a new book by first-time author and full time roboticist, Daniel H. Wilson, entitled “How to Survive …
Tag: robotics
Oct 27 2005
Korea’s Intelligent Service Robot Project
Gizmodo’s got a brief summary today of an article in the Korea Herald that outlines the government of South Korea’s desire to have commercially available intelligent robots by next year. The “intelligent service robot” project as it is being called by the Ministry of Information and Communication states that intelligent robots for entertainment, education, home …
Oct 24 2005
Mac Mini Robot
Engadget.com has a brief post today about this Mac mini robot. The developer’s site, kulturtechnik.twoday.net, is in German, but the translated page does yield some details about the project including the fact that the robot’s vision is provided by, fittingly enough, an iSight mounted on the mini’s case and that it’s AI is based on the …
Oct 08 2005
Fast Robot Prototyping
IBM has just published a new article in it’s developerWorks section entitled “Wireless robotics: Fast robot prototyping.” Written by Erik Zoltan, the article approaches robotics development with a “bottom-up” approach, a process during which the subsystems are built and ultimately assembled with no specific goal of what the final robot will look like. Prototyping using …
Oct 07 2005
Funding for Robotics R&D Urged by EU Commissioner
Europe, home to many cutting-edge robotics projects, could fall behind the rest of the world if funding for such programs fails to keep pace over the next several years suggests Viviane Reding, an EU Commissioner of information society and media issues. She is asking both government bodies and private industry to act quickly in order …
Oct 06 2005
London Aquarium to Debut Robotic Fish
The AFP reports today that the London Aquarium is set to unveil the first autonomous robotic fish. Developed at the University of Essex over a period of three years, the fish are designed to not only physically resemble their biological counterparts but also replicate their behavior and movement. While they were primarily created to drive …
Oct 06 2005
Carnegie Mellon Secures Pole in Grand Challenge II
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, aka DARPA, announced the 23 finalists who have been chosen to compete in this year’s Grand Challenge, a race between autonomous robotic vehicles over a grueling course of up to 175 miles in the Mojave Desert. A red Hummer named H1ghlander developed by a team from Carnegie Mellon University …
Oct 05 2005
iRobot Introduces Antisniper Robot
The Boston Globe is reporting today that iRobot Corp., maker of the popular Roomba vacuum-bot, has been working in conjunction with Boston University to develop a robot that can spot and point out enemy snipers on an active field of battle. The system, called REDOWL (Robot Enhanced Detection Outpost with Lasers), was put through it’s …
Oct 03 2005
Minature Self-Assembling Robots
LiveScience.com has published an article regarding the research work done by Joseph Jacobson of the Molecular Machines group at MIT in developing minature robots that mimic the way living cells replicate DNA. In order for a cell to replicate it’s DNA, enzymes known as polymerases in the nucleus read the structure of the DNA and …
Oct 02 2005
Sony Releases AIBO ERS-7M3
Sony released a new version of it’s popular robo-dog, the AIBO, last week. The ERS-7M3, which seems to only currently be available for order in Japan, retails at about $2300 USD. The important distinction between this model and the previous ERS-7M2 model is in the “M3” portion of it’s designation, referring to the fact it …