Sep 27 2017
From Vienna Bienalle 2017, taking place this week in Austria, comes a new take on Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. The head of the project, Christoph Thun-Hohenstein, says the update was necessitated by: …the need for benign intelligent robots and the necessity of cultivating a culture of quality committed to serving the common good! …
Jun 09 2017
Boston Dynamics, the MIT spin-off and self-proclaimed maker of “nightmare-inducing robots“, has been sold by its parent company Alphabet (aka Google) to the Japanese tech behemoth SoftBank. No specifics regarding the price or the terms of the sale have been announced which is not surprising given we still don’t know how much Google paid for the …
Jun 27 2016
Ever since their introduction over eighty years ago, Isaac Asimov‘s Three Laws of Robotics have been the de jure rules governing the acceptable behavior of robots. Even the uninitiated and uninterested are likely to say they know of them, even if they can’t recite a single rule verbatim. When conceived, the Three Laws were nothing but a thought …
Feb 06 2016
In a press release yesterday, iRobot, maker of the impossibly cute Roomba robot vacuum cleaners, announced that they are emancipating their Robot Defense & Security (D&S) unit. The yet-to-be-named new company will continue to serve the current D&S market of defense, law enforcement, and industrial organizations. The existing D&S management team will continue to lead the …
Jul 12 2015
This post is a throwback to March, 2006 when I purchased the original Vex Robotics Design System v0.5. I had originally posted these pictures and their respective comments on Flickr. I had forgotten all about them when I happened to stumble upon them today. Although I think I was more surprised to find that Flickr …
Jun 30 2015
I admit it. I’ve spent the last 30 minutes trying to figure out how to get a “Rock You Like a Hurricane” reference into the title of the post. As you can see I have failed. Regardless, it’s still worth writing about today’s AP report regarding the ongoing clean up efforts at the Fukushima Nuclear Power …
Jun 23 2015
Hackday had a post today referencing an article about the state of drone racing in Australia originally published on DroneWatchDogs.com earlier this month. With so much of the news about drones dedicated to their darker uses: law enforcement, military action, surveillance, etc., it’s pretty easy to forget that majority of the UAVs in the air today are piloted …
Aug 21 2014
I’m really looking forward to seeing this movie. I just hope that it actually makes it to theaters, unlike Prototype which I’ve been patiently waiting to watch for more than two years now.
Mar 29 2006
Still looking to fill the void left since Sony surreptitiously put down their robot dog Aibo, I am always excited to read about any new robotic animals under development. The Raw Feed is reporting today that Illinois-based robotic research group Iguana Robotics Inc. has created TomCat, a headless robot cat whose lack of visual aesthetics …
