Category: ROBOT NEWS

MorpHex part II

Innovation Contest Winner Hexapod – Morphex – 31007

The Boca Bearing Company is pleased to announce the final winners of the 2012 Innovation Contest. To celebrate 25 years in business Boca Bearings challenged their community of engineers, robot builders, mechanics and makers to show us their innovative mechanical project videos. The only rule was their project had to utilize ball bearings, roller bearings, linear bearings or any form of full ceramic or ceramic hybrid bearings in some capacity.

GOOGLE

PRIVACY CONCERN OVER FLYING ROBOTS 31004

There’s growing privacy concern over flying robots , or “drones”. Organizations like the EFF and ACLU have been raising the alarm over increased government surveillance of US citizens. Legislators haven’t been quick to respond to concerns of government spying on citizens. But Texas legislators are apparently quite concerned that private citizens operating hobby drones might spot environmental violations by businesses .

Incredible FLYING ROBOT, Festo SMARTBIRD 31003

Festo has added to its robotic menagerie with the creation of a robotic seagull that weighs just 450 g (15.87 oz) and boasts a wingspan of 1.96 m (6.4 ft). Dubbed the SmartBird, the ultralight flying robot was inspired by the herring gull and can take off, fly and land autonomously, without the help of any additional drive systems.

Robot with a BIOLOGICAL BRAIN

Robot Controlled by RAT BRAIN CELLS – 31002

Kevin Warwick, once a cyborg and still a researcher in cybernetics at the University of Reading, has been working on creating neural networks that can control machines. He and his team have taken the brain cells from rats, cultured them, and used them as the guidance control circuit for simple wheeled robots. Electrical impulses from the bot enter the batch of neurons, and responses from the cells are turned into commands for the device. The cells can form new connections, making the system a true learning machine.  He and his competitors continue to move this technology forward – animal cyborgs are real.

Cloud-Based Brain (Raptuya) for Robots 31001

The project, carried out by a team at ETH Zurich, is called RoboEarth and its linchpin is a cloud software platform called Rapyuta. The way it works is pretty simple at a high level: robots communicate with a cloud-based application platform that carries out computation tasks and connects to a cloud database full of information such as maps, images, language, as well as to other web services. The robots themselves are pretty much hardware terminals equipped with sensors and moving parts but limited on-board processing power or data storage.

Google I/O 2011: Cloud Robotics

Google I/O 2011: Cloud Robotics Presentation – New Era in Robotics – 11046

How Cloud Robotics Could Soon Threaten Jobs

The last point cannot be emphasized enough. I think that many economists and others who dismiss the potential for robots and automation to dramatically impact the job market have not fully assimilated the implications of machine learning. Human workers need to be trained individually, and that is a very expensive, time-consuming and error-prone process. Machines are different: train just one and all the others acquire the knowledge. And as each machine improves, all the others benefit immediately.