David Szondy

If you've ever tried typing while talking to technical support with the phone crammed between ear and shoulder, then you know the meaning of frustration. Now imagine doing that upside down inside an airplane wing while juggling wires, crimps and a schematic printout. For some field engineers, that sort of thing is an everyday occurrence, so IBM in collaboration with the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) in the UK is developing a mobile maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) prototype robot. It's a combination of a smartphone app and a camera/projector mounted on a robot arm, that allows supervisors and experts to have a more active presence on the job.  Read More

Take the little floating ball that gave Luke Skywalker so much trouble during lightsaber practice, slap a pair of huge welder’s goggles on it and you start to get a picture of NASA’s latest foray into flying robots. Currently being tested aboard the International Space Station (ISS), MIT Space Systems Laboratory’s SPHERES-VERTIGO system is a free-flying robot with stereoscopic vision that is part of a program to develop ways for small satellites to autonomously create 3D maps of objects such as asteroids or disabled satellites.  Read More

For astronomers, a well-lit city means a sky unavailable for study. Worse, light pollution is blamed for affecting bird migration, sea turtle hatching, and wildlife mating and feeding routines. Researchers at National Central University, Taiwan, and Unidad Academica de Fisica, Universidad Autonoma de Zacatecas, Mexico, have attacked the problem with a new LED street lamp designed to shine only where needed, without splashing into unwanted areas, as a way to reduce light pollution while providing better lighting.  Read More

The history of spaceflight is filled with great images, such as Neil Armstrong setting foot on the Moon or Viking 1’s first images from Mars, but some of the most dramatic events haven’t any images to accompany them. As NASA's two Voyager spacecraft leave the Solar System, there won’t be any historic pictures sent back. Instead, that invisible boundary between our system and interstellar space will be marked by readings taken by the instruments of the spacecraft. NASA has placed a readout on the Voyager mission home page that shows two of three key factors that will let the public know when this momentous milestone has been reached.  Read More

Sure, robots do all kinds of useful work from exploring Mars to imitating baby sea turtles, but when was the last time you had a conversation with one? Developed by artist Alexander Reben and filmmaker Brent Hoff, BlabDroid is a “social robot companion” that was originally used at the Tribeca Film Festival to get visitors to open up and chat about things that they wouldn't say to a human being. This proved so successful that the little cardboard robot is now the focus of a Kickstarter project aimed at putting it into production.  Read More

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced on Monday the winner of the first challenges in its competition to design the Fast Adaptable Next-Generation Ground Vehicle (FANG). The US$1 million prize went to “Ground Systems” – a three-person group with members in Ohio, Texas and California. The first of three challenges, the purpose of the competition is to bring crowdsourcing to the problem of creating armored vehicles, with the hope of reducing the design costs by a factor of five.  Read More

When Orbital Science Corporation's Antares rocket lofted a simulated spacecraft mass into orbit on its maiden flight from NASA's Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia on Sunday, it also carried a piggyback cargo of three NASA nanosatellites. These “PhoneSats,” which were built using smartphone and off-the-shelf consumer components in a standard cubesat frame, may be the cheapest satellites ever launched.  Read More

With the burgeoning Chinese car market seeing a large percentage of cars being snapped up by younger people, it's no surprise Volkswagen chose the 2013 Shanghai Auto Show as the location for the world première of its iBeetle – a marriage of Volkswagen’s iconic Beetle and Apple's equally iconic iPhone. The iBeetle will come in Coupe and Convertible models and features a centrally located docking port specially designed in collaboration with Apple that allows a docked or undocked iPhone to interface with the vehicle using the Beetle app.  Read More