Jason Falconer

We've all seen gigantic touch screens on the news or in movies, but what if you could achieve the same type of interface by simply replacing the bulb in your desk lamp? That's the idea behind the LuminAR, developed by a team led by Natan Linder at the MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group. It combines a Pico-projector, camera, and wireless computer to project interactive images onto any surface - and is small enough to screw into a standard light fixture.  Read More

Over the past few weeks, Japan has unveiled robotic exoskeletons and quadrupeds designed to work in radioactive areas, and today Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) has revealed its own inspection and maintenance robot. The MHI-MEISTeR (Maintenance Equipment Integrated System of Telecontrol Robot) has two arms which can be equipped with various tools to remove obstacles and collect samples in areas where people cannot go.  Read More

Humanoid robots tend to be quite pricey, and the general rule of thumb is the bigger they are the more costly they become. That's not to say you can't cut corners – have it move on wheels instead of legs, for example – yet even then, most robots inevitably end up costing thousands of dollars. What kind of life-sized robot can be built for less than a grand, if you're an individual or a university lab on a budget? One possibility, which comes to us from Columbia University computer science students Marc Howard, Anton Mayr, Jason Ravel and Alexandros Sigaras, is not very pretty – but what Talos lacks in high tech sex appeal, it makes up for with bright-eyed enthusiasm.  Read More

Luxo Jr, the adorable little lamp that appears in the Disney Pixar logo, illustrates how animators can breathe life into mundane inanimate objects. Now, robotics technology allows us to do the same thing in real life, as shown by a trio from the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Using a combination of readily available robotics and automated manufacturing technology, mixed with open-source software, they were able to grace a desk lamp with a little personality.  Read More

Robot manipulators – or hands, as we like to call them – come in all shapes and sizes. Some, like those developed for Willow Garage's PR2, have just two fingers. Others have three, four, or five fingers – and some manage to lift objects with none at all. Now, an MIT spin-off called Robot Rebuilt is hitting up Boston venture capital firms to develop a manipulator with human-like sensitivity.  Read More

Originally announced in early 2011, a small humanoid robot will be sent to communicate with astronauts living in the International Space Station's Japanese Experiment Module "Kibo" in the (Northern Hemisphere) summer of 2013. The robot will feature speech recognition and natural language processing technology developed by Toyota, while delivering twitter and voice messages from Earth to Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata.  Read More

Sitting somewhere between the "solar trees" erected on parking garages at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD) and the nanotrees developed on the same campus, the electree+ is a sculptural bonsai tree with 27 solar cells for "leaves." The tree's branches can be adjusted to catch the rays just right, and its internal battery will store enough electricity to charge an iPhone5 nine times over, a Galaxy S3 seven times, or an iPad 2 twice.  Read More

While earning his PhD at the MIT Media Lab, Cory Kidd wanted to build a social robot that could have a place and function in the home. One of the potential applications was a lifestyle coach – a robot that you would interact with daily as you try to lose weight. Kidd built a prototype, recruited people for a study, and found that participants using the robot stuck to the weight loss program twice as long as those who used an identical program on a laptop – and that most felt that the robot was more credible than an animated character on the screen.  Read More

In early October we took a look at the naro - tartaruga, a biomimetic robot based on sea turtles being built by researchers at ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology). It's a research platform that tests the concept of fin propulsion, and now we have a video of its first swim, which is surprisingly life-like.  Read More