Robot

Are you the kind of person that likes their own company? Maybe you're just a narcissist? Well Japanese department store operator Sogo & Seibu have just the thing for you. As part of a New Year’s promotional sale Sogo, Seibu, and Robinson’s department stores will offer people the chance to buy a humanoid robot custom-built to look, move and sound just like themselves. Read More

Stopping a heart from beating during surgery is a complicated and risky procedure. Robotic technology that predicts the movement of the heart as it beats, thereby enabling surgical tools to move in concert with each beat, could help cut the risks of such surgery by allowing surgeons to operate on a beating heart as if it were stationary. Read More

The SWAT BOT is what you get when you cross a paintball gun and pepper spray with a remote-controlled RV whose parents were a laptop computer and the Road Runner. Designed for law enforcement situations like riot control, hostage scenarios, building security, bomb threats or other hostile or covert situations, this all-aluminum, lithium polymer battery powered unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) is equipped with a 100-round magazine, wireless barrel-cam and can fire paint and pepper balls or hardened rubber rounds up to 250ft at a rate of 20 shots per second as well as travel at speeds in excess of 50mph. Read More

The military potential of robotics has long been one of the primary driving forces in the funding of research and development in the field. Aerial UAVs transformed armed conflict so dramatically that a new wave of robotic military capabilities are being readied for the battlefield in the hope of providing a similar competitive edge. Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) recently began showing a battery-powered robotic beast of burden which can carry up to 200 kilograms, run three days without a recharge, and follow and respond to the voice commands of its master. Though designed for use on the battlefield, REX has myriad commercial applications in agriculture, manufacturing, and beyond. Read More

Although digital storage devices that cram more and more information into smaller and smaller packages continue to be developed, unfortunately the same can't be said for those trusty old analogue data storage devices known as books. However, the British Library’s Boston Spa site in West Yorkshire has used new technology of a different sort in the form of seven robotic cranes that will be used to retrieve items in its new Additional Storage Building (ASB) that will eventually house approximately seven million items from the UK national collection. Read More

The versatile humanoid robot Nao caught Gizmag's attention at the 2009 International Robot Exhibition (iREX 2009). What Nao lacks in size, he makes up for in features and capabilities. Nao can see (via two cameras), will react to touch, can surf the Web and can interact with other Naos. He can speak (in English or French, so far) by reading out any file stored locally in his storage space or captured from a website RSS flow. The bot is fitted with an accelerometer and gyrometer so he won't fall down, he's also equipped with two pairs of ultra-sound senders/receivers on his torso that give feedback on several echoes so Nao is aware of obstacles close by and can avoid them. Read More

The age-old battle of man versus machine will move to a new arena in 2010 when Audi will begin pitting an autonomous TTS Coupe quattro against record times of some of the great driving challenges, including a likely attempt at the infamous 12.42-mile Pikes Peak Hill Climb in Colorado, USA. The driverless Audi is from the same team that built the VW Touareg which won the first race for autonomous vehicles, the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. The inevitable incorporation of advanced robotic technologies into our automobiles will ultimately yield a safer vehicle and it’s the thin end of the wedge – one day soon your car will not only be smarter than you are, it will also be faster and maybe even better looking. Read More

One of the stand-outs amongst a stellar field of automated and autonomous ingenuity on show at the IRex robotics expo in Japan this week was the Yurina Care Robot from Japan Logic Machine. Essentially a robotic bed, the 3.5 million Yen (around US$41,000) Yurina reconfigures electronically, on-the-fly, can be controlled by the user or a carer into many different configurations, has four separate sections which can all be angled differently, and can lift and make comfortable, a disabled person of up to 120 kilograms in almost any position. It gets along at 4kmh, can lower you into the bath and get you out again without giving anyone a hernia and comes with a range of optional extras you could only dream about if you are in need of such a device. Read More

Researchers at MIT have taken inspiration from the simple razor clam to design a “smart” anchor that burrows through the ocean floor. The so-called RoboClam could prove useful as tethers for small robotic submarines that are routinely repositioned to monitor variables such as currents and temperatures. The device can burrow into the seabed, be directed to a specific location and can also operate in reverse, making them easier to recover. Read More