Most humanoid robots are just a set of legs with big flat feet balancing a dead-center torso doing an awkward slow-mo hula dance. But watch PETMAN. Really watch. It’s like witnessing a birth.
As it turns out, this rather serious Italian robot isn’t shaped like a supercar or a Vespa. It’s a shiny silver quadruped that can kick you in the shin if you make any pasta or romance jokes.
DARPA finally let Boston Dynamics bring it’s new toy out for show and tell.
Boston Dynamics Big Dog robot has been around for several years, and robotics enthusiasts, dorky website makers, DARPA, and those who dig a good mechanical creep-out have been waiting and longing to see the upgrade.
Back in March, ANTHROBOTIC mentioned that a version of American company iRobot’s battle-tested Packbot was the first robot to explore and assess the situation at the failing Fukushima nuclear power plant. To Japan’s implicit embarrassment, there were no Japanese robots available or able to immediately hit the ground running (as covered after the jump, one of the trained Japanese operators wrote an anonymous blog about the whole thing – which has been a gold mine for developers). So, while Japan continues cranking out the world’s fastest supercomputers and badass semiconductors and tons of industrial automation robots and some of the [read full post]
Japanese company ITK’s latest telepresence-like robot hand system is now in production. Among the numerous potential applications for materials science, medicine, military, and extreme-environment tasks, I’ll refrain from making any tele-romance jokes or references and I definitely won’t mention/introduce the word “teledildonics.“ Actually, the sex industry does deserve certain recognition as a formidable force in human technological development. Think VHS. DVD. Online video. Water-based lubricants. Birth control (not only as a wealthy nation’s luxury, but also as a tool for developing nations to reign in population growth). So, just saying. Long-distance love could send this technology into overdrive. [yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPpX8UApuxk&feature=player_embedded’] [read full post]
Above, dude with a Terminator accent and his team at the Bionic Learning Network (how perfect is that?) built an ultralight robotic bird – it flies at a similar weight and with many of the movement and aerodynamic faculties of a seagull. His team let it fly around in a TED (VIDEO) presentation hall – which was pretty awesome. DARPA will certainly come calling soon… [VIA SINGULARITY HUB] Below, Tokyo Institute of Technology’s SOINN (Self-Organizing Incremental Neural Network) robot is all kinds of learning how to serve stuff to humans (we appreciate the classy coasters). It’s, you know, incremental – [read full post]