Contraband smugglers beware: A new underwater robot can now sniff out your “goods” hidden “cleverly” aboard your ships. Developed by researchers at MIT, the football-sized robot, equipped with ultrasound sensors, can ride along the underbelly of a cargo ship along its flat edge to scan the ship’s contents and discover fake hulls and propeller shafts, […]
Just when you thought it was safe to run into the water to escape the land-robot madness, here comes the Octobot! Swimming at a blistering 7 inches a second, the Octobot, developed by the Institute of Computer Science in Greece, is inspired by the common octopus, using eight arms to swim and chase down its […]
While 3D printers are able to print virtually anything, the size of what’s able to be printed is limited by how big the printer is. Well, that isn’t a problem anymore! Researchers from Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janiero have made a 3D printer on wheels. With 4 omni-directional wheels and an extruder that […]
To touch, or not to touch. For this robot, the answer is the former, always the former. A hand with three digits, the robot designed by Achint Aggarwal and his team at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence in Bremen lives to examine the depths of the ocean by touch. With underwater visibility hampered […]
Try to burn it, run it over, or freeze it, and it just keeps on crawling. Developed by Michael Tolly of Harvard University and his team, the pink X-shaped robot is completely soft, with no rigid skeleton. At 65 centimeters long, this robot has a battery capable of running for 2 hours on a single […]
Admit it. What do you usually do when you see a hitchhiker on the side of a street? Ditch ’em, not hitch ’em, right? What if there was a robot there instead? Built by Frauke Zeller, a Ryerson University communications professor, hitchBOT is complex enough to hold a conversation with other people. Within a few […]
“Beep”, chirps a slim, R2-D2-esque robot, dancing as it receives yet another good review from a satisfied customer. In a hotel just across from Apple’s corporate campus in Cupertino, California is the new robot bellhop/butler, aptly named “Botlr”. Standing at a menacing 3 feet tall, and racing around at break-neck speeds of up to 4 […]
