With conspiracy theorists teeming with excitement over Google’s potential Skynet plot (buying Schaft, Boston Dynamics, self driving cars…what gives?), roboticists Yasuhiko Ishigure, Katsuyuki Hirai, and Haruhisa Kawasaki, are adding to the fray, with this lumberjack bot. This chainsaw bot is not only capable of climbing up and down trees, but can also dismember them without human interaction. The […]
You know what’s missing from your garden or lawn right now? Of course, robots! Your garden is absolutely missing robots. Especially the sort with lots of legs and big lights on their heads. People often have to get down on all fours to move lamps and lanterns from one spot on their garden to another. The […]
It prints, it scores! Recently, Jose Julio re-purposed a 3D printer to play hockey, but not full-scale, body smashing ice-hockey, the more printer-friendly air hockey. The robot has three motors, one for the x-axis and two for moving the mallet along the y-axis. Using a PlayStation Eye camera, Julio wrote code to 1) allow his robot to […]
When you first think of termites, you might think of those pesky little bugs that take down your houses, right? Well, termites also have another skill. They can build huge and vast structures, with amazingly little mental and physiological capabilities. Inspired by what little termites are able to build, Dr Justin Werfel of Harvard University created unsupervised, […]
Is your fish out of its fish-tank? It probably went out for a drive. A company called Studio diip has recently created a mini aquarium on wheels. With a webcam positioned above the tank which feeds video to a Beagleboard, the car can steer according to the direction the fish is swimming in and the […]
It wasn’t until a few years ago that the French company Parrot decided to start building robots. They weren’t really specialized in that field: they mostly made Bluetooth stuff, speakers, and some fantastic headphones. Recently, they’ve expanded their new family of robots, with a wheeled sumo robot that jumps. In the Jumping Sumo (I have […]
No fancy hat. No spurred boots. The latest rendition of the iconic western cowboys is now…a robot. Built by a team from the University of Sydney’s Australian Centre for Field Robotics, the four-wheeled remote-controlled robot, Rover has been tested in rounding up cattle. The cows have been quite accepting in allowing a robot to control […]
