Although it hits retail on Thursday, you might want to get your pre-order in now given the way these things tend to go scarce near the Xmas rush. We’re talking about Elmo Live of course, the singing, dancing, and story telling robot with wobbly red limbs and interactive sensors scattered around the monster’s face and [...]
Apparently that sexual harassment suit had a big payoff for Aiko: she’s getting a hand. The developers of the fembot have created a hand for her botness, with five movable fingers, 15 movable joints, feedback sensitivity, low power consumption and palatable material cost of $1800. Oddly enough, the appropriate testing grounds for such a hand [...]
Don’t you hate it how simply moving a robotic arm in a microgravity environment can produce enough negative reaction forces to alter a spacecraft’s orientation? Well, a group of researchers from Cornell University have now devised a new type of robot arm that they say could make that pesky problem a thing of the past. [...]
Tokyo-based ZMP has already teamed up with a consortium of other Japanese companies to take on the encroaching robot threat from South Korea, and it’s now taken another step to spur on development and released the source code to its nuvo series of robots. Unfortunately, it’s not going the open source route, with interested researchers [...]
It looks like the Artificial Life XI conference hosted by the University of Southampton was home to a unsettling number of swarm robots this week, including some we’ve seen and some we haven’t. Among the more interesting of the lot are the matchbox-size bots (pictured above) developed by a group of researchers from the host [...]
Oh Pleo, it’s been far too long since we’ve seen you out and about! Thankfully, we’ve stumbled upon a handful of Pleo news all at once, so we hope you’re ready to catch up with your favorite dinosaur. First up is a pair of useful hacks from GRIP: a spy cam hack — which transmits [...]
Turn away before it’s too late, we beg you. Don’t make the mistake we did by watching WowWee’s Alive Lion Cub get splayed for the chuckling amusement of ol’ Pig Eye Jackson. Should you choose to proceed, choose to hit that read link then be warned: you’ll never eat bot-sausage again.
[Thanks, Robert O.]
We’ve seen plenty of pill bots in our day — most of the dumb little swallowable cameras — but Carnegie Mellon University isn’t messing around with this stuff. The nerds over there have built a remote controlled pillbot with small, adhesive arms that allow it to grip onto internal surfaces. That is to say, your [...]
Remember Orb Swarm, that merry band of rolling semi-autonomous spheres? Well, they’ve seen the open-source wizard and came back with a brain. In other words, they’ve gone autonomous, or mostly so as they are now capable of navigating within a pre-defined GPS course. Besides navigation, these orbs feature an embedded processor, accelerometer and ZigBee wireless [...]
There’s a new iRobot in the wings, ready for that all-important cat-in-a-tree incident your neighborhood has been gearing up for over the past decade. Well, kind of. The new iRobot Negotiator is designed for “public safety organizations” who don’t need or can’t afford the $100k PackBot 510. The Negotiator is built to provide basic reconnaissance [...]