Aug 06
Slackstory subjected three chatbots to the Proust Questionnaire. (You can find his answers here.) Their answers are the sort of transcendent absurdity than I aspire to. So much so that I’m going to start randomly feeding my email interviews into chatbots.
Aug 02
Giardia lamblia, the microscopic intestinal parasite that causes beaver fever, may inspire the next generation of swimming robots. In a peer-reviewed paper released Monday by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Zhang and Scott Lenaghan, Corinne Davis, William Henson and Zhili Zhang outline how they used high-speed microscopic imaging to study the …
Jul 31
The Keio-NUS CUTE Center ( a collaborative lab between National University of Singapore (NUS) and Keio University of Japan) has proposed research into the field of Lovotics. The goal is to create robots that can love and be loved by humans. Their research will be based on three modules. Artificial Endocrine System (based on physiology of …
Jul 29
The winners of the Robot Film Festival are below. For a collection, you can go to the Vimeo collection and you can find pictures from the red carpet here. VISIONARY FUTURES AWARD: MOONRUSH An extended cut of the trailer for Moonrush, an in-production documentary about the first privately funded mission to the moon. ETHICS AND …
Jul 15
Robots For Humanity has helped Henry Evans to scratch an itch and shave himself. Neither of these are mundane tasks for Mr. Evans, who was, at age forty, paralyzed and struck mute by a brain stem stroke. He has since regained some movement of a finger and his head. This is enough to control PR2. …
Jul 09
Dr. Jordan Boyle of the University of Leeds has developed a robot worm that can maneuver through obstacles. Boyle hopes that one day the worm would help in rescue operations in earthquake hit places to search for survivors trapped in the rubble. Boyle has derived inspiration from the nematode worm, Caenorhabditis elegans, and has written the software …
Jul 06
Japan has always been on the forefront of cutting edge robotics. Its roots can be traced back 200-300 years during the Edo period when skilled craftsmen created automata (self-operating machines). Using nothing more than pulleys and weights they were able to make the Karakuri (Japanese automata) perform amazing tasks. Japan’s modern day robots can be …
Jul 02
A couple of interesting, separate but seemingly connected, developments in robotics. First off: Researchers from the Excellence Cluster CoTeSys at the Technische Universität München (TUM) have created a sensitive skin for robots that allows them to feel temperature and a light touch. And secondly: . . . researchers in Japan have developed a dental training robot that …
Jun 27
pic nicked from here Recent work by a research group from Delft University of Technology, Delft, and Philips Research, Eindhoven, in The Netherlands, examines the personality that people desire from their robotic vacuum. Robot Vacuum Cleaner Personality and Behavior published in the International Journal of Social Robotics,Volume 3,notes that: People tend to behave towards artifacts in a social way, …
