Robotics

Nevada is known as being one of the most lenient states when it comes to gambling, fireworks, and getting married; and now it's extending that easygoingness to driverless cars.

As of today, Nevada is the first state to let Google's self-driving cars on the roads. The state's Department of Motor Vehicles issued the tech giant the first license to see just how these cars act and react on busy streets and highways, according to the Las Vegas Sun.

"We're excited to receive the first testing license for self-driving vehicles in Nevada," a Google spokesperson … Read more

In what could be a major boon for the study of brain disorders such as schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, autism, and epilepsy, researchers at MIT and Georgia Tech say they've figured out how to automate finding and recording information from neurons in live brains.

The process, described this week in the journal Nature Methods, involves a robotic arm guided by a cell-detecting algorithm that can identify and record data from neurons faster and more accurately than we mortal humans.

"In all [the abovementioned disorders], a molecular description of a cell that is integrated with [its] electrical and circuit … Read more

Where do you find inspiration for your work? Robert Full, a professor at University of California at Berkeley, and his team looked to lizards when it came to thinking of ways to better design robots for search and rescue missions.

Such robots have to be more agile. So Full's team studied the movements of a red-headed Agama lizard and discovered the importance of having a tail.

"I think what this shows is that even the strangest creature that we think has nothing to offer really holds fundamental secrets of how things work, and those can be translated to … Read more

Someday soon, FedEx packages could be transported by autonomous planes and apple trees sprayed by driverless tractors, says aerospace and robotics expert Mary "Missy" Cummings.

Cummings, a professor of aeronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was interviewed today at Wired's Disruptive by Design conference in New York, where she offered her views on the state of the art in autonomous vehicles.

The work of Google and automakers has shown how cars can drive themselves in some situations. And many commercial flights are already fly-by-wire, allowing pilots to monitor the plane for when something wrong happens, rather … Read more

BEDFORD, Mass. -- In the movies, robots always have a mind of their own. But for iRobot's military bots, it's a slow process of gaining more smarts.

The company's latest military robots, which run on caterpillar tracks and resemble miniature tanks, are slowly adding autonomous features to improve their capabilities.

iRobot's latest military robot, the throwable 110 FirstLook, has the ability to right itself if it lands upside down and retrace its tracks if it gets out of communications range. A group of these encyclopedia-size robots will soon be able to create a mesh network to … Read more

If I were near Tokyo Station right now, I'd hop on a bullet train to Osaka lickety-split. Why? To get my scalp cleansed by Panasonic's shampoo robot, of course.

Hair salon Super Hair Seo in the nearby city of Nishinomiya is playing the lucky host to the electronics giant's Head Care Robot, which is undergoing its first tests alongside hairdressers.

Introduced back in 2010, the device consists of a reclining chair and a mechanized washbasin. It first scans your head to get an idea of its shape, and can accommodate a variety of noggins, according to Panasonic. … Read more

Working at a restaurant requires doing many repetitious tasks, but perhaps the most tedious and lamented (aside from bathroom cleanup) is wrapping silverware in a napkin.

To solve that age-old annoyance of having to bundle countless utensils, the Capstone Design class at Georgia Tech created an autonomous silverware wrapper capable of perfectly packaging silverware at a respectable speed. … Read more

BURLINGTON, Mass.--Someday soon Ava the robot may bring you to the Roomba vacuum cleaners at Best Buy or call you if an elderly relative at home fell down and can't get up. But first she has to get in the good graces of doctors.

Ava is iRobot's three-wheeled pedestal-shaped robot that sports a tablet computer as its "head," the primary user interface. If the pieces fall into place as its creators hope, Ava will be the company's ticket into new markets beyond its remote-controlled military bots and Roomba-led home cleaning products.

iRobot will start trials this year of Ava in a couple of her target industries of health care, retail, and building security, CEO Colin Angle said in an interview with CNET. During a demo last week at the company's headquarters here, a prototype Ava smoothly navigated through iRobot's office space based on a map it had generated itself.

Although its movements were not flawless (table tops remain a challenge), Ava points to a new era in mobile robots brought about by advances in other technologies, notably by better sensors.

"So much of robotics has to do with physical motion--navigation around our environment and doing increasingly high-level tasks--it makes these two initial markets (of military and home cleaning) seem pedestrian versus the dream of what's possible," said Angle.… Read more

In the future when we'll all be wearing robotic exoskeletons, we'll laugh when we think back on the days when we were mere meatsacks. German automation firm Festo is helping us upgrade with the ExoHand, a glove controller that can give people a machine handshake.

Known for its elegantly engineered SmartBird robot seagull, Festo says its ExoHand can not only teleoperate a robot hand in a master-slave control relationship, it can reduce strain from repetitive tasks when using your own old-fashioned, flesh-and-blood hands. … Read more