Robotics

Wow. And you thought "S*** That Siri Says" was funny. Wait till this Kinect-enabled shopping cart from Whole Foods hits the real world. The possibilities for parody (and aisle-storming, non-gluten-free-linguini-flinging mayhem) are infinite.

As Geekwire reports, Microsoft demoed this very early prototype at an event on its Redmond, Wash., campus today. The motorized, talking cart is kitted out with a Kinect sensor for Windows, and other scanning gear, and can detect items as you place them in the cart; alert you to items that don't jibe with your preprogrammed dietary constraints; ring you up and charge your account; and, perhaps most chillingly, follow you around the store.… Read more

Rather than using plaster and pickaxes, paleontologists are now digitizing ancient fossils.

Drexel University yesterday detailed an initiative to use three-dimensional printing to create models of dinosaur bones for further study. Researchers hope that models will allow them to study how dinosaurs moved and help create smaller robotic models of massive dinosaurs.

Paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara has started doing 3D scans of giant dinosaur bones and, with a collaborator, is building scale models of complete skeletons. The process works by extruding very thin layers of resin or another material to slowly build up an object. A six-inch model of a dinosaur … Read more

Could soldiers of the future fight battles in robot bodies controlled from afar? DARPA apparently thinks so, and the agency wants to create an army of surrogate fighting droids.

The U.S. military's research wing apparently is planning surrogates like in the film "Avatar" but with robots instead of giant Na'vi. It has a $7 million program code-named "Avatar" in its 2013 budget, according to Wired.

The robots would reduce risk to human fighters, just as thousands of aerial drones are already keeping pilots out of harm's way. … Read more

Nevada wants to befriend robotic cars.

The state's legislature on Wednesday approved regulations for self-driving vehicles, the first state in the country to do so.

"These regulations establish requirements companies must meet to test their vehicles on Nevada's public roadways as well as requirements for residents to legally operate them in the future," Bruce Breslow, director of Nevada's Department of Motor Vehicles, said in a statement.

Nevada's DMV worked with Google, automakers, insurance companies, and law enforcement on the regulations. The department said that other states already have bills to allow self-driving cars and … Read more

Harvard University has developed a method for churning out coin-size microrobots en masse.

By drawing on the ideas of origami, researchers have engineered a fabrication technique that produces a small flying robot much the way a children's pop-up book creates a structure.

The method can be used for different types of millimeter-scale electromechanical machines, Harvard said yesterday. But researchers developed the system specifically to replace the painstakingly slow process of manually making insect-like flying robots for its RoboBees project.

"You'd take a very fine tungsten wire and dip it in a little bit of superglue," Pratheev … Read more

As computers and robots advance, more of the physical world will become "machine readable," whether by a security camera or a robotic car able to process information on the road.

Designer and filmmaker Timo Arnall last week created a video of machine vision footage that helps illustrate the point of view of these machines. The video is a montage of experiments to make machines "see" the human world and create some order around it.

In some scenes, the computer places a colored rectangle around cars and pedestrians to analyze parking-lot traffic or highway congestion. In others, they graphically track the movement of people in city streets, walking through buildings, or waiting in lines.

In a blog post, Arnall said he's captivated simply by the look of the videos, with their colored arrows and boxes superimposed on street corners and roadways. But it's also part of getting familiar with the perspective of robots. "It's something we need to develop understandings and approaches to," he wrote, "as we begin to design, build, and shape the senses of our new artificial companions." … Read more

I had a desktop Zen garden once, then the cat stepped on it and sent granules of sand flying everywhere. I'd be willing to take a chance on a new inside Zen garden, but only if it's a Zen Table.

The Zen Table is a Kickstarter project that successfully reached its funding goal earlier this month. It's a glass-top table filled with tiny silicone beads so that the whole creation has the appearance of an enclosed Zen garden.

Zen garden coffee tables have been done before, but not quite like this one. Beneath that sea of silicone is a system of electronics and robotics that carves images into the sand. Load up an SD card with bitmaps, and let the machine do the rest.… Read more

Remember the original BigDog? That funny robot pack animal? Well, a supersized version has been let off the leash--and it ain't so funny anymore.

We last saw the brute when Boston Dynamics unveiled the AlphaDog prototype last year. Even in a harness, it looked pretty mean and could haul 400 pounds without even panting.

This latest incarnation, though, makes its predecessor look quite poodle-like. As seen in the video below, DARPA recently took AlphaDog, aka the Legged Squad Support System, or LS3, out for a walk in the woods and probably scared off every living creature for miles around. … Read more

As I'm writing this post, I'm desperately trying to find a way to warm up my feet and hands. I suppose ditching the ice-cold soda would be a good place to start, but I need some caffeine on this post-Super Bowl Monday. If only I had Hagent, the heat-spewing robot, by my side.

Hagent is a portable heating concept by German designers Andreas Meinhardt and Daniel Abendroth. Though it looks like a simple black box on the outside, the mobile bot is capable of searching out heat, absorbing it, and then re-releasing the heat in cold places. … Read more