Ad: Manage updates with the Download App
ie8 fix

smartpal

Kinect-run Smartpal robot cleans mom's house

You can kinda be in two places at once with telepresence robots, but most machines limit you to chatting with folks on the other end and moving around. They don't even have arms.

Japanese industrial robot maker Yaskawa Electric, known for its Motoman line of robot arms, has been improving its Smartpal service robot since 2005. Once conceived as a robot bartender, the latest generation Smartpal VII is a Kinect-controlled telepresence tool that lets users tidy up at mom's house from hundreds of miles away.

That was the scenario Yaskawa presented recently at the iRex 2011 robot trade show in Tokyo, where it held a demo.

While a staffer moved his arms around in front of a Kinect, Smartpal mimicked his motions, picking up stuffed animals and tidying up, as seen in the vid below. … Read more

Giving voice to a new artificial larynx

A new type of artificial larynx could mean better-sounding speech for those who've had their larynx removed due to laryngeal cancer or other ailments.

Researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, have come up with a system that tracks mouth movements to determine what word is being formed and then uses a speech synthesizer to audibly produce the correct word.

"All of the currently available devices produce such bad sound--it either sounds robotic or has a gruff speaking voice," Megan Russell, a Ph.D. candidate at the university, told Technology Review. "We … Read more