The intersection between robots, makers and marketing has hit fever pitch with the creation of a robot mixologist built in partnership with Coke and Barcardi. Meet the Makr Shakr. Read more »
Attack of the flying robot bird: it can dive and roll and looks so realistic that other birds have attacked it in flight. Read more »
Rethink Robotics re-tools Baxter the manufacturing robot to be a research assistant. Baxter can be programmed by a human trainer who walks it through its tasks. Read more »
A group of European researchers has created a cloud platform designed to serve as a central processing and data-access brains for robots located throughout the world. Read more »
If you want robots and people to work together efficiently, you need to cross-train them to build teamwork, according to new research from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. Read more »
Two major trends could open the door to robotic care givers that help senior citizens stay in their homes longer. First, robots are getting more people friendly. And second: people are getting more robot friendly. Read more »
Double Robotics’ iPad-eqipped telepresence robot is the first beneficiary of the $25m fund Grishin announced earlier this year. His cash will help Double ramp up manufacturing, which will be useful as early demand has been high. Read more »
Baxter the robot may not iron your clothes but he very well might assemble your furniture or pack the boxes it comes in. The brainchild of Rethink Robotics’ founder Rodney Brooks, Baxter is really making some waves in the industrial robot sector. Read more »
Blue River Technology is a startup that raised $3.1 million to take machine learning from Silicon Valley to the farming-focused Salinas Valley. It has built a robot that identifies and then kills weeds and hopes to reduce the use of pesticides in agriculture. Read more »
Don’t have the $2.5 billion budget that Nasa spent to design, build and launch the Mars Curiosity rover? For a fraction of the price you can virtually be in two places at once thanks to telepresence robots for every budget, including those using iPads or smartphones. Read more »
Here’s our daily pick of stories about Apple from around the web you shouldn’t miss. Today’s installment: a more walkable, community-oriented Apple campus proposal, see which older Macs won’t update to Mountain Lion, Apple’s part in the mobile patent mess, and a future with Siri-powered robots. Read more »
Robots and 3-D printers aren’t yet used by mainstream consumers but when I find one effort that combines the two, it’s a “nerdgasm” to the extreme. Take a peek at this video showing off a robotic hand that was created from a 3-D printer. Read more »
If “Judgement Day” ever arrives and Terminator robots take over the world, at least we’ll eat well. Herb, the Home Exploring Robot Butler, is a Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute project that has both the sensors and the smarts to microwave a meal autonomously. Read more »
The search for robots that can jump, run and fly has become an obsession for the U.S. military, research scientists and a large population of the web. So when researchers showed off a robotic bird that can perch on an object, I was intrigued. Read more »
We’ve seen 3-D printers that create previously designed objects, but what about smart grains of sand that self-replicate things? It’s not science fiction: MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is demonstrating intelligent, 1 cm cubes that can assume any shape through magnetism principles and algorithms. Read more »
Are Cylons in our future? Robots can already perform complicated tasks — from navigating mountain roads to winning on quiz shows. Daniel Butler explains how science fiction is starting to look more like science fact. Read more »
The fourth quarter may have lacked a dominating big-event product announcement like Q3’s Facebook platform extension or Q2’s unveiling of Google+, but the NewNet world continued to buzz along. In the battle for mind share, everyone wanted to be a platform. Meanwhile, consumer and social technologies continued to gain momentum, and new vehicles for content and service discovery presented both challenges and opportunities for NewNet companies. And it is hard to ignore the overcrowded but growing world of daily deals. This quarterly report analyzes these trends and others, and it also provides a near-term outlook of trends, technologies and companies to watch in 2012. Companies mentioned in the report include Amazon, Facebook and Socialcast. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Got an old netbook? For a $225 Kickstarter pledge, you can turn a netbook into a telepresence robot, remotely controlling it over from a web browser or a smartphone. Over a web connection, you could even use the Oculus robot to speak with remote workers. Read more »
Verizon is putting LTE chips in TouchTunes’ new digital karaoke machines, but that’s not all. At CES, Verizon seemed determined to embed its latest wireless network technology into anything that could conceivably need an Internet connection, including ATM machines, robots and photo booths. Read more »
Imagine a future where you could take over the body of a robot from home and use it to do work at your office. Even better, when you finished your tasks, what if another remote employee could “beam in” to the same robot to get their tasks done? That’s not science fiction: It’s reality thanks to web-connected robots. Read more »
For those who ever wanted their own Street View car, similar to Google’s camera on wheels used to capture images for Google Maps, there’s now a small robotic version made out of LEGOs. It’s another example of the growing opportunities that connectivity and sensors bring us. Read more »
I’ve written about robots powered by smartphones and the web, so you’d think I’d be comfortable seeing a new robot video. I saw one today showing the PETMAN, and I’m actually torn between amazement and fright. Then again, he might make for a good personal assistant. Read more »
The Jetson’s Rosie the Robot is not reality yet, but new-age robots are getting smarter and more adaptive given new toolsets, artifiical intelligence and good old-fashioned training, according to robotics experts at the Emtech 2011 conference at MIT this week. Read more »
Embodied social proxies, basically robots that serve as in-office proxies for remote workers, helped involve remote workers in watercooler conversations and even deeper design discussions. However, the ESPs also made them late to meetings and created some etiquette issues around volume. Read more »
What’s an iOS app developer to do when a client asks to have a mobile app stress tested by snapping 10,000 images from an Apple iPad? Hiring an intern is one way to solve the problem, but building a LEGO robot might be the better option. Read more »
Microsoft today adds Kinect support for its Robotics Developer Studio. Software and an SDK are helpful, but the real news may be in Microsoft’s 2010 purchase of Canesta, which has a chip-level pattern recognition solution. With it, Microsoft could shrink Kinect functionality to fit in smartphones. Read more »
Smartphones, tablets and Chromebooks had center stage at Google I/O, but don’t count out the robots! A 40-minute session captured on video explains how Google will help enable a new robotics era thanks to the Android platform, smartphone sensors and vast amounts of cloud intelligence. Read more »
While the big news from Google I/O was today’s official launch of Chromebooks, other Google partners are thinking about new mobility paradigms. Take iRobot, the folks behind the Roomba. Their new Ava robot uses an Android tablet for sight, sound, speech and, of course, apps. Read more »
My mobile profession combined with a robot addiction takes a new step forward thanks to Cellbots, a free Android application to control home robots. The software moves a connected robot through the phone’s touchscreen, by voice commands and even through a Google Talk session. Read more »
There really is an app for everything now that LEGO has released software that turns an Android handset into a wireless remote control for robots. MINDroid uses a wireless Bluetooth connection and phone accelerometer to send commands to a robot with the flick of a wrist. Read more »
Smartphones are becoming more powerful and useful with each new iteration. Looking at what these devices are capable of got me thinking: Could such technologies power inexpensive, intelligent home robots? The potential is there as our handsets now have several senses and connectivity to the Internet. Read more »
We’ve brought you the victories and the disappointments of the year in cleantech, and now here’s a top 10 list that’s a little more personal: The top 10 Earth2Tech stories of 2008. The list is a combo of reader favorites — page views and number of […] Read more »
For all those times when smooching a Slave Princess Leia action figure just doesn’t cut it, Sega is rolling out a line of 15-inch robot girlfriends that will kiss on command. The Eternal Maiden Actualization (EMA) will enter into “love mode” and plant one on your […] Read more »
