Don’t try this at home. Unless, of course, you have an industrial robot with a swivel chair mounted on it. I would also recommend a few trial runs with a crash-test dummy to make sure you’ve programmed the thing right. You don’t want to discover your mistake by having Robby pile-drive you headfirst into the […]

…and it could probably set itself. I give you the walking table Here we have another fine example of better living through robotics technology grafted onto mundane, low-tech items. Or maybe it’s the first such example. But the point is — it’s an example. And I’m eager to see more.

Something I rarely ever do is click on the Google Adsense links in the sidebar and at the top of the page. (Although I highly recommend that you, dear reader, check out this valuable information and click, click, click your way to a brighter tomorrow.) But I just couldn’t resist the one that read: Used […]

This is pretty nifty. Check out the video. It really does appear to be in quite a hurry. Based on the way it moves, I think we’ll have sophisticated dancing robots before we have running robots, although Runbot appears to be a (very sprightly) step in both directions.

This is pretty nifty. Check out the video. It really does appear to be in quite a hurry. Based on the way it moves, I think we’ll have sophisticated dancing robots before we have running robots, although Runbot appears to be a (very sprightly) step in both directions.

This is what you get when you cross an Imperial Walker from Star Wars with the Oliphants from The Lord of the Rings – a 30-foot tall robotic elephant! The 30 foot tall robot elephant was built especially as a part of a Jules Verne centennial celebration. Verne, the author of classics like Twenty Thousand […]

Mark Steyn paints a very pessimistic picture of the developed world’s future in his recent article, “It’s the Demography, Stupid.” Steyn points out that the replacement fertility rate is an average of 2.1 live births per woman. The United States’ birth rate is practically equal to this replacement value at about 2.08 live births per […]

Check out Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines by Robert Freitas and Ralph Merkle. Summary: This book offers a general review of the voluminous theoretical and experimental literature pertaining to physical self-replicating systems. The principal focus here is on self-replicating machine systems. Most importantly, we are concerned with kinematic self-replicating machines: systems in which actual physical objects, not […]

Via GeekPress, the company that brought us Roomba — the cute, almost cuddly household cleaning robot — is moving into some surprising new territory: IRobot Corp. of Burlington, famous for its robotic vacuum cleaners, has teamed up with researchers at Boston University to develop a military robot capable of spotting enemy snipers.IRobot demonstrated the system, […]

Roomba hacking sounds promising, but THIS seems a little extreme doesn’t it? The iRobot company is opening the Roomba’s robotic vacuum to third part developers. In early July the company will post instructions for controlling its Roomba vacuum cleaner via the built-in serial port, so programmers can modify it however they want — from equipping […]