Last week we were horrified to write about a DARPA-built robotic cheetah capable of sprinting along at 18mph. It was scary. Now, though, it seems it’s not alone in the field of intrepid animal-aping robots: a new team of whale-like swimming bots has just broken a world distance record. Read more
DARPA likes to build robots. Some of them are big, and some of them are small. This one is really, really fast. It’s a robotic cheetah being developed for military purposes, which has just managed to break a world record. Read more
This little antenna’d chap might look like Short Circuit’s Johnny Five without arms, but wait till you see him dance. That’s right, he’s got moves, but even better, you can make him yourself, just given the right tools, a bit of patience, and enough willing to watch a robot dance.
Click through for the video of him dancing like an over-excited toddler after six cans of Red Bull, as well as instructions on how to make your own.
When Google announced an ADK allow with Android Ice Cream Sandwich to allow developers to control hardware, it was almost inevitable that we’d get a moving Android mascot.
But the disco dancing droid created by Chris Elliot is a real treat with light up LED eyes and four servo motors lurking inside to articulate the head, body and arms. Appropriately, you can see Chris controlling the Android mascot with his Android tablet in a video filmed on an Android phone, after the break…
Most Star Wars fans agree that George Lucas really needs a few new ideas, rather than constantly tweaking the films they love in unnecessary ways. He really needs to watch this robot lightsaber duel.
We’d love to see some more evil droids battling some Jedi bots but in the meantime, Yakaskawa, maker of Motoman industrial robots, has equipped them with lightsabers and set them off fighting at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Shanghai. It’s oddly beautiful…
The DeskPet iPhone robot is rolling out this summer and it looks awesome. The rolling robot is set to join the Parrot AR.Drone as the next recruit in our iOS robot army. The DeskPet iPhone robot is the Tankbot which can be controlled by any iOS device as well as gestures thanks to built-in IR sensors. It’ll also trundle around on its own with autonomous maze navigation and free roaming modes. No pricing has been outed for the DeskPet Tankbot yet but it’s going to be “under $20″ with four colours on offer. Click the headline and let us know: do you want an iOS robot?
Monday Kinect hack time! The Hybrid Systems Lab at UC Berkeley in the US has grafted Kinect to an autonomous flying machine to create a quadrotor robot which can navigate on its owning using Kinect as its eyes. The robot uses the open-source ROS Kinect driver to do its magic combined with a 1.6Ghz Intel Atom chip powering Ubuntu. We’re impressed but it does make us frightened about the inevitable rise of Skynet. Hit the jump to see the Kinect hack flying machine in action…
Microsoft Kinect might be the latest in video game motion sensing tech, but as we’ve now seen, hack-types are using it for all sorts. One of the latest hacks is this Kinect-equipped Frankenstein-like invention that turns Kinect into a 3D sensing robot you can navigate with your hands. Could this one day be Microsoft’s version of the infamous Nintendo R.O.B.? See it in action, in our video of the week.
