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25 March 2010—Nowadays, a phone that doesn’t know where it is or where it’s going can’t really call itself ”smart.” To orient themselves properly, smartphones require not just GPS capability but also an electronic compass, an accelerometer, and increasingly, digital gyroscopes. The point of a gyroscope is to sense any change in an object’s axis of rotation. Up until now, gyroscopes measured movement around the three axes with three sensors—one for pitch, one for yaw, and another for roll. At most, two of these sensors would be combined on a single die. The best you could do was, say, match up a 3- by 5- by 1-millimeter yaw sensor with a 4- by 5- by 1-mm sensor that would detect pitch and roll. But on 15 February, STMicroelectronics unveiled  a 4- by 4- by 1-mm gyroscope whose single sensing structure tracks all three angular motions. It’s a triumph of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) engineering.

A new development in virtual cameras at the University of Abertay Dundee is developing the pioneering work of James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar using a Nintendo Wii-like motion controller – all for less than £100.Avatar, the highest-grossing film of all time, used several completely new filming techniques to bring to life its ultra-realistic 3D action. Now computer games researchers have found a way of taking those techniques further using home computers and motion controllers.James Cameron invented a new way of filming called Simul-cam, where the image recorded is processed in real-time before it reaches the director’s monitor screen. This allows actors in motion-capture suits to be instantly seen as the blue Na’vi characters, without days spent creating computer-generated images.

In this project we want to analyze and test the idea of incorporating a network of robots (robots, intelligent sensors, devices and communications) in order to improve life quality in urban areas. The URUS project is focused in designing a network of robots that in a cooperative way interact with human beings and the environment for tasks of assistance, transportation of goods, and surveillance in urban areas. Specifically, our objective is to design and develop a cognitive network robot architecture that integrates cooperating urban robots, intelligent sensors, intelligent devices and communications.

When the Arduino Duemilanove microcontroller appeared in 2005, it featured a set of female pin headers exposing most of the pins of the ATmega168 for easy hacking and for connecting accessory boards known as 'Shields'. The purpose of a shield is to provide new plug-and-play functionality to the host microcontroller, such as circuit prototyping, motion control, sensor integration, network and radio communication, or gaming interfaces, without worrying too much about the hardware implementation details. Seven years after the birth of the original Arduino, new shields keep coming out and are being cataloged on http://shieldlist.org/, a testament to the versatility of the design. It is also simple to build a DIY shield when nothing out there will meet your needs or when you want to understand how the shield concept works from the ground up.