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California-based company Anybots continues work on a telepresence robot that can take communication to a whole new level by eliminating the need for people to actually be present at board meetings or conferences. Because God knows executives work hard enough. The idea behind QA, the robot, is to interact with people, such as clients or partners, from anywhere in the world, which will save a lot of money on travel costs and different remote-communications equipment. Designed not unlike a sophisticated Skype program, QA relies on a Wi-Fi connection to allow users to interact through video, sound and diagrams projected from and onto the robot’s interface. With a sleek white exterior design, the armless 5-foot robot looks just about how you would expect a robot tailored for the boardroom to look. His rectangular-shaped face with two big eyes reminds a bit of Steven Spielberg’s E.T., so people should warm up to it fairly quickly.

Zipping through space at nearly a million miles per day, NASA's New Horizons probe is halfway to Pluto and just woke up for the first time in months to look around. An artist's concept of New Horizons. "Our spacecraft is way out in exotic territory, in the middle of nowhere," says Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist at Johns Hopkins University. "And we have a lot to do." It's the perfect opportunity to test New Horizon's instruments before the probe reaches Pluto in 2015. "We don't want to miss a single breathtaking moment during the Pluto encounter," he says. "So we're checking everything out now to make sure we're ship-shape and ready to go." The 9 weeks of testing commenced on May 25th. Mission controllers plan a thorough checkout and recalibration of all seven science instruments onboard. First up is LORRI, the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager, one of the largest interplanetary telescopes ever flown. "On July 14, 2015, the date of closest approach, we'll be able to distinguish objects on Pluto as small as a football field," says Weaver. "That's about 300 times better resolution than anything we have now."

“CMS” stands for Compact Muon Solenoid, a general-purpose particle physics detector built on the Large Hadron Collider. The CMS project posted a few comics which provide a nice, simple (if somewhat cheesy) explanation of what the CMS/LHC does. The LHC generates massive amounts of data of all different varieties, which is distributed across a worldwide grid. It sends status messages to some of the computers, job monitoring info to other computers, bookkeeping info still elsewhere, and so on. This means that each location has specialized queries it can do on the data it has, but up until now it’s been very difficult to query across the whole grid. Enter the Data Aggregation System, designed to allow anything to be queried across all of the machines.

As Paolo Robuffo Giordano and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, in Tübingen, Germany, would have it, scientific research means riding the business end of a giant industrial robot arm while playing video games. But hey -- they produced some serious research on it, which was presented at ICRA 2010.  The CyberMotion Simulator is basically a full motion simulator adapted to a racing car game. Players (or subjects, the researchers prefer to call them) sit in a cabin on a robot arm some 2 meters off the ground and drive a Ferrari F2007 car around a projected track with force-feedback steering wheel and pedals. The aim is to make the experience as realistic as possible without having to buy a real F2007, and to test the simulator with an environment that requires sudden, massive acceleration.

Now that Harry's the prime suspect in the killings he was charged to solve even his best friend doesn't trust him. And it could cost Lt. Murphy her life! Can Harry reach her in time?The Dresden Files: Storm Front rolls on with its hallmark mix of mystery and adventure that made Jim Butcher's novels a smash hit!

Rube Goldberg couldn’t have designed a more elegant confluence of convoluted causal relationships.  Start analyzing the perplexing paradox of the FPGA synthesis market and each link of the chain reveals a bizarre force vector that eventually doubles back onto itself into an unlikely equilibrium that miraculously has held stable for a full decade despite disruptive forces of epic proportions. For over a decade now, Synplify has navigated these waters and has continued to survive and thrive through the unlikeliest of conditions.  Now in the hands of EDA giant Synopsys, the Synplify family of FPGA synthesis tools continues to evolve - with a major upgrade this fall.  When you put a digital design into an FPGA, there are two technologies that determine whether your design fits or doesn’t fit, whether it meets your timing constraints or does not, whether the power consumption will be within your limits (or those of the FPGA), or whether it fails completely, leaving your project at the mercy of major mulligans.   Those two technologies are synthesis and place-and-route. 

A research project will be conducted this week in Linz, Austria, to discover what the ideal interaction between people and humanoid robots ought to be in the future, Honda R&D and Ars Electronica Futurelab announced today. The research, the first of its kind in Europe, will involve members of the public directly interacting with ASIMO, Honda's humanoid robot.

In its latest episode, the Robots Podcast interviews the lead researcher of the Distributed Flight Array and one of my colleagues at the ETH Zurich's IDSC, Raymond Oung. The Distributed Flight Array (DFA) is an aerial modular robot. Each individual module has a single, large propellor and a set of omniwheels to move around. Since a single propellor does not allow stable flight, modules move around to connect to each other. As shown in this video of the DFA, the resulting random shape then takes flight. After a few minutes of hovering the structure breaks up and modules fall back to the ground, restarting the cycle. As most projects at the IDSC, the DFA is grounded in rigorous mathematics and design principles and combines multiple goals: It serves as a real-world testbed for research in distributed estimation and control, it abstracts many of the real-world issues of the next generation of distributed multi-agent systems, and it provides an illustration for otherwise abstract concepts like distributed sensing and control to a general public. For more information on current work, future plans and real-world applications, read on or tune in!

Carnegie Mellon has taught its robotic snake to climb trees, though one hopes it won’t start offering your spouse apples. “Uncle Sam” (presumably named for its red, white, and blue markings) is a snake robot built from modular pieces. The latest in a line of ‘modsnakes’ from Carnegie Mellon’s Biorobotics Lab, Uncle Sam can move in a variety of different ways including rolling, wiggling, and side-winding. It can also wrap itself around a pole and climb vertically, which comes in handy when scaling a tree. You have to watch this thing in action. There is something incredibly life-like, and eerie, about the way it scales the tree outdoors and then looks around with its camera ‘eye’. Projects like Uncle Sam show how life-mimicking machines could revolutionize robotics in the near future.

Scientists at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) were awarded no less than $34.5 million by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to continue their outstanding work in the field of prosthetic limb testing, which has seen them come up with the most advanced model yet. Their Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL) system is just about ready to be tested on human subjects, as it has proved successful with monkeys. Basically, the prosthetic arm is controlled by the brain through micro-arrays that are implanted (gently) in the head. They record brain signals and send the commands to the computer software that controls the arm. To be honest, it will be interesting to see just how these hair-chips are attached to the brain, but the APL say clinical tests have shown the devices to be entirely harmless. The monkeys didn’t mind them too much, at least.

An innovatice camera system could in future enhance security in public areas and buildings. Smart Eyes works just like the human eye. The system analyzes the recorded data in real time and then immediately flags up salient features and unusual scenes.  »Goal, goal, goal!« fans in the stadium are absolutely ecstatic, the uproar is enormous. So it‘s hardly surprising that the security personnel fail to spot a brawl going on between a few spectators. Separating jubilant fans from scuffling hooligans is virtually impossible in such a situation. Special surveillance cameras that immediately spot anything untoward and identify anything out of the ordinary could provide a solution. Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT in Sankt Augustin have now developed such a device as part of the EU project »SEARISE – Smart Eyes: Attending and Recognizing Instances of Salient Events«. The automatic camera system is designed to replicate human-like capabilities in identifying and processing moving images.

This is a site for all things about amateur Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Use the tabs and drop-down menus above to navigate the site. These are our Arduino-based open source autopilot projects: * ArduPilot, a low-cost autopilot system for planes. * ArduCopter, a fully-autonomous quadcopter system (heli autopilot coming soon). * BlimpDuino, an autonomous blimp with both infrared and ultrasonic guidance.

DMA is used in almost every complex system or subsystems, but it's observed that teams either build the DMA controller from scratch for each project for specific application or take the existing DMAC available from elsewhere. This article discusses the architecture of DMAC that can be used with any kind of Bus, configuration (parallel, serial transfers), can be connected to any kind of ports, most importantly any kind of software assumptions can be implemented in the DMAC very easily.

The latest episode of the Robots podcast interviews Dr. Alvar Saenz-Otero from MIT on the SPHERES project. SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold Engage and Reorient Experimental Satellites) are basketball-sized satellites able to fly in and maintain formation at nanometer precision. In the second part of this episode we continue our quest for a good definition of a robot by looking at a well-known definition dating back to 1979. Read on or tune in!

Within the next three years, the U.S. military will test the feasibility of sending a quadruped robot out into the field as a trusty pack mule to carry supplies for its troops, wherever they go. If the testing goes well for Boston Dynamics's Legged Squad Support System (LS3), company founder Marc Raibert will have come a long way from the one-legged hopping robots he pioneered in the 1980s. Actually Raibert has already come a long way, to the point where the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Tactical Technology Office and the U.S. Marine Corps awarded his company a 30-month, $32-million contract last week to deliver a prototype LS3. This would be the first step in fulfilling the military's call for an autonomous, legged robot that can carry up to 181 kilograms of supplies for at least 32 kilometers without refueling.

ScalaModules is an open source project aimed at providing fluent support for OSGi to Scala developers. It takes advantage of Scala's infix operator notation, higher order functions, and implicit conversions. ScalaModules transparently uses the Scala compiler to wrap an OSGi BundleContext with its own RichBundleContext model. This general technique is not unusual for creating DSLs in mainstream languages. Sean McDirmid uses similar tricks for his C# Bling library for WPF, except that Bling must overcome the lack of C# offering comparable extensions to Scala.

Verification of algorithm-intensive systems is a long, costly process. Studies show that the majority of flaws in embedded systems are introduced at the specification stage, but are not detected until late in the development process. These flaws are the dominant cause of project delays and a major contributor to engineering costs. For algorithm-intensive systems —including systems with communications, audio, video, imaging, and navigation functions— these delays and costs are exploding as system complexity increases. It doesn't have to be this way. Many designers of algorithm-intensive systems already have the tools they need to get verification under control. Engineers can use these same tools to build system models that help them find and correct problems earlier in the development process. This can not only reduce verification time, but also improves the performance of their designs. In this article, we'll explain three practical approaches to early verification that make this possible. First, let's examine why the current algorithm verification process is inefficient and error-prone. In a typical workflow, designs start with algorithm developers, who pass the design to hardware and software teams using specification documents.

For my latest project, WeatherBar, I had to pick a weather API. Basically, I needed to get the weather conditions for a specific location, as well as a short forecast. The choices I had were Yahoo Weather API, WeatherBug API and Google Weather API (yes,there is no mistake here – it is a direct API call, since Google doesn’t have an official page for this API). Probably there are more services offering a public weather API out there, but these caught my attention.

Andrew Phillips holds the title of Scientist with Microsoft Research Cambridge, and he's working on a method of programming that compiles into DNA. Part of this involves a visual programming language called Stochastic Pi Machine, or SPiM. This system models biological processes to help give researchers feedback on how organisms will react to modifications. The hope is that this can be used to help scientists program for large biological systems using modular components compiled to DNA. Yes, I’m in way over my head here, but I do my best to ask Andrew about the role this will play in medical treatment going forward, what it means to DNA computing, and the ability of back-engineering the genetic code we don’t use now

Andrew Phillips holds the title of Scientist with Microsoft Research Cambridge, and he's working on a method of programming that compiles into DNA. Part of this involves a visual programming language called Stochastic Pi Machine, or SPiM. This system models biological processes to help give researchers feedback on how organisms will react to modifications. The hope is that this can be used to help scientists program for large biological systems using modular components compiled to DNA. Yes, I’m in way over my head here, but I do my best to ask Andrew about the role this will play in medical treatment going forward, what it means to DNA computing, and the ability of back-engineering the genetic code we don’t use now.