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The Balancing Cube is a robotic sculpture that can stand on any of its corners. Pendulum-like modules, located on the inner faces of the cube, constantly adjust their positions to shift the structure's center of gravity and keep it balanced. The cube remains stable even if you poke it. But not too hard! Created by Raffaello D'Andrea, Sebastian Trimpe, and Matt Donovan at ETH Zurich, the contraption is half art and half technology. They got their inspiration from a Cirque du Soleil performance in which acrobats use their bodies to support each other and balance together in seemingly impossible positions.

Remember Hitachi’s little helper robot, EMIEW 2 (Excellent Mobility and Interactive Existence as Work-mate)?  It’s been a couple of years since we heard anything regarding the project and we feared the worst.  Hitachi has put those fears to rest by holding a news conference to show off its new enhanced voice recognition and driving performance! Known primarily for its unique legs which have wheels for feet, EMIEW 2 can drive at up to 6km/h to keep pace with people.  If it needs to carry something it can kneel down (for added stability) and scoot around, and thanks to its bipedal legs it can step over obstacles that are too high to drive over.  Now it has been given adaptive suspension control technology which increases its stability when driving over bumpy terrain such as elevator doors.  During the press demonstration, EMIEW 2′s springy legs bobbed independently as it drove over cables and uneven flooring.

You might think that some devices in the modern age have reached their maximum development level, such as the common desk-lamp, but you would be wrong. Natan Linder, a student from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has created a robotic version that can not only light your room, but project internet pages on your desk as well. It is an upgrade on the AUR lamp from 2007, which tracks movements around a desk or table and can alter the color, focus, and strength of its light to suit the user’s needs. The LuminAR comes with those abilities, and much more. The robotic arm can move about on its own, and combines a vision system with a pico projector, wireless computer and camera. When turned on, the projector will look for a flat space around your room on which to display images. Since it can project more than one internet window, you can check your email and browse another website at the same time.

Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) has detailed the software used to make their robot dance (see some nice photos over at Pink Tentacle) in a recent press release.  The software, dubbed Choreonoid (Choreography and Humanoid), is similar to conventional computer animation software.  Users create key poses and the software automatically interpolates the motion between them.  What makes the software unique is that it also corrects the poses if they are mechanically unstable, such as modifying the position of the feet and waist, allowing anyone to create motions compatible with the ZMP balancing method.  This is especially important for robots like the HRP-4C, where complicated motions could easily cause it to fall over.

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.

The potential for the QTC material to transition from an insulator to a conductor (i.e. change its electrical property) is influenced by how much deformation the material is experiencing as a result of the applied mechanical pressure. QTC can be used to produce low profile, low cost, pressure activated switches or sensors that display variable resistance with applied force and return to a quiescent state when the force is removed. The difference between a QTC switch and a QTC sensor is arguably only the speed and amount of physical input required to achieve the required switching point or resistance range.

RobotShop, the World's Leading Source for Personal and Professional Robot Technology. Here you will find personal robots, professional robots, robot toys, robot kits and robot parts for building your own robots. If you are looking for robot pet care, robot floor cleaners, robot vacuums, robot pool cleaners or robot mowers, to do your household chores, this is the site for you. We also bring robots back to life™ via our Robot Repair Center.

“The ability to harness and control the power of bacterial motion is an important requirement for further development of hybrid biomechanical systems driven by microorganisms," said Argonne physicist and principal investigator Igor Aronson. “In this system, the gears are a million times more massive than the bacteria."

NAMO (Novel Articulated MObile platform)  is a humanoid robot built by The Institute of Field Robotics (FIBO) at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi in Thailand. FIBO is active in the RoboCup scene and have developed a wide range of robot types, including an experimental biped.  NAMO was unveiled on March 29th 2010, serving as FIBO’s mascot as part of the university’s 50 year anniversary celebrations.  NAMO will be used to welcome people to the university and may be deployed at museums.  Given its friendly appearance and functionality, it could be used to research human robot interaction and communication. NAMO is 130cm (4′3″) tall and has 16 degrees of freedom.  It moves on a stable three-wheeled omnidirectional base, and is equipped with a Blackfin camera for its vision system.  It is capable of simple gesture recognition, visually tracks humans or objects of interest automatically, and can speak a few phrases in a child-like voice (in Thai).

Scientists from Columbia University, Arizona State University, the University of Michigan, and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a robot that’s just 4 nanometers wide. And no, it doesn’t have flashing lights, video cameras or wheels. It does, however, have four legs, and the ability to start, move, turn, and stop. Descendants of the molecular nanobot, or “spider,” could someday be used to treat diseases such as cancer or diabetes. The team built the spider by starting with a protein called streptavidin, that conveniently has four symmetrically-placed binding pockets for a chemical called biotin. The legs were made from four strands of biotin-labeled DNA, which were bound to the pockets. Three of the legs were made from enzymatic DNA, which is a type that binds to and then dissociates (cuts away) from other particular sequences of DNA. Its fourth leg was made from what the researchers call a “start strand” of DNA - it keeps the spider tethered to its starting site, until it’s released.

With all of the new competition in the consumer robotics field, it’s about time for iRobot to show that they’re still capable of innovating new and exciting things. AVA, their technology demonstrator, definitely fits into the new and exciting category. AVA is short for ‘Avatar,’ although iRobot was careful not to call it a telepresence robot so as not to restrict perceptions of what it’s capable of. AVA is capable of fully autonomous navigation, relying on a Kinect-style depth sensing camera, laser rangefinders, inertial movement sensors, ultrasonic sensors, and (as a last resort) bump sensors. We got a run-down a few days ago at CES, check it out:

In recent years, ‘social’ robots—cleaning robots, nursing-care robots, robot pets and the like—have started to penetrate into people’s everyday lives. Saerbeck and other robotics researchers are now scrambling to develop more sophisticated robotic capabilities that can reduce the ‘strangeness’ of robot interaction. “When robots come to live in a human space, we need to take care of many more things than for manufacturing robots installed on the factory floor,” says Haizhou Li, head of the Human Language Technology Department at the A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research. “Everything from design to the cognitive process needs to be considered.”

A new aquatic microrobot that mimics the water-walking abilities of the water strider has been developed by researchers at the Harbin Institute of Technology in China.The robot is about the size of a quarter, with ten water-repellent, wire legs and two movable, oar-like legs propelled by two miniature motors. Because the weight of the microrobot is equal to that of about 390 water striders, one might expect that it would sink quickly when placed on the water surface. But it stands effortlessly on water surfaces and also walks and turns freely.

IROS 2011 takes place later this month in San Francisco (25th ~ 30th), and as usual there’s so many interesting projects being presented that attendees won’t be able to see them all. We’ve looked at the schedule and will highlight some of them, beginning with this robot developed at the Graduate School of Information Science & Technology, The University of Tokyo, Japan.

So after all that you are probably asking, “What is SimpleCV?” It is an open source computer vision framework that lowers the barriers to entry for people to learn, develop, and use it across the globe. Currently there are a few open source vision system libraries in existence, but the downside to these is you have to be quite the domain expert and knowledgeable with vision systems as well as know cryptic programming languages like C. Where SimpleCV is different, is it is “simple”. It has been designed with a web browser interface, which is familiar to Internet users everywhere. It will talk to your webcam (which most computers and smart phones have built in) automatically. It works cross platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc). It uses the programming language Python rather than C to greatly lower the learning curve of the software. It sacrifices some complexity for simplicity, which is needed for mass adoption of any type of new technology.