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The Care-O-bot® research initiative aims at making Care-O-bot® 3 available as high-tech research platform. The main objectives to reach this goal are to provide a common open source repository for the hardware platform provide simulation models of hardware components provide remote access to the Care-O-bot® 3 hardware platform

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.”

There is a long history of attempts at replicating neural systems either in software or in conventional semiconductors, such as the FACETS project (not to mention the creation of conventional logic gates from lab-grown biological neurons!) According to a USC Viterbi news release, researchers at the BioRC project, whose goal is research on an artificial cortex, have succeeded in creating a functioning synapse from carbon nanotubes. The new research was presented by Alice C. Parker in the paper "A biomimetic fabricated carbon nanotube synapse for prosthetic applications" at the Life Science Systems and Applications Workshop in April 2011. (unfortunately the actual paper is behind a paywall but the abstract is readable). An earlier paper, "A Biomimetic Carbon Nanotube Synapse Circuit", describes the proposed design of synapse including schematics and comparison with biological neural

The Special Project for Earthquake Disaster Mitigation in Urban Areas (2002-2006) conducted by the Earthquake Research Institute at the University of Tokyo. The project revealed the detailed geometry of the subducted Philippine Sea plate (PSP) beneath the Tokyo Metropolitan area and improved information needed for seismic hazards analyses of the largest urban centers. In 2007 the Special Project for Earthquake Disaster Mitigation in Tokyo Metropolitan Area started focusing at  the vertical proximity of the PSP down going lithospheric plate and the risks for the greater Tokyo urban region that has a population of 42 million and is the center of approximately 40 % of the nation's activities. A M 7 or greater (M 7+) earthquake in this region at present has high potential to produce devastating loss of life and property with even greater global economic repercussions. The Central Disaster Management Council of Japan estimated that a great earthquake in the region might cause 11,000 fatalities and 112 trillion yen (1 trillion US$) economic loss. The Earthquake Research Committee of Japan estimated a probability of 70 % in 30 years for a great earthquake in this region. 

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.

Researchers at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research are working on a new mathematical model to mimic the human brain's ability to identify objects. The model can predict human performance on certain visual-perception tasks suggesting it’s a good indication of what's actually happening in the brain. Researchers are hoping the new findings will make their way into future object-recognition systems for automation, mobile robotics, and other applications.

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.