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A giant cobra made of robot men slithers around eating cars
Frank Tobe
20 Oct 2010
... New Indian movie “Endhiran (The Robot)” has a giant cobra made of robot men plus many dance scenes. Enjoy the trailer.
... Last year’s fashion robot HRP-4C did a song and d...
Berkeley Bionics uses military technology to let wheelchair users walk
Frank Tobe
09 Oct 2010
... Slimming down their military HULC exoskeleton (which they have licensed to Lockheed Martin), Berkeley Bionics has introduced eLEGS, a gesture-based human-machine interface which senses and determi...
Stephen Colbert’s droid rage
Frank Tobe
02 Oct 2010
... On a recent Colbert Report, he shows a snake robot, Wall.e, an archer and the new skin from UC Berkeley: “Scientists teach robots how to lie, kill and feel shame about their naked bodies....
The Robot Report’s database now has over 1,800 robotics links in the following directories
Frank Tobe
30 Sep 2010
... Industrial robot manufacturers
... Service robots for gov & corp use
... Service robots for personal use
... Ancillary businesses
... Start-up companies
... Educational & research faciliti...
EmTech@MIT: 35 young innovators give their elevator pitch
Frank Tobe
23 Sep 2010
... David Kobia, of start-up Ushahidi, won Humanitarian of the Year for his work creating web programs that collect and visualize information for communities around the world faced with natural disast...
Optimism: a conversation with Rodney Brooks
Frank Tobe
22 Sep 2010
... Rodney Brooks is the founder and chairman of Heartland Robotics and a founder and board member and former CTO of iRobot Corp. He was also the former director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab...
Two new market analyses: The UAV and UGV market 2010-2020
Frank Tobe
20 Sep 2010
... Visiongain now selling “The Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV) Market 2010-2020: Military Robots for EOD & Counter-IED”, a $2,130 analysis of the worldwide UGV market.
... Visiongain ...
Five government agencies combine to fund a long list of robotic research
Frank Tobe
19 Sep 2010
... The Whitehouse Office of Science and Technology believes that “robotics is at a tipping point in terms of its usefulness and versatility” and is backing their belief with a fund to spu...
The potential of agriculture as a market for robotics
John Payne
16 Aug 2010
When I imagine robots tending land, it's nearly always machines that are supported from above, on a beam that itself is supported by wheels running either on rails or in troughs that double as a deliv...
A plant positioning system based on suspension
John Payne
02 Aug 2010
Something which could be accomplished through robotics that couldn't economically be accomplished using human labor would be maximizing the utilization of a very limited surface area (and the sunlight...
The pursuit of collaboration
John Payne
05 May 2010
Two heads are generally better than one, and while that truism doesn't necessarily scale very well, it can and often does in the open source software movement.
Willow Garage is out to make it...
Rail & gantry bot
John Payne
13 Mar 2010
This is actually a 3D printer, but [elevate the rails and] replace the print head with a couple of general purpose robotic arms and you've got the makings of a gardening robot.
Reposted f...
The empowerment of small-scale industrial designers
John Payne
01 Mar 2010
This Wired video discusses how easy it has become to get ahold of custom parts. Not mentioned, but quite obviously working away, is a 3D printer, building up a bust using deposited material.
...
The application of ‘elegance’ to machine behavior
John Payne
30 Jan 2010
We all have some idea of what elegance means, whether our notion of it is tied up with silky evening dresses, polished wood and brass, chandeliers and stained glass windows, exotic carpets, and expens...
Contrasting two robotic developments
John Payne
23 Nov 2009
The first is an autonomous agricultural robot that you can actually buy, or will be able to soon. It runs on gas and will cost around $100,000 when it becomes available early next year. FHI claims t...
Le Petit Prince takes attentiveness to an extreme
John Payne
31 Aug 2009
Are your plants suffering from lack of attention? Perhaps this little robot is what you need. Unfortunately, you'll need a few thousand of them if you plan to do any serious gardening.
Repo...
Cultibotics as a quality of life issue
John Payne
26 Jul 2009
Your typical farm raises at most a few crops, frequently only one. Because it's what I know, and because it's in practically every processed food you can buy, let's take wheat as an example.
...
Of thresholds and the forces that drive change
John Payne
29 Jun 2009
"But why would you want to turn farming over to machines?"
Ahem! Farming has been conducted primarily by machines for going on a hundred years, at least in the United States. I want to subs...
Discussion of military robotics
John Payne
02 Apr 2009
The Inkwell discussion mentioned below is now underway. See Inkwell.vue topic #352 on The WELL.
For two weeks, beginning April 29th, Brookings Institution Senior Fellow P.W. Singer will be o...
Convertible manipulator/sheer
John Payne
02 Mar 2009
A manipulator with four or six ‘fingers’ positioned symmetrically around a central axis might also serve as a sheer, able to snip along two or three planes. The cutting edges would be the edges o...
Keeping dust off optics
John Payne
02 Mar 2009
Whether lenses for machine vision, or lenses and mirrors to direct laser light, the need to keep dust off their surfaces should be obvious.
One likely solution is to surround the lens with a ...
Valuing the work done
John Payne
10 Jan 2009
So long as the alternative to the use of robotics remains human labor, the value of the work a machine does can be measured in terms of what it would cost to pay people to do the same work, plus the g...
Robots under glass: The threshold of minimal investment
John Payne
04 Jan 2009
For the time being, it probably doesn't make good economic sense to dedicate sophisticated machinery to managing a patch of ground that's unprotected from the elements, when it might just as well be w...
No one’s going to take your tractor away
John Payne
25 Nov 2008
Even if, between now and January, Congress were to get religion with regard to the benefits to be gained from applying robotics to the transformation of agriculture, and had a full-speed-ahead bill re...
The importance of interfaces
John Payne
24 Nov 2008
Take the USB port as an example. It's ubiquitous; practically everything either has one or plugs into one.
Similarly, if you want to build a multi-vendor market for almost anything, one of t...
Finding a place for cultibotics in Obama’s rural agenda
John Payne
23 Nov 2008
It's not like there was any shortage of ideas for how to improve the stability of U.S. agriculture, the lot of farmers, and the economic vitality of rural America. Just have a look at President-Elect...
More specifically, how would they work?
John Payne
22 Nov 2008
This a subject for research and development, of course, but it's my ‘job’ to make this vision as accessible as I can, to both anticipate what that R&D might produce and describe it in plain langua...
Imagine a machine built for efficient gardening
John Payne
18 Nov 2008
What would it look like? How would it be powered, and how would it transmit power to the parts that need it? What actions would it be capable of performing?
There's no single, right answer ...
Center-pivot tillage system
John Payne
27 Oct 2008
Thanks to Jan Slinsky for posting this YouTube link, to a video showing a center-pivot system used for tilling a small plot of land.
While requiring more energy than tillage-free management w...
The origin of cultibotics in science fiction
John Payne
26 Aug 2008
To be quite truthful, the dream of having robots take over the task of managing productive land isn't really mine in the sense of having originated it. To be sure I've contributed some detail, but ot...
An idea the time for which is growing closer
John Payne
25 Aug 2008
When I first started thinking about the use of sophisticated robotics on the front line of horticulture/agriculture, performing most or all field operations autonomously, in a detailed manner, I figur...
WSIC: Knowing the right search term is golden
John Payne
22 Mar 2008
WSIC is an acronym with multiple interpretations, one of which is relevant here. For our purposes, it means "wide-span implement carrier" and refers to a category of machine wherein the components th...
The long, slow tipping point, or boiling frogs
John Payne
03 Mar 2008
It's said that if you raise the temperature slowly enough you can boil a frog alive and it will never jump out of the pot. True or not, it illustrates the idea of changes that happen so gradually we ...
Cultibotics and nutrition
John Payne
13 Jan 2008
A very long time ago, 1981 to be precise, I intended to pursue a masters degree in agronomy, with a focus on how well various agricultural systems supported balanced nutrition for those dependent upon...
Why use robots, round 5
John Payne
16 Nov 2007
Figuratively speaking, a robot is a machine with a brain. They don't really have brains, of course; they have processors and programs, which would be depicted on some low-detail flowchart as lying be...
Getting there from here, round 2
John Payne
10 Nov 2007
While it's inevitable that agriculture will eventually incorporate robotics to some degree, what form that takes is a wide open question, one that, left to itself, would eventually find an answer driv...
