ROS-I is developing and promoting a manufacturer-independent open-source library of drivers and the transfer of established components from research to industry - not just h/w interfaces and MS, IOS a...
On April 8-9, Stanford Law School held the second annual robotics and law conference, We Robot. This year’s event focused on near-term policy issues in robotics and featured panels and papers by sch...
This concludes the ShanghAI Lecture series of 2012. After a wrap-up of the class, we announce the winners of the EmbedIT and NAO competitions and end with an outlook of the future of the ShanghAI Lect...
A growing business within Parrot S.A., (PARRO:EUROLIST B) is their AR.Drone line of products, parts and software. Their first quadcopter product was developed internally by (1) observing the $1 billio...
Researchers from the Wyss Institute and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard have developed a millimeter-scaled insect robot that can autonomously control its flight. Their findin...
In the 9th part of the ShanghAI Lecture series, we look at ontogenetic development as Rolf Pfeifer talks about the path from locomotion to cognition. This is followed by two guest lectures: The first ...
At the Xconomy Forum held in Palo Alto earlier this week, the focal topic was "Robots Remake the Workplace." It was expected that the jobs issue would permeate the event. Do robots take away jobs? Ins...
In the 7th part of the ShanghAI Lecture series, Rolf Pfeifer talks about collective intelligence. Examples include ants that find the shortest path to a food source, robots that clean up, and birds th...
This article looks at how the robotics industry of today is following in the footsteps of the personal computer industry of yesterday, and why Natural Language Processing, like the Graphical User Inte...
"Moore's Law has never moved faster than is moving inside the phone you've already got in your pocket. The pace of development and the price performance curve is moving faster in smartphones than it's...
This is the fourth part of the ShanghAI Lecture series, where Rolf Pfeifer starts introducing a set of “Design Principles” for intelligent systems, as outlined in the book “How the Body Shapes t...
As a robotic warfare veteran, there are three common misperceptions about the use of robots in warfare that I’d like to address.
Misperception #1: There is some sort of ethical quandary or challe...
Robots have already changed the face of modern warfare, particularly through the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly called "drones." Currently, armed drone aircraft are in widespread use...
This is a brief presentation of some of the most widely used robots (or remotely controlled, semi-autonomous systems) from militaries around the world. There are numerous other projects that are curre...
Study the past if you would define the future. - Confucius
War will always have a human element. Robots will be tools in future conflicts, just as they (and other technologies) have been in the past...
It's absolutely the case that after the first accident involving an automated vehicle, there will be an automated ambulance chaser following.
- Robert Hartwig, president of the Insurance Informati...
In this lecture Rolf Pfeifer presents some first steps toward a “theory of intelligence”., followed by guest lectures by Vincent C. Müller (Anatolia College, Greece) on computers and cognition, a...
On February 1st of this year, Catherine Mohr, Director of Medical Research and chief spokesperson for Intuitive Surgical (ISRG:NASDAQ), gave a talk on the campus of CMU. (Video of talk and Q&A)....
Astronauts: awesome, but only human
It's cold out there beyond the blue. Full of radiation. Low on breathable air. Vacuous. It's hard to keep machines and organic creatures functioning and/or alive....
In this 2nd part of the ShanghAI Lectures, Rolf Pfeifer looks at the paradigm “Cognition as Computation”, show its successes and failures and justifies the need for an embodied perspective. Follo...
German KUKA youBot Store has announced a new initiative to promote education in mobile manipulation. Research groups and labs in universities and public research facilities are invited to organize an ...
In recent years cloud computing has made an entrance into our lives. Naturally, this begs the question how cloud computing can be used in robotics applications. With Rapyuta, the RoboEarth Cloud Engin...
In this first part of the ShanghAI Lecture series, Rolf Pfeifer gives an overview of the content and scope of the project, discusses the meaning of “Intelligence”, the Turing Test, and IQ....
Two of the most challenging problems tackled with quadrocopters so far are balancing an inverted pendulum and juggling balls. My colleagues at ETH Zurich's Flying Machine Arena have now combined the t...
Bolt, Ben Einstein's hardware and robotics accelerator in Boston, today announced the close of their first funding round and the opening of the first round of applications for 2013 hardware startups. ...
I've read a wide range of reports and single-topic reviews about the presentations and about some of the exhibitors at last November's RoboBusiness Leadership Summit held in Pittsburgh. I didn't feel ...
http://youtu.be/kwkxx84wXNo
This video, by MotherboardTV, was posted on YouTube in early December, but, at just over 50,000 views, it hasn't yet reached the audience it deserves.
Not knowing muc...
One of the exciting announcements at Automate 2013 is also one of the smallest. Gumstix, providers of Linux computers-on-modules (COMs) are offering ROS on a stick. For $45, Gumstix provide a bootable...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2OQxHNVLNY
In this recently released TED talk, Dennis Hong from VirginiaTech presents all the recent developments of his RoMeLa Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory...
The use of UAVs has skyrocketed, a wide variety of systems ranging from extremely small flying bots to large airframes like the Predators or Global Hawk drones is currently in use, mostly from armed ...