Our most recent video update comes from our VP of Engineering Andy Atkins. Take a sneak peak inside the minds of our engineers as they finish our newest Jibo P2s, to find out what kinds of challenges ...
Social Robotics: The UX of Natural Language
A very smart and snotty journalist told me that he had spoken with Aldebaran's Pepper system when he was in Boston. Much to his chagrin, the robot didn't ...
[tweetquote]What is a social robot supposed to look like?[/tweetquote] We have asked ourselves this question many times during the last year. HUGE design was fortunate enough to be partnered with th...
This weekend we became the #1 Most Successful Technology Campaign on Indiegogo ever when we broke $2.2M! We are both elated and deeply grateful to all our supporters for helping JIBO set a new recor...
A few of days ago, WIRED and Robohub covered a story about “Largest Swarm of Robots” and how self-organizing algorithms can be used by robots to form certain shapes. This inspired us to see wha...
A couple of months ago, we asked our readers whether three different unlicensed groups of individuals should be able to ride in autonomous cars alone. The individuals were: a child under the legal dr...
On July 15th, Jibo launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo with the goal of raising $100,000 towards developing their new social robot for the home. Less than one week later, Jibo surpassed the ...
JIBO, a 2013 Boston startup, launched an IndieGoGo campaign last week and is off to a rousing start, lots of favorable press, and, as of the time of this writing, has raised more than $700,000 over th...
Cynthia Breazeal’s Jibo launched today and coming on the heels of Pepper, Aldebaran and Softbank’s new social robot, and Jimmy from Intel. It seems like we’re seeing a second wave of social robo...
Building a robot company is difficult, very difficult. It requires unwavering belief in yourself, in your idea, in your team and ultimately in your product. But it is also one of the most thrilling ex...
In 1922, the Elmwood Button Co. commercialized a toy that could respond to voice commands. The toy, called Radio Rex, was a dog made of celluloid that would leap out of its house when you called its n...
You are travelling along a single lane mountain road in an autonomous car that is approaching a narrow tunnel. You are the only passenger of the car....
“When the American people, through their Congress, voted for a twenty-six-billion-dollar highway program, the most charitable thing to assume is that they hadn’t the faintest notion of what they w...
Bruno Maisonnier at TedExConcorde. Photo credit: Rodrigo SEPÚLVEDA SCHULZ.
Last week I dropped by Aldebaran’s studio to get a glimpse of Pepper in action, and was pretty excited about this robot. ...
It is a fantastic time for technology. We live in a more connected world, and compared to even a few decades ago, we have vastly improved access to information and content, and have dramatically expan...
Image credit: Craig Berry
Life and death decisions make interesting thought experiments. When you throw an autonomous car into the mix, things get even more interesting....
Image source: Karora via Wikipedia.
There may be times when an accident or a death is unavoidable while an autonomous car is controlling the wheel.
What should an autonomous car do when such ...
Our previous poll, which asked (among other questions) whether kids should be allowed to ride in autonomous vehicles by themselves, revealed that responsibility is a key issue for most people. Are we ...
We conducted two polls last month in collaboration with the Open Roboethics initiative to get a sense of what people think about autonomous cars. Our polls started some interesting discussions arou...
Share your opinion and take our next reader poll: Should autonomous cars be allowed to speed?Reader poll results: Earlier this month, when we asked people about your general thoughts on autonomous c...
Image from Wikimedia Commons
Two weeks ago we published our first reader poll in collaboration with the Open Roboethics initiative in order to find out more about what people think about autono...
What do people think are the main advantages of owning an autonomous car? Do people think autonomous cars should be easily identifiable? How much money are people willing to pay for an autonomous car ...
Today we drive our cars. In the future they’ll do the driving.
Autonomous cars are no longer a far-off futuristic dream, but something that we can expect to see on the road within the next dec...
Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2010-12-16
The lecture starts with a short introduction to the Interactive Robots and Media Lab and the United Arab Emirates. Then, it continues by exploring so...
Posting on the Slate blog Future Tense, James Bessen takes issue with the notion that technology causes unemployment, illustrating his point by debunking a pair of frequently cited examples, textile w...
Sharon Marzouk with a class of excited youngsters and their Thymio-based creations.
Sharon has found classroom robotics is an excellent motivator for independent learning and discovery: “The way I ...
The Girls of Steel – a competitive FIRST team located in Pittsburg, PA – is on a mission to draw more young women into engineering. We've already heard what it's like to be part of an all-girls ro...
To understand what the Drones for Schools program is, and how it came about, it helps to know a few things about my background. I didn't originally set out to be a STEM educator. I had some science ed...
I am profoundly convinced that if we are able to preserve the natural curiosity of early childhood in growing up individuals, without fail they will develop a durable attraction to science, technology...
As a robot animator I can attest to the fact that robots don't "need" heads to be treated as social entities. Research has shown that people will befriend a stick as long as it moves properly [1].
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The obvious answer to this question is "No: there are lots of robots without heads." It's not even clear that social robots necessarily require a head, as even mundane robots like the Roomba are anthr...
On June 30th of this year, Ryerson University in Toronto held an event titled UAVs: Pros vs Cons Symposium. Some of the presentations have since been incorporated into a YouTube playlist by Nikola Dan...
In light of the popularity of his AR.Drone tutorials, we have invited Robohub contributor Mike Hamer to act as Guest Editor for our next focus series "Getting Started in Robotics."
Like many ch...
SUSBEXPO is the first conference about unmanned systems to really focus on the growing commercial opportunities of this market. AUVSI put on a spectacular annual show, but it is predominantly militar...
Autonomously flying robots — also called small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — are more and more exploited in civil and commercial applications for monitoring, surveillance, and disaster r...