[lotuseclat79]

AIDA Robot Aims To Change The Way We Interact With Our Car (w/ Video).

MIT researchers and designers are developing the Affective Intelligent Driving Agent (AIDA) - a new in-car personal robot that aims to change the way we interact with our car. The project is a collaboration between the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab, MIT’s SENSEable City Lab and the Volkswagen Group of America’s Electronics Research Lab.


AIDA. Photo - Courtesy of the SENSEable City Lab

-- Tom

[ekim68]

NASA moon-excavation robot competition digs deep

Student teams use automation and robotics technologies to design and build robotic machines to excavate simulated lunar soil (known as "regolith") last week. And the goal is leave your opponents in the dust — literally.

Excavating regolith, according to NASA, will be an important part of any construction projects or processing of natural resources on the Moon. The robots are tested in box containing eight tons of simulated lunar regolith that is about four metres square and about one-half-metre deep. In order to qualify for a prize, a robot must dig up and then dump at least 150 kilograms of regolith into a container in 30 minutes. The teams with the robots that move the most regolith will claim the three cash prizes.

http://www.automationmag.com/2009103...digs-deep.html

[lotuseclat79]

Armada of Robots to Explore Saturn's Titan?.

Wolfgang Fink, visiting associate in physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena says we are on the brink of a great paradigm shift in planetary exploration, and the next round of robotic explorers will be nothing like what we see today.

"The way we explore tomorrow will be unlike any cup of tea we've ever tasted," said Fink, who was recently appointed as the Edward and Maria Keonjian Distinguished Professor in Microelectronics at the University of Arizona, Tucson. "We are departing from traditional approaches of a single robotic spacecraft with no redundancy that is Earth-commanded to one that allows for having multiple, expendable low-cost robots that can command themselves or other robots at various locations at the same time."

"In the future, multiple robots will be in the driver's seat," Fink said. These robots would share information in almost real time. This type of exploration may one day be used on a mission to Titan, Mars and other planetary bodies. Current proposals for Titan would use an orbiter, an air balloon and rovers or lake landers.

-- Tom

[ekim68]

More on post #178:

A glimpse of the future: Robots aid Japan's elderly residents

TOKYO — It looks like a scene from Robocop or one of the Terminator movies: A human steps into a sleek robot suit and is miraculously transformed, suddenly capable of astonishing feats of strength.

But this is no sci-fi film — it's a promotional video by Cyberdyne, a Japanese electronics company. It shows an elderly male patient with Parkinson's disease being strapped into a robotic skeleton that, using sensors attached to the wearer's skin, reacts to nerve impulses and moves its "arms" and "legs" accordingly.

The robotic suit, known as the Hybrid Assisted Limb (or HAL), is designed to boost its wearer's strength by a multiple of 10. In July, it allowed the patient at the Seiko En nursing home in Tsurugashima, Japan, to walk for the first time in two years, Cyberdyne CEO Yoshiyuki Sankai says.

"I was surprised," Sankai admits. "I expected him to stand up, but not to walk."

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/ro...n-robots_N.htm

[Blackmirror]

Until robots are equipped with a human brain then we are safe