Tag Archives: robots

Bee-Inspired Bots Skitter and Swarm at NYCs Museum of Mathematics | Gizmodo

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Dr. James McLurkin has a swarm of robots. Individually, theyre not that smart, but a crateful of them behaves in some very complex ways, like the bees that inspired them. Gizmodo got to see the wee machines in action, and while theyre adorable, they represent some serious future bot capabilities.

Dr. McLurkin, a professor of computer science, runs the Multi-Robot Systems Lab at Rice University. He and his team research distributed algorithms for multi-robot systems. In other words, using the combined abilities of several rather simple robots to perform complex tasks. Dr. McLurkin has spent the past three years developing Robot Swarm, an exhibit of his hive-mind bots set to debut at Manhattans Museum of Mathematics in early 2015. This week, Dr. McLurkin gave a sneak preview of the exhibit, and Gizmodo was there.

READ MORE Bee-Inspired Bots Skitter and Swarm at NYCs Museum of Mathematics | Gizmodo

Japan’s New Robot Museum Guides Are All Too Human | Mashable

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Japans New Robots Are All Too Human

If you’re searching for the uncanny valley, look no further than the work of Osaka University professor Hiroshi Ishiguro. He has been creating humanoid robots for years, and his latest incarnation — which is so realistic its scary — will act as robot guides at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Japan Miraikan.

The museum will welcome three robots, introduced in Japan on Tuesday. There’s the youthful-looking Kodomoroid, the adult female Ontonaroid and the baby-like Telenoid. With the exception of Telenoid, these robots look remarkably lifelike, have eerily expressive faces and are designed, in a limited sense, to move and communicate like real people.

Read More: Japans New Robots Are All Too Human | Mashable

Readworthy: Amazon Drones News

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FAA Reminds Us: The U.S. Has Approved One Commercial Drone Operator, And It’s Not Amazon | FastCompany
The federal aviation administration says it will establish drone regulations and standards in the coming years.

Amazon ‘drones’ stir up privacy concerns among lawmakers | CNET
Sen. Edward Markey says the Federal Aviation Administration needs to adopt privacy regulations before allowing services like Amazon Prime Air, which will use drones to deliver packages, to get off the ground.

Amazon drones: Bold experiment or shrewd publicity stunt? | CNET
Amazon faces a ton of hurdles when it comes to deploying delivery drones, but the idea isn’t as farfetched as it first might sound.

Amazon Prime Air drones revealed on 60 Minutes, aim to deliver in half an hour (video) | Engadget
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took to 60 Minutes to reveal the company’s latest delivery method: drones. In what is likely a cunning reminder of the e-tailer’s upcoming Cyber Monday sales, these bots will apparently be capable of delivering packages up to five pounds (86 percent of orders are apparently less than that), with the aim of getting them to your house in under half an hour. The system is called Prime Air and the octo-copter drones, which wait, ready to deliver, at the end of conveyor belts, have a range of 10 miles. As Amazon puts it, “Putting Prime Air into commercial use will take some number of years as we advance the technology and wait for the necessary FAA rulesand regulations” and Bezos himself added in the TV segment that it won’t be before 2015 at the very earliest. While it sounds like they”ll take their time to get here (if they ever do), we’ve at least got a video of the drones in action — it’s right after the break.

Primo Is An Arduino Robot That Teaches Kids Programming Logic Through Play [Kickstarter] | TechCrunch

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Dan Shapiro’s Robot Turtles board game Kickstarter showed there is serious appetite for kids’ games that aren’t just fun to play with but also sneakily teach core coding principles. Instead of the $25,000 he was aiming for, Shapiro raised more than $630,000. Geeky moms and dads clearly have money, and will spend it on the right bit of educational kit.

With that kind of Kickstarter community response, it’s pretty likely we’re set to see a wave of educational toys doing cool fun stuff with programming principles. To wit, meet Primo: a physical programming interface that teaches children programming logic while they control the movements of an Arduino-powered robot.

Read: Primo Is An Arduino Robot That Teaches Kids Programming Logic Through Play | TechCrunch.

The Internet Of Things Will Be Huge—Just Not As Huge As The Hype | ReadWrite

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The Internet of Things promises to bring a new level of convenience to our lives. Could it bring trillions of dollars worth of convenience? Not likely, but that’s not stopping a lot of prognosticators out there.

The level of hype around the financial promise of the Internet of Things is truly gargantuan. A May 2013 report from the McKinsey Institute suggests that connecting billions of ordinary devices to the Internet will add between $2.7 trillion and $6.2 trillion a year to the global economy by 2025.

Cisco, which has a big stake in the hardware infrastructure for a thriving Internet of Things, estimates that what it calls “the Internet of Everything” will boost global output by $14.4 trillion over 9 years, or a comparatively sane $1.6 trillion a year. General Electric, by contrast, goes even bigger than McKinsey, and estimates that the “Industrial Internet” will boost global GDP by $15.3 trillion in 2030.

So where is all this money going to come from? Will all the little robots and sensors that will fill our lives with automated goodness also spit out gold coins? Not quite. But the Internet of Things is still going to add a lot of economic value. Even if actual gains only amount to a tenth of the hype, the potential boost to the economy—and human wellbeing in general—will be very significant.

Read the rest of the story: The Internet Of Things Will Be Huge—Just Not As Huge As The Hype | ReadWrite.

The Hummingbird Drone | PBS Video

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The Hummingbird Drone | Watch NOVA Online | PBS Video.

Watch A Drone Make A Masterpiece Of The New York Public Library | Co.Design

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The New York Public Library is a stunning piece of architecture. Its Rose Reading Room has 51-foot ceilings and measures the length of a football field (that’s more than a Manhattan block), yet it has no columns, making it one of the largest open interiors in the world.

If you’re Nate Bolt–Facebook design researcher, amateur filmmaker, and friend of the NYPL’s skunkworks team–you get invited to fly a drone through the space. Bolt shot the video you see here using an ultralight setup–a DJI Phantom quadcopter drone loaded with a GoPro and aniPhone. That’s roughly $1,500 in equipment weighing just a bit over two pounds. It allowed Bolt to film with a god-like perspective as the camera floats over shoulders and through doorways to explore the nuance of such grand architecture.

Read more: Watch A Drone Make A Masterpiece Of The New York Public Library | Co.Design | business + design.

Screw Teaching Your Kids–Get This Robot Instead | Co.Labs

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Gupta set out to find a way to teach very young children the basics of coding–sequences of instructions, subroutines, events, conditional statements–in a playful way. Today Play-i launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise $250,000 to manufacture two kid-friendly robots called Bo and Yana, which teach high-level programming concepts to children as as young as five.

Read more: Screw Teaching Your Kids–Get This Robot Instead ⚙ Co.Labs ⚙ code + community.

MIT’s Self-Assembling Robots Offer Whiffs of Optimus Prime | Wired.com

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Read the story: MIT’s Self-Assembling Robots Offer Whiffs of Optimus Prime | Wired Design | Wired.com

Meet the Drone That’s “Guiding” New Students Around MIT This Fall | Gizmodo

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Navigating a new campus is all part of the nostalgic movie montage that is freshman year of college. The changing leaves! The quaint Gothic architecture! The… drone tour guide? That’s the concept behind Skycall, a playful prototype that’s designed to help visiting Harvard students find their way around MIT’s notoriously confusing campus—which has been called “one of mankind’s most difficult and disorienting labyrinths.”

The full story: Meet the Drone That’s “Guiding” New Students Around MIT This Fall | Gizmodo