Back in January, Adept's Erin Rapacki told us all that it's time to start 3D scanning the world. We agree with her, but it's not an easy thing to actually go and, you know, do. There are approximately 975 bajillion different objects out there in the world that robots need to know how to interact with, and the only way we're going to learn about them all (short of Google throwing approximately 975 bajillion dollars at the problem) is through a cooperative, crowdsourced effort like this new project called Kinect@Home.
A mola, or ocean sunfish, is a very big, very flat, and (in this reporter's opinion) rather silly looking tropical bony fish. Aerovioronment has used the sunfish as an inspiration for one of their latest proof of concept robots: Mola, an oceangoing robot that's powered by the sun.
Before Curiosity, before Opportunity, before Spirit, and before Sojourner, the very first robot to land on Mars was this little guy, way back in December of 1971. Called PrOP-M, the rover was part of the Soviet Union's Mars-3 mission, which had the potential to deploy the first ever mobile scientific instruments onto the Martian surface.
Yep, we sure do love robot babies. Especially ones where we have videos of them floundering around on the floor. There are other things we love too, like Curiosity and Darwin and overblown fake movie trailers and robot hands spanking a car to make music, and all of those things are coming up on this week's Video Friday.
While we're not allowed to share all the cool stuff that we saw on our visit to iRobot back in July, DARPA has just approved for public release a video of this awesome project: a fully controllable robot arm that can be inflated and deflated like a balloon.
Carnegie Mellon's Robot Hall of Fame (that's RHoF for you neobots) will be inducting four brand new robots this October, and you get to help choose which ones are worthy. We have the whole lineup for you, along with insightful expert commentary on each from us here at IEEE Spectrum to help aid you in your decision-making process.
We first met Stanford's robotic Audi TTS back in 2009, and while it's managed to climb Pike's Peak all by itself, it didn't do so in a time that was all that impressive. More recently, Stanford let Shelley off the leash at California's Thunderhill Raceway, where it almost (almost!) destroyed all human drivers with some aggressive laps around the track.
You remember this thing, right? The vaguely creepy little soft robot that can crawl through gaps and can't be killed? In addition to not being able to stop it or kill it, you now can't even see it, since it's learned how to camouflage itself. Even in the infrared. And also, just for fun, it glows in the dark. Video of this, and oh so much more, in today's Video Friday.
Sandia National Labs is one of those secret places that does a lot of cool stuff with robots, but that we don't always get to hear about. They were initially responsible for that jumping robot as well as nine other robots that the Smithsonian snapped up a while back, and as part of DARPA's ARM program, Sandia has partnered with Stanford to create a dexterous robot hand on the cheap.
