Blog Post: Move over, humans! This autonomous robot skier can race down a snowy slope, slalom-style.

Video: A robot with permanent magnets on its feet requires some clever engineering to get moving

Blog Post: The Coordinated Robotics Lab at UCSD is developing agile robots that can overcome obstacles by balancing and hopping

Article: How far are we from sending robots into the world in our stead?

Blog Post: Instead of being limited to household servants, remote visitors, or virtual doctors, telepresence robots might instead change the way everyday people go to work.

Blog Post: This British robo-driver can steer, brake, change gears, and follow a GPS path stored in its memory -- try that, humans

Blog Post: At last week's Maker Faire, roboticist Rodney Brooks discussed the exponential improvements in robotics, the demands of our aging population, and how robots could save manufacturing in the United States.

Blog Post: Using glider AUV technology, researchers at Rutgers University hope to be the first scientists to successfully navigate an AUV across the entire Atlantic Ocean over the course of seven months. Ari Daniel Shapiro reports on the project in an excellent Spectrum podcast, explaining the technology behind the glider and what the goals of the mission are. Gliders use low-power variable buoyancy systems to glide up and down through the water column for months at a time and carry payloads of different kinds of sensors to collect oceanographic data. These are primarily water quality sensors -- salinity, temperature, optical quality, …

Blog Post: I am a confessed Roomba evangelist. One of the most frequent questions I get is how Roomba knows where to go -- does it build a map? Does it do rows of your carpet? Why is it spinning in circles? Since I'm friends with a few past and current Roomba engineers, I've always known that Roomba is mostly random. It does have a few behaviors -- for example, wall-following, or the spiral pattern it uses when it starts up or when it's in "dirt detect" mode -- but mostly, it wanders, as anyone who's spent time watching their Roomba with …

Blog Post: A robot penguin and its 3D Fin Ray® structure. Source: Festo Following up on a previous post, Festo's latest creation deserves a closer look. To start with the obvious: Why robot penguins? Penguins are amazingly efficient swimmers: According to tests by Festo's engineers, their body shape shows a flow resistance 20 to 30% lower than the hydro-dynamically most favorable known technical bodies. If penguins were to run on gas, their energy efficiency would allow them to swim 1,500 kilometers through icy Antarctic waters - on just one liter (0.26 US gallons) of fuel! Festo's …