arm

BOL co-founder Molly Wood discovers "her people" in San Diego. Also, we're actually talking about white iPhones. How'd that happen? And Mama's taking our Kodachrome away.

How many tries does it take for a robot to screw in a lightbulb? How about flip a pancake? If the video below is any indication, IHOP won't be robotized anytime soon.

Sylvain Calinon of the Italian Institute of Technology is into teaching robots skills by first taking the bots through the steps involved. For a cooking class on pancakes, Calinon and colleagues used a seven-axis Barrett WAM robotic arm and a simulated pancake with four tracking markers.

As the video shows, the arm needs more than a bit of practice to get the right touch--it finally manages to … Read more

Routine use of robotic lift trucks may not be far off.

Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, along with a team of engineers, have transformed a Toyota 8-Series lift truck into an autonomous bot capable of working alongside human supervisors using voice commands or hand gestures.

The 3,000-pound-capacity lift truck from Toyota Material Handling (TMHU) is capable of locating, lifting, moving, and placing supplies while traversing just about any type of terrain. It was demonstrated last month at an event hosted by the U.S. Army Logistics Innovation Agency at Fort Lee, in Virginia.

"Robotic forklifts have the potential to protect both military and civilian personnel working in high-risk environments, such as hazardous material storage facilities, said Brett Wood, president of TMHU.

The demo included a review of the robot's safety features, sensor capabilities, and human-robot interface.

The researchers and engineers developed a complex network of systems to enable the lift truck to navigate real-time conditions faced by lift truck operators (navigating obstacles and interacting with other moving vehicles, for example). To do this, they added a camera, sensors, laptops, servomotors, Wi-Fi, and a PDA.

"We chose the internal combustion Toyota lift truck because it can be operated outdoors on packed earth or gravel and because, with mini-lever control some of its functionality can be controlled electronically rather than solely mechanically," said MIT Professor Seth Teller, who headed the project.

The modified vehicle wirelessly exports video from its own point of view, so the human supervisor, even if hundreds of miles away, can see whatever is nearby (provided there is network connectivity between the lift truck and supervisor's tablet).

In September 2009, for example, the team demonstrated the lift truck operating autonomously at MIT, in Cambridge, Mass., while under the supervision of an operator in Washington D.C.… Read more

Apple is set to become the world's second largest semiconductor buyer in 2011, another sign of the shift in the balance of power in the chip world.

Driven by the success of the iPad and iPhone, Apple is expected to pass Samsung as the world's No. 2 chip buyer in 2011, second only to Hewlett-Packard, according to market researcher iSuppli.

The firm is projecting that Apple's semiconductor spending in 2011 will hit $16.2 billion, surpassing Samsung Electronics, which is forecast to be at about $13.9 billion. HP will stay in the No. 1 position with $… Read more

Sales of Windows-Intel laptops will take a hit because of iPad and tablet growth, according to research notes released by Barclays Capital.

Sales of the iPad and similar tablets will jump next year, with some of that heady growth coming at the expense of Netbooks and low-end notebooks, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, citing a series of research notes sent out by Barclays Capital.

Tablet sales are forecast to reach at least 15 million units this year, jumping to 28 million in 2011, Barclays said. "We believe the initial phase of the tablet surge will cannibalize a portion … Read more

IBM, Texas Instruments, Samsung, ARM, and others have formed a company to streamline development of products, such as tablets, on ARM processors.

Typically, companies wanting to develop for ARM processors--one of the most prolific chip designs in the world--need to wade through a morass of different operating systems and versions of those operating systems. Those include Google's Android and Chrome OSes, Ubuntu Linux, Palm's WebOS, and MeeGo from Intel and Nokia.

The new company, Linaro, is a non-profit software engineering outfit that intends to simplify the development process and is backed to the tune of "tens of … Read more

Netbooks are expected to get a dual-core Intel Atom processor by June, finally giving this category of tiny laptops all of the goodness that multicore processors offer.

Netbooks from Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Dell, and Toshiba are offered exclusively with single-core Atom processors, which provide good battery life but lack the performance of multicore chips. Though Asus has been offering a dual-core Netbook, this kind of design is rare because it shoehorns a more power-hungry Atom chip built for desktop PCs into a larger laptop-sized casing.

But a dual-core Atom tamed for the tiny Netbook form factor could boost the product segment … Read more

ARM is running one of its Web sites on a cluster of ARM-based chips, part of a handful of experiments to test out the viability of using its chip architecture in servers.

The Cambridge, England-based company does not market designs for server processors, concentrating its efforts instead on chips for the mobile phone market--where it dominates--and on early forays into smartbooks and tablets. However, ARM is working on low-powered server chips in response to customer demand, marketing chief Ian Drew told ZDNet UK.

"We've been doing some testing over the past year or so," Drew said on … Read more

Smartbooks have failed to materialize due to delays in Flash optimization, a lower-than-expected uptake of Linux on Netbooks, and the sudden emergence of tablets, ARM's marketing chief has said.

ARM dominates the mobile phone chip design market and has since 2008 been trying to get into the subnotebook market as well. The plan was to do so through Linux-based, ARM-powered "smartbooks" that would provide an instant-on, longer-life alternative to x86-based Netbooks but, according to ARM's marketing vice president, Ian Drew, events have conspired to stall this plan.

"We thought [smartbooks] would be launched by now, … Read more