Robotics

Norovirus is a particularly nasty virus that causes severe gastrointestinal upset. It's famous for turning cruises into nightmares. It's a tough little number that spreads easily and is hard to kill. To study it, you can't just ask a bunch of sick people to pop down to the lab and vomit on demand. That's where a robot nicknamed Vomiting Larry comes in.

Larry is a one-robot upchucking machine in residence at the Health & Safety Laboratory in Buxton, U.K. He's an anatomically correct model and his favorite hobby is barfing for science. He helps scientists determine how far the norovirus can spread. … Read more

Here's a robotics challenge for you: create an advanced humanoid robot in only nine months.

That's what engineers at the University of Zurich's Artificial Intelligence Lab are trying to do with Roboy, a kid-style bot that's designed to help people in everyday environments.

Researchers around the world are trying to create useful humanoids. One interesting aspect of Roboy is its tendon-driven locomotion system.

Like Japan's Kenshiro humanoid, Roboy relies on artificial muscles to move; in the future, it will be covered with a soft skin. … Read more

Jan Scheuermann can't use her limbs to feed herself, but she's pretty good at grabbing a chocolate bar with her robot arm.

She's become the first to demonstrate that people with a long history of quadriplegia can successfully manipulate a mind-controlled robot arm with seven axes of movement. Earlier experiments had shown that robot arms work with brain implants.

Scheuerman was struck by spinocerebellar degeneration in 1996. A study on the brain-computer interface (BCI) linking Scheuermann to her prosthetic was published online in this month's issue of medical journal The Lancet.

Training on the BCI allowed her to move an arm and manipulate objects for the first time in nine years, surprising researchers.

It took her less than a year to be able to seize a chocolate bar with the arm, after which she declared, "One small nibble for a woman, one giant bite for BCI." Check it out in the video below. … Read more

Is a robot with muscles and bones any more freaky than one with servomotors?

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have been building a humanoid robot called Kenshiro that moves around with muscles that work with small pulleys.

Initially developed as a scrawny kid-bot in 2001, Kenshiro has been packing on muscle mass. With a total of 70 degrees of freedom, or axes of motion, it now has 160 muscles, with 22 in its neck, 12 in its shoulders, 76 in its abdomen, and 50 in its legs.

But it's still designed to mimic the body of a 12-year-old Japanese male, standing 5 feet and 2 inches and weighing 110 pounds. It also has a human-like ribcage, pelvis, and spine made of aluminum. … Read more

Call it too little, too late.

Mitsubishi is the latest Japanese conglomerate to show off a new robot to work at the devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, following Toshiba's flubbed demo of a quadruped walker.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI), Japan's largest defense contractor, yesterday unveiled the Maintenance Equipment Integrated System of Telecontrol Robot (Meister), a two-armed unit that rolls around on four tracks.

The remote-controlled bot can wield a variety of tools such as cutters and drills, clear obstacles, and pierce through concrete to check radiation levels, according to MHI.

Just like human arms, its robotic appendages can move along seven axes. Check it out cutting a pipe in the video below. … Read more

PARIS -- LeWeb's focus this year on "the Internet of things" this year brought Net-enabled door locks, houseplant monitors, and footstep loggers to the conference stage. But the gadget that caught the most attention was a remote-controlled quadcopter.

Quadcopters are all the rage these days, popularized best by the Parrot AR.Drone. Here at LeWeb, startup Team BlackSheep showed its take on the tech with a model that's remotely piloted by an operator who sees what's going on from a camera mounted on the drone itself.

Raphael Pirker, founder of the company, piloted a TBS … Read more

We've seen transforming robots before, and I'm not talking about anything related to Hasbro.

Researchers from MIT are among many engineers and tinkerers trying to design robots that perform different functions by changing their shape or appearance.

Japan-based Brave Robotics has designed a 1/12-scale RC car that can transform into a humanoid robot. It can shuffle around, grab footage with its Wi-Fi camera, and even fire little missiles from its arms. … Read more

PARIS -- For telecommuters who just aren't happy with Skype videoconferences or Google+ hangouts, why not try a telepresence robot?

David Cann, co-founder and chief executive of Double Robotics, showed off such a beast today here at the LeWeb show. The $2,000 design looks, in Cann's words, like an iPad on a Segway.

The robot, called Double, is basically a mobile videoconferencing device. On the bottom is a pair of wheels and a motor; in the middle a thin stalk; and on the top a bracket with an iPad. The operator can control the robot remotely, steering … Read more

You gotta hand it to the marketers who come up with robot acronyms. Can it get any better than Extreme Access System for Entry (EASE)?

Sounds innocuous enough, right? Until this little critter tries to float into your room to spy on you. It's one of two bots unveiled by CyPhy Works, headed by iRobot co-founder Helen Greiner.

EASE and PARC (that's Persistent Aerial Reconnaissance & Communication), a communications relay, are compact flying machines that can fly between 3 feet and 1,000 feet while remaining tethered to their human controllers via microfilaments. … Read more