DARPA (the same, that brought us the Internet after all) financed a research project of AeroVironment. They build some sort of new helicopter, that flies like a hummingbird. Recently it flies just for several seconds, but should show the potential of a new kind of technologies. Applications should be something like "spy-drones", that are small, lightweight and have dynamic abilities, for example to fly "10 meters per second" and that can "withstand 2.5-meter-per-second wind gusts".
Darpe just handed AeroVironment another new 2.1 million dollars to build a new, improved version of the "hummingbot". Robotic insects and birds are going to come. I personally find this Butterfly robots from Japan a little more charming.
Small scale industrial manufacturing - this is a hot topic. The guys who are already doing fabbing (printing of objects) are into lots of good research, both at an "at home" level, as well as at academia, like the MIT researching this area. This are thoughts floating in my mind right at the moment.
And than THIS came up:
The M-1iA from FANUC robotics is a small-scale assembly robot, with a weight of only 17 kg. It is therefore perfect for doing automated assembly at home, or on mobile situations like exhibitions, travel or even more futuristic scenes.
Self-assembly of robots for example is just one interesting field to explore or robotic mobility concepts. Okay people - time to move on and explore new plateaus, instead of doing one robot after another that does anything.
At Wired/Geekdad I found an extensive list of "robot-twitterers". 52 of them. A long list - lots of new things to discover. Hm, we are not listed there. Maybe this is the case, because we don't twitter? Hm.. I occasionally twitter about robot-related things at my personal twitter-account: @020200.
On a very unique design wirls LMB-user Arek ArunioSmo. Neat I just see, that he comes form Duisburg, not that far away. No wonder, that this type of stair-style just released some enjoyable childhood memories.
"ArunioSmo" uses a very unique design with a wooden arc for The Climber. It uses its wheels to get grip and climb the stairs. The "organic" feel of the robots gives a worm feeling like a living creature. Very well done! If you are reading this Arek, feel free to throw in a comment!
One of the most influential indie-labs in the world turned three today (or yesterday, depends on timezone). They made some groundbreaking discoveries and inventions, like the Candy Fab or the Meggy Jr RGB. But by far the most distributed work from them is the Bristlebot. Hell, even we have a special bristlebot-tag on this blog for this cheap and easy to to at home tiny robots. People all over the world are tinkering with them.
How to make a bristlebot
For the celebration of the three, they made a special page, listing the most important works they made in this time.
Now this is totally awesome. Mech Warfare is a new competition at the RoboGames. Using mechanical systems (so called robots) with cameras, that can be controlled remotely with a joystick. The concept is called telepresence. I mostly enjoy, that this is a marriage of games and robots.
The aim of the competition is according to the webseite:
Our goal is to create a real-life robotic combat competition that mirrors the scenarios found in Sci-Fi universes such as Battletech, Warhammer 40k and Armored Core.
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