Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) was awarded a prime contract by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) program phases two through four to design, build and test a new prototype unmanned autonomous surface vessel.
Nov 12th, 2012
Read more
Navy plans to phase out its Sea Mammal Program and retire its pods of dolphins and sea lions that are currently used to help locate - and in some cases destroy - sea mines. Swimming into their place is a new generation of robotic mine hunters.
Nov 8th, 2012
Read more
Max and Ben, two knee-high humanoid robots that can dance to ?Thriller?, play games and emulate Tai Chi, are to be showcased by researchers at the University of Birmingham as part of the ESRC festival of Social Sciences.
Nov 8th, 2012
Read more
LEXI is a new robot at work in the firing tanks of the Lab's High Explosives Applications Facility (HEAF) and the work that's done there for the National Explosives Engineering Sciences Security (NEXESS) Center. The tri-lab program is funded by the Department of Homeland Security to assess threats from explosives and to evaluate countermeasures.
Nov 8th, 2012
Read more
NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) successfully have used an experimental version of interplanetary Internet to control an educational rover from the International Space Station. The experiment used NASA's Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol to transmit messages and demonstrate technology that one day may enable Internet-like communications with space vehicles and support habitats or infrastructure on another planet.
Nov 8th, 2012
Read more
Computer scientists from the University of Bonn have developed a new robot whose source code and design plan is publicly accessible. It is intended to facilitate the entry into research on humanoids, in particular, the TeenSize Class of the RoboCup. The scientists recently introduced the new robot at the IROS Conference (International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) in Portugal.
Oct 30th, 2012
Read more
Cornell researchers have created an autonomous flying robot that is as smart as a bird when it comes to maneuvering around obstacles.
Oct 30th, 2012
Read more
A new study shows that jumping can be much more complicated than it might seem. In research that could extend the range of future rescue and exploration robots, scientists have found that hopping robots could dramatically reduce their power demands by adopting a unique two-part "stutter jump".
Oct 26th, 2012
Read more
Robots have the potential to help older adults with daily activities that can become more challenging with age. But are people willing to use and accept the new technology? A study by the Georgia Institute of Technology indicates the answer is yes, unless the tasks involve personal care or social activities.
Oct 25th, 2012
Read more
The Robot Hall of Fame inducted four robots chosen for the first time by a popular vote ? Aldebaran Robotics' NAO humanoid, iRobot's PackBot bomb disposal robot, Boston Dynamics' four-legged BigDog and WALL-E, the fictional robot of the namesake Pixar movie - during a ceremony tonight at Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh.
Oct 24th, 2012
Read more
Roboticists at Carnegie Mellon University will field two teams in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Robotics Challenge, a competition in which robots will perform complex, physically challenging tasks as they respond to disaster scenarios in human-engineered environments, such as nuclear power plants.
Oct 24th, 2012
Read more
Teaching a robot a new trick is a challenge. You can?t reward it with treats and it doesn?t respond to approval or disappointment in your voice. For researchers in the biological sciences, however, the future training of robots has been made much easier thanks to a new program called "PaR-PaR".
Oct 23rd, 2012
Read more
Scientists from eight countries (Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand and the United States) have created the first detailed 3D map of the underside of sea ice in Antarctica.
Oct 19th, 2012
Read more
Perceive first, act afterwards.The architecture of most of today's robots is underpinned by this control strategy. The eSMCs project has set itself the aim of changing the paradigm and generating more dynamic computer models in which action is not a mere consequence of perception but an integral part of the perception process. It is about improving robot behaviour by means of perception models closer to those of humans.
Oct 18th, 2012
Read more
A research team from the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) and the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) have been awarded a new $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to continue developing a small robot that could one day be a huge aid to neurosurgeons in removing difficult-to-reach brain tumors.
Oct 16th, 2012
Read more
On the horizon: A new generation of robots made of soft materials and capable of performing tasks too complex for conventional robots.
Oct 16th, 2012
Read more
A research team led by Professor Mike Stilman at the Georgia Institute of Technology hopes to change that by giving robots the ability to use objects in their environments to accomplish high-level tasks. The team recently received a three-year, $900,000 grant from the Office of Naval Research to work on this project.
Oct 9th, 2012
Read more
Scientists at the Universities of Sheffield and Sussex are embarking on an ambitious project to produce the first accurate computer models of a honey bee brain in a bid to advance our understanding of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and how animals think.
Sep 27th, 2012
Read more