Robot Living

Associate Professor Mark Yim from the University of Pennsylvania’s Modular Robotics Lab has created the modular ckBot.

The modular robot is made up of blocks and can reassemble itself if taken apart. The basic idea is if some accident or explosion ocurred, what type of system or robot could put itself back together. In the amazing video below from Wired’s upcoming Nextfest, Associate Professor Yim explains how the ckBot works.

See another very funny video of the robot called yim kick.

Nextfest by Wired starts Friday 9/26 in the Chicago area.

Link via (Nextfest)

Tags: research

Ben Way of dot com 1.0 fame has started a new company called WAR (Weapons Against Robotics).

His current company is called Rainmakers.  What this company does is hard for even Ben to pin down.  He states:

What we do not is easy to sum up; we invent, create and connect.We can do this across a diverse range of technologies and areas of business. It’s not easy to pigeon-hole what we do, but what we do is unique.

His latest venture , WAR, is also a little hard to pin down.  The website does not have much detailed information, but WAR is supposedly developing Weapons Systems, Detection Systems and Robo Virus Systems.

The Weapons Systems will have AAA (Autonomous-Against-Autonomous) and BAA (Biological-Against-Autonomous).

Ben Way also states that,

Although the decision to take human life is currently still taken by another human, before long such decisions will be made … within a robot.

Mr Way and his WAR company see the doom of mankind approaching and envision  the next war being fought robot to robot.  Sounds like a movie I once saw called Terminator……

Link via (The Register)

The iRobot Roomba has now gone all cute with Hello Kitty edition being available on 9/30/08.  Only a limited edition of 500 will be produced at a price of about $810 or 84,500 yen.

The Hello Kitty edition will be available at the iRobot Japan website.

Link via (Dvice)

Tags: japan

The Rovio Spy Robot by WowWee Robotics is on sale at Hammacher Schlemmer for $299.95 and is expected to ship on 9/26.

The Wi-Fi enabled robot can be controlled via the web.  Using high resolution video streamed in MPEG 4 format, you can watch your house over the web.  The robot also a 2 way microphone to enable real time conversations telling the unwanted robbers to get out of your house.

See a video review of the Rovio with Veronica Belmont from this years CES in January here.

Link via (i4news)

Tags: rovio, wowwee

Remote clinics in South Africa are hard to reach due to dirt roads and sometimes heavy rains. This often creates long delays in diagnosing diseases like tuberculosis.

Two UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) have been successfully tested to help with this problem and can carry medical payloads of up to 500 grams.  These former spy drones could carry 2 liters of blood or samples back to a lab from the clinics.  Test results could then be text messaged back to the clinic.

The UAVs can launch in wind speed of up to 45 miles per hour and were developed by Denel Dynamics. Using microelectronic gyroscopes and GPS, the UAVs follow a pre determined route to the nearest lab.  One of the UAVs has been nicknamed “e-Juba”, from the Zulu word for pigeon.

The people testing this are waiting for the OK from the South African Civil Aviation Authority to start testing with real payloads.

Watch one of the UAVs being launched in a video here.

Link via (Gizmodo)

Tags: medical