Robotics

We've all known people who, let's face it, have a bit of a pong, and not the cool video game kind. The trouble is that no one wants to be the impolite person who lets them know about it. Well, two companies in Japan have designed a pair of robots that do it for you.

The robots, designed by robot manufacturer CrazyLabo in collaboration with the Kitakyushu National College of Technology, are in the shape of a girl's head and a rather lumpy-looking dog, and they can detect the aromas emanating from your breath and your socks, respectively.

The girl, called "Kaori-chan" (which means perfume or fragrance), analyzes a person's breath when they exhale into her open mouth (ew). A commercially available odor sensor quantifies the components on the breath and give it a rating on a scale of one to four: … Read more

Shortly after a large meteor hit Russia in February, injuring about 1,000 people, President Obama's administration announced that the U.S. would work on asteroid tracking technology to avoid potentially more severe Earth collisions. On Monday, top NASA administrator Charles Bolden reiterated this pledge.

Bolden spoke at the Human to Mars Summit in Washington, D.C. on Monday and said that a robotic spacecraft mission currently being planned will "prepare efforts to prevent an asteroid from colliding with devastating force into our planet,"according to U.S. News & World Report.

The government's plan is … Read more

Would you mind if your doctor were treating you through a display on top of a robot? What if that display could save your life?

Well, that could be the case if you find yourself at one of seven U.S. and Mexican hospitals that have deployed the RP-VITA telepresence robot, which obtained FDA approval earlier this year as the first of its kind.

RP-VITA, which stands for Remote Presence Virtual + Independent Telemedicine Assistant, is now on hand at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, five other medical centers in the U.S., and one in Mexico City, developers iRobot and InTouch Health announced today.

"During a stroke, the loss of a few minutes can mean the difference between preserving or losing brain function," the companies quoted Paul Vespa, director of neurocritical care at the Reagan Center, as saying in a release. … Read more

Pinckney Community High School in Pinckney, Mich., is the site of a robotics experiment gone very, very right. Junior Nick Torrance has muscular dystrophy. He uses a wheelchair to get around, but the muscle disease makes it difficult to handle simple activities, like opening up his locker.

The high school already has a top-notch robotics class. Seniors Micah Stuhldreher and Wyatt Smrcka won the 2012 SkillsUSA national robotics competition, so they were a natural choice to tackle the locker door problem with a robotics solution.… Read more

After more than a decade of work, Harvard University researchers have finally gotten the so-called "RoboBee" to take flight.

According to the scientists, the robot -- which is half the size of a paperclip and weighs less than a tenth of gram -- was able to hover for a few moments and then flew on a "preset route through the air."

"This is what I have been trying to do for literally the last 12 years," Robert J. Wood, principal investigator of the National Science Foundation-supported RoboBee project, said in a statement. "It's really only because of this lab's recent breakthroughs in manufacturing, materials, and design that we have even been able to try this. And it just worked, spectacularly well."… Read more

Mimicking the human grasp is no easy feat. Robotic hands tend to be clunky and expensive.

But now, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is showing off a robotic hand that's dexterous enough to pick up keys and tough enough to survive being hit with a baseball bat.

The video below shows a prototype from DARPA's Autonomous Robotic Manipulation project. Instead of trying to reproduce the human hand in robot form, the prototype focuses on function. It has three fingers that are able to pick up small objects such as keys and credit cards, and it can even grasp objects with tweezers. … Read more

By far the coolest thing Canada has in space is Chris Hadfield, commander of the International Space Station. He's all over social and news media with his wacky zero-g demos, guitar playing, and amazing photos of Earth.

Today Hadfield notched another first: unveiling a banknote in space. At a Bank of Canada press conference in Ottawa, the mustachioed colonel appeared via ISS video link. He plucked the bank's latest polymer bill from a bracket on the wall, gave it a few weightless twirls, and pointed to the robots it features.

"I just want to tell you how proud I am to be able to see Canada's achievements in space highlighted on our money," Hadfield told Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney. "To feature Canadarm2 and Dextre for the theme of the $5 note, it really marks Canada's contribution to the International Space Station Program, and especially our longtime area of expertise in robotics." … Read more

We know Boston Dynamics is keen on four-legged robots, even creating a cheetah of its very own. So is the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland; its Cheetah-Cub has been in development at the Biorobotics Laboratory since 2008.

Teaching a quadruped robot to walk can be a tricky business, though. Something called a Central Pattern Generator (CPG) network is used to generate movements according to a repetitive pattern. But no matter how robust the rhythm of the movements is, it can be tough to implement outside of a lab environment, where the ground won't necessarily always be even.

Enter the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). The team there broke down the movements of horses via motion capture into what it calls "kinematic Motion Primitives" (kMP), analyses of the trajectories of limbs and bodies, translated into data that can be fed into a CPG. … Read more

The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots kicked off its protest against self-powered military machines earlier this week.

CNET caught up with the campaign organizers to hear why they want killer 'bots banned -- play the video above to hear their reasoning and to witness the kinds of death-dealing devices the organization is trying to stop.

One thing I wanted to know is why the campaign is so averse to autonomous robots. As Noel Sharkey, expert roboticist and professor, told me, however, this movement is only about putting the brakes on autonomous killing machines. … Read more