DARPA is developing a program called “Biometrics-at-a-distance” which will enable sensors to pick up a heartbeat using electrocardiography. It will be able to track up to 10 humans at once, at a distance of over 10 meters, even through walls, doors, floors, or concrete. This will be an incredibly useful tool for soldiers in urban [...]
Posted in DARPA, defense, featured, future, government, military / law enforcement, research 
Tags: biometrics, DARPA, heartbeat, sensors 
No Comments »In this experiment, a robot uses electrodes to control a blindfolded person’s arm and hand, guiding the arm so that they move the ball into position and drop the ball when it is over the net. This process of controlling the muscles via electrodes is called functional electrical stimulation (FES) and has many potential applications [...]
If the Worm-Bot can’t slither its way to you in time when you are trapped in a cave-in, perhaps this robot spider could get to you more quickly. (And who doesn’t want to see something like that coming at them when they are already scared and confused?) This spider body prototype is created using a [...]
Posted in biomimetic, domestic, featured, research Tags: 3d printing, biomimetic, Fraunhofer, rescue, robot, sls, spider No Comments »
“Bigger is certainly not better when it comes to the world’s first single-molecule electric engine, which measures in at one nanometer wide — for perspective, that lash hanging from your left eye is around 60,000 times larger.” [engadget]
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Posted in AI, autonomous, defense, domestic, education, ethics, featured, future, research, roboticists Tags: Articlect, Cosmist, singularity, Terrans No Comments »
Skynet still has a bit more work ahead of it before the walking, shooting cyborgs from James Cameron’s Terminator movies become reality. “You might not know this, but one of my responsibilities as commander-in-chief is to keep an eye on robots,” said President Obama in a speech at Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center [...]
This robot arm doesn’t have much to do with armed robots.. but the failed attempts are pretty funny. And it does show that robots can be taught to do pretty much anything people want to teach them to do. So far this year, robots have been learning to play soccer, fetch beers, iron clothes, fold [...]
Posted in domestic, research, roboticists, study, testing, video Tags: pancakes, robot No Comments »Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands are working on a spoken language for robots, built with both human brains and robot simplicity in mind. ROILA, or Robot Interaction Language, is intended to be easy for people to learn and easy for robots to understand. Some phrases and words in ROILA: Pito loki [...]
Interesting and informative article about robots teaching humans. South Korea is employing hundreds of robots as teacher aides and classroom playmates. One concern that will resonate with readers of this website was voiced by Mitchel Resnick, head of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who commented, “I worry that [...]
