Robots.net

Roomba Pac-Man
The Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles (RECUV) at the University of Colorado at Boulder has been developing software that helps robots form ad-hoc networks and distribute cooperative control of their operations. Some of the individuals at RECUV decided to create a cool ...

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Introduction to Swarm Intelligence
Sabu M. Thampi has posted a very short introduction to Swarm Intelligence (PDF format). In his paper, he describes the biological origins of swarm intelligence in flocks of birds, schools of fish, and swarms of bees. He goes on to describe the importance of swarm intelligence to robotics...

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Robots: Active Touch
As reported in some previous posts, whiskers are a great sensing device for autonomous robots, because they allow to detect and categorize objects and surface textures while only lightly touching them. The latest episode of the Robots podcast takes a closer look at using Active Touc...

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TRESSA: NASA's Rock Climbing Robot Project
NASA has published a new Tech Brief on TRESSA, the Three-Robot System for Traversing Steep Slopes (TB login needed to view full brief). TRESSA is a group of three autonomous robots that work together to climb steep slopes. And by steep we mean up to 90 degree slope angles. Two of the robo...

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Piano-based Voice Synthesizer
Ed Okerson writes, "at a DPRG club meeting a few months ago, some of the members were discussing building robotic musical instruments. Well, here is a very interesting application for a mechanically actuated piano." Ed's talking about Austrian composer Peter Ablinger's mechanically act...

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Security Risks of Household Robots
Tamara Denning and other researchers at the University of Washington have released a paper on the privacy and security risks of household robots, titled "A Spotlight on Security and Privacy Risks with Future Household Robots: Attacks and Lessons" (PDF format). Under the assumption that futu...

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NASA Needs Your Help with LCROSS Impact
On Friday, October 9 at 4:30am (11:30 UTC), NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) impactor will hit the Moon, followed four minutes later by the impact of the LCROSS robotic mothership, which will fly through the 10km high debris plume collecting data about th...

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CMU Machine Learning Lab G-20 Protest
The G-20 protests have generated a lot of geeky news. In additional to the usual tear gas grenades and stun grenades, this year's G-20 protest marked the first public use by the government of a 150 DB sound cannon against civilian protesters. The result was a call for a DIY HERF gun tha...

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Phidgets GNU/Linux ARM Robot Controller
The LinuxDevices blog reported yesterday on a new ARM controller from Phidgets that runs GNU/Linux and is designed with robot applications in mind. Called Phidget SBC, the board is based on the Samsung S3C2410 ARM processor, which uses the ARM 920T core running at 266MHz. You get 64MB of...

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Robots: Emerging Communication
The latest episode of the Robots podcast takes a closer look at the emergence of communication - and how it can be studied using robots. The first part features an interview with Sara Mitri, an interdisciplinary researcher at Switzerland's EPFL and the University of Lausanne, Swit...

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Alien Globes of Doom Invade Detroit MOCAD
This seems to be a week of robot art and music. Alien Globes of Doom, created by Detroit electro-mechanical art collective, Apetechnology, impressed visitors to Strange Beautiful Music III, the third annual New Music Detroit festival at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). The...

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Random Robot Roundup
The inbox is still overflowing with robots news, so here's another random news dump, this time entirely from the backlog of the Swirling Brain. We've got a Science Daily story on the possibility of replicating the human brain in some form of machine within 10 years; an engadget story on plas...

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