Robotics Trends

Korea Puts $750M in Robotics, Aims to Lead Market by 2018 The government of South Korea has promised to invest 1 trillion Won (about $750 million U.S. dollars) in the country’s robotics industry in an attempt to accelerate its growth. The goal is to help the global robotics market grow to more than $30 billion by 2013 and to help Korean companies take as much as 10 percent of that market, according to Huh Kyung, Director General for Emerging Industry in the government’s Ministry of Knowledge Economy, which is responsible for regulating and overseeing high-tech industries in South Korea. Robotics is one of the fastest-growing of Korea’s highly successful electronics and high-tech manufacturing sectors and will be one of the drivers of the country’s growth during the next five years, Korean officials said during the announcement. The… View this post
Filed in: Service Robotics • Feature • Latest News • Editor's Pick
Tagged: Service robotics, Financing, Korea, Economy, Government support

Honda Interface Lets Human Direct Asimo Robot By Thought Alone Honda has combined two impressive but currently impractical technologies together to allow a human to control its Asimo robot simply by thinking about it. The Brain Machine Interface (BMI) uses a combination of electrical and heat scanners to identify activity in the brain, and sophisticated pattern-identification software to match that activity with specific patterns of thought it can translate into simple commands. As a demonstrator for the interface, one version of Honda’s humanoid Asimo robot was configured to respond to control signals it receives from the BMI setup using a wireless data connection. This BMI is a second for Honda which developed one in 2006 that was based on Functional Magnetic Resistance Imaging (fMRI), which creates images of the brain by monitoring changes in a magnetic… View this post
Filed in: Academics and Research • Latest News • Editor's Pick • RT News • Robotics Features
Tagged: Honda, Asimo

EU Commissions Swarm of Robot Fish to Sniff Out Pollution in Ports Researchers in Southern England have won part of a European Union contract with a sophisticated, autonomous, marine-locomotive pollution detector that looks astonishingly like a fish. The 2.5 million-pound ($3.6 million) contract was awarded by the EU’s 7th Framework Programme for SHOAL a project whose name looks like an acronym but isn’t, whose goal is to use robot fish to sniff out and report pollution in Europe’s harbors and rivers. EU countries currently spend about $350 million per year on detection of pollution in its ports, but often either overlooks new sources of pollution, or identifies them too late – after a ship has left port, for example. The idea behind the fish swarm is to use “hybrid particle swarm/ant colony optimization techniques,” according to the EU’s… View this post
Filed in: Robotics Trends Feature • Editor's Pick • RT News • Robotics Features
Tagged: Autonomy, Fish, Essex university

Army Buys 27 ROVs for Underwater Inspections SeaBotix Inc.  has landed a $1.9 million contract by the U.S. Army’s Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM) for the purchase of 27 of the company’s LBV150SE-5 deep-water remote-operated vehicles. The units are designed to be easy to use, remote-controlled underwater explorers, specially designed in models suited for differing depths and levels of difficulty, to examine underwater facilities such as ship’s hulls, pipelines, the footings and supports of oil rigs and other objects that are subject to decay, but difficult to examine. The LBV (Little Benthic Vehicle) is a five-thruster unit with cameras to let the operator examine a target, and a series of attachments that can increase the level of detail or analysis. With the right module, the units can add sonar, laser-based measurements, estimations of… View this post
Filed in: Security & Defense Robotics • Latest News • Editor's Pick • RT News
Tagged: Army, Remote operated vehicle

Carnegie Mellon System Allows Any Digital Camera To Produce Interactive, Multibillion-Pixel Panorama Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with scientists at NASA’s Ames Research Center, have built a low-cost robotic device that enables any digital camera to produce breathtaking gigapixel (billions of pixels) panoramas, called GigaPans. The technology gives people a new way to make and share images of their environment. It is being used by students to document their communities and by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to make Civil War sites accessible on the Web. To promote further sharing of this imagery, Carnegie Mellon has launched a public Web site, http://www.gigapan.org, where people can upload and interactively explore panoramic images of any format. In cooperation with Google, researchers also have created a GigaPan layer on Google Earth. Anyone using Google Earth can now fly into these… View this post
Filed in: Academics and Research • Latest News • Editor's Pick

UAlbany to Use Robots to Study Computer Science Education $330k grant from National Science Foundation grant partners researchers from UAlbany, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Schenectady County Community College, Union College and Schenectady Museum & Suits-Bueche Planetarium The University at Albany’s Institute for Informatics, Logics and Security Studies (ILS) has received $326,752 to utilize social robotics as a mechanism to deliver a revitalized computer science education. The program will bring together researchers from UAlbany’s ILS, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Schenectady County Community College, Union College and the Schenectady Museum & Suits-Bueche Planetarium. Students will utilize robots as a platform to learn key computer science concepts, programming, and the interplay between hardware and software. “Robotics has a widespread base of appeal to students, academics and the general public alike,” said Nick Webb, principal investigator and senior research scientist at… View this post
Filed in: Robotics Trends Feature • Editor's Pick

Kiva Expands Professional Services to Support Growing Customer Base Kiva Systems has announced the expansion of the company’s professional services activities with the addition of two industry veterans to work with the growing number of companies adopting Kiva’s Mobile Fulfillment technology. Mark Mastandrea, vice president of customer experience, joins Kiva to lead the system design and customer support functions, while JD Harris, vice president of professional services, will lead the integration and implementation of Kiva solutions. The Kiva Mobile Fulfillment System offers the first true breakthrough in material handling in decades, using hundreds of mobile robots to deliver inventory to pickers. This approach provides dramatic ROI and flexibility around fulfillment operations. Mark Mastandrea will help Kiva customers take advantage of this flexibility by leading the design of unique and effective solutions from the full Kiva… View this post
Filed in: Academics and Research • Latest News • Editor's Pick

Innova Completes Sale of Altronics Service’s Assets Innova Robotics & Automation, Inc. (OTCBB: INRA) today announced the sale of the assets of its subsidiary, Altronics Service, Inc. The major terms of the transaction included the receipt of $100,000 in the form of a promissory note payable within 35 days secured by the assets of the buyer, the buyer’s assumption of liabilities totaling $365,000, the forgiveness of a promissory note for $100,000 payable by Innova to the buyer, and the assignment to Innova of 250,000 shares of the Company’s restricted Common Stock for cancellation. “The sale of Altronics’ assets represents a significant milestone for Innova in its positioning as a software and software professional services business,” said Gene Gartlan, CEO of Innova Robotics & Automation. “We recently announced our decision to exit the machine… View this post
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CCAT San Diego Provides Awards In conjunction with the Department of Defense (DoD) Joint Robotics Program at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center, San Diego (SSC San Diego), the CCAT program conducted a nationwide solicitation for proven robotic payload technologies that could be used to bolster the effectiveness of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) currently in use by the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq. The six companies awarded funding and business services are: AETC, San Diego, CA, was granted a $75,000 product development award, a market study and commercialization planning assistance for their acoustic array technology that improves situational awareness of UGVs. This technology utilizes both sound and ultrasound to detect and precisely locate many activities that are otherwise undetectable by the war fighter. A $75,000 product development grant, a… View this post
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NovAtel Inc. Technology is OnBoard Neural Robotics’ Autonomous Mini-Helicopter NovAtel Inc. (NASDAQ: NGPS), a precise positioning technology company, announced that its GPS engine is onboard Neural Robotics Inc.’s (NRI) AutoCopter™ Express Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) - a fully autonomous and electric-powered mini-helicopter that can be used as an aerial platform in the sky for applications including aerial photography, surveillance, pipeline and utility line inspection, convoy escort, and mine detection. The key technology in the AutoCopter is NRI’s patented neural network-based flight control system. The algorithms in this system provide the “intelligence” to allow operators, without any piloting experience, to maneuver the helicopter (via joysticks on the transmitter) to takeoff and land, fly to a point and hover, etc. The system can also be flown in a fully autonomous mode (automatic takeoff, pre-programmed flight path, and… View this post
Filed in: Robotics Trends Feature • Editor's Pick