06/21/12 — Researchers at USC's Viterbi School of Engineering have created a robotic fingertip that is more sensitive to the touch than an actual human fingertip, an achievement which could greatly aid prostheses and advance artificial intelligence. Called BioTac, the tiny machine is a "new type of tactile sensor built to mimic the human fingertip, using a newly designed algorithm to make decisions about how to explore the outside world by imitating human strategies." The sensor was only rarely confused by pairs of similar textures, between which humans could not differentiate at all. USC Professor of Biomedical Engineering Gerald Loeb, who is…

05/02/12 — Keith Wagstaff for TechLand—The anthropomimetic robot synthetic human parts like bones, muscles and tendons. Its name is ECCEROBOT (short for Embodied Cognition in a Compliantly Engineered Robot) and it’s being developed by Owen Holland at the University of Sussex. The idea of biomimetic robots is not new — scientists have been building robots based on animals like fish and birds for a while now. The audacity of this project is try to mimic the internal structures of an animal — in this case, us — all in pursuit of an even more audacious and absurd goal: artificial intelligence. As human…