A robotic utility vehicle wasn’t a thing until — well, until Clearpath Robotics decided to make it a thing by creating the Grizzly, its most recent robot and its largest yet. Like the previous products in Clearpath’s lineup, the Grizzly is an unmanned vehicle platform for research and development. However, designing an all-terrain vehicle that
Last month, as expected, robot astronaut Kirobo uttered the first words spoken by a robot in outer space. Yesterday, via the PR agency that helped sponsor his journey, we found out what he said (translated from Japanese): “On August 21, 2013, a robot took one small step toward a brighter future for all.” See the
DARPA reported today that it has selected this year’s class for its Young Faculty Award program, several of whom will concentrate of robotics-related research. From a group of 226 applicants, 25 tenure-track researchers were chosen to receive up to $1 million each over three years. Recipients receive two years of funding at $250,000 each year,
The fledgling “drone journalism” programs at the University of Missouri and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln recently received letters from the Federal Aviation Administration advising them that they lack proper authorization and could be subject to legal action. As a result, they will cease flying unmanned aerial vehicles outdoors for newsgathering and research purposes. The universities
Earlier this month, DARPA hosted a “Proposer’s Day” at Johns Hopkins University to share details of its futuristic Hydra program with companies who might be in a position to help make it a reality. The goal of Hydra is to create an unmanned undersea system that can rapidly deploy unmanned aerial and underwater vehicles worldwide. Pretty
GrabCAD, a platform that helps engineers collaborate and quickly share CAD files, recently partnered with RoboSavvy, which hosts an online community for humanoid robot builders, to launch a new humanoid robot design challenge. It’s not exactly DARPA Robotics Challenge in terms of scope — these robots aren’t meant to revolutionize the future of search and
Willow Garage, the robotics research lab responsible for both the open-source robot operating system ROS and the PR2 robot, announced yesterday via its blog and a press release that a majority of its employees are moving over to remote presence company Suitable Technologies. Both companies were founded by Scott Hassan, an early Google developer and
In July, AeroVironment’s Puma AE became one of the first two small unmanned aircraft systems to receive approval from the Federal Aviation Administration for commercial missions. At AUVSI’s Unmanned Systems conference earlier today, the company shared a new milestone, reporting that an in-development solar-powered version of the Puma AE lasted more than nine hours during a
According to a post on its official blog, the next entry in the White House “We the Geeks” series of Google+ Hangouts will be all about robots. Phil Larson, the space and aeronautics policy adviser who posted the blog entry, said that as the Curiosity rover celebrates one year on Mars, the White House wanted
Becoming potentially the cutest space traveler ever (with apologies to Laika, the Soviet space dog), the pint-sized Kirobo robot astronaut was launched from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Tanegashima Space Center early yesterday morning. Kirobo — a combination of “kibo” (hope) and “robot” — began his journey at 4:48 a.m. Japan time aboard the Kounotori
