Robotics Alley, the Minnesota-based robotics conference and expo founded in 2011 by ReconRobotics and the Minnesota High Tech Association, has been sold. The new owner is The Event Group, Incorporated, a Minnesota-based event management and marketing firm. The event was created to spur public-private partnerships and development within Minnesota’s robotics industry and the surrounding region.
For years, we’ve been promised by books, television, movies (and more recently, actual researchers) that the future holds a slew of domestic robot helpers that will save us from household chores. But if you actually had such a robot, could you trust it? A new 3 1/2-year, £1.2-million project in the United Kingdom aims to
A team from MIT recently demonstrated its ability to swap autonomy software into autonomous underwater vehicles on the fly, a skill the group says is needed to advance AUV applications and enable rapid mission configuration changes in the field. The demonstration was conducted by MIT’s Laboratory of Autonomous Marine Sensing Systems to showcase the MOOS-IvP
As robots come out from behind their cages to work with humans on production floors and in warehouses and — eventually — inside our homes, we need to be certain we can prevent broken bones caused by machines that don’t know their own strength. Intelligent software and sensors already make it possible for people to
Robotics and autonomous systems are among three key technologies earmarked by the United Kingdom’s Chancellor of the Exchequer to receive an £85 million investment for capital equipment. The investment comes as part of the government’s £600 million “eight great technologies” initiative, which was outlined earlier this year. Speaking earlier this week at the Global Intelligent
A DARPA-funded team led by Honeywell International Inc. has developed a novel optical fiber design using a hollow, air-filled cores that researchers say could lead to a new generation of high-power sensors. Hollow-core fiber has previously been available from overseas suppliers, but DARPA says its ongoing Compact Ultra-Stable Gyro for Absolute Reference (COUGAR) program has
Last week, DARPA and Boston Dynamics unveiled Atlas, the humanoid robot that seven lucky teams won the right to program for the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials in December. They will be competing against a group of teams that created their own search-and-rescue robots, which remain shrouded in considerably more mystery. As we near the competition,
We’re living in an era where low-cost computers, open-source software and crowdfunding have helped democratize the creation and production of robots. Now a new company that comes out of that ethos — its product runs off Arduino boards, it promotes open-source ideology and its origins were on Kickstarter — is trying to do the same for
In the first stage of the DARPA Robotics Challenge, which we reported on here, contestants were asked to demonstrate that they could navigate a virtual robot through a variety of simulated challenges. The winners received the honor of moving to the next round with a real robot provided by DARPA to compete for a spot
When Congress passed the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, it set the clock ticking toward the day when unmanned aircraft systems must be integrated into the national airspace. The target is Sept. 30, 2015, now just a little more than two years away. That fast-approaching deadline has created a new intensity in discussions
