Recently, researchers at Sweden’s Örebro University released a video showcasing GiraffPlus, a “smart home” system designed to allow the elderly to live independently longer. The system consists of a network of home sensors that monitor residents’ health paired with a mobile telepresence robot, called Giraff, that allows caregivers to check in. The system has been
If robotics has anything close to a Super Bowl, it’s probably the DARPA Robotics Challenge, which launched last year and will conclude in December 2014 with teams competing for a $2 million prize. The goal of the competition is to develop a robot that can provide meaningful assistance in disaster relief efforts. Sticking with the
Research published online this week in the latest edition of Advanced Materials could make possible a generation of miniaturized robots that until now have lacked sufficiently small and powerful batteries to operate. To create the grain-of-sand-sized lithium-ion microbatteries (shown above), researchers 3-D printed interlaced stacks of battery electrodes less than the width of a human hair, according
We recently wrote about the promise of the new Xbox Kinect sensor for robotics applications as well as the trend of using existing technologies to enhance the abilities of a new generation of robots. Researchers from the University of Washington have combined those two ideas with a new gesture-recognition system that uses the wireless signals
Research described in the latest issue of the journal Alcohol highlights the little-known field of “ethorobotics,” or the study of the interaction between biologically inspired robots and live animals. The interaction in this case was between groups of live zebrafish and a biomimetic robot fish designed to mimic certain zebrafish traits. In previous research, the zebrafish showed
The history of The University of Texas at Arlington Research Institute goes back 25 years, but its current name and mission only date back to last summer. That’s when the organization, formerly known as the Automation and Robotics Research Institute, rebranded as “UTARI” and refocused its efforts on bridging the gap between academic research and
Hello and welcome to The Business of Robotics! If you have even a passing interest in robotics, you know the field is exploding, having reached a technological tipping point that is bringing self-driving cars and robot co-workers out of the realm of science fiction and into reality. Just last week, a new $100 million dollar
