This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Suspicious eyes — In the year 2001, US president George W. Bush foreshadowed a hope that decades later would pervade the robotics industry. Bush stood next to Russian president Vladimir Putin at a press conference in Slovenia […]
An old song may have a new answer. The song is Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” The answer, maybe, is suggested by the new study: “Dandelion-Picking Legged Robot,” Sandilya Sai Garimella and Shai Revzen, arXiv:2112.05383, 2021. (Thanks to Mason Porter for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at the University of […]
The ever-expanding list of professions which might soon be replaced by hi-tech. solutions is still growing strong. Sony Interactive Entertainments Inc. (Tokyo) has just been granted a US patent for its Robot As Personal Trainer Embodiments of the present invention disclose methods and systems that are used to assist a user to perform an activity, […]
Peace has yet to be attained between robotics, lawn care specialists, and hedgehogs. This study wades into the vexatious arena: “Wildlife Conservation at a Garden Level: The Effect of Robotic Lawn Mowers on European Hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus),” Sophie Lund Rasmussen, Ane Elise Schrøder, Ronja Mathiesen, Jeppe Lund Nielsen, Cino Pertoldi, and David W. Macdonald, Animals, […]
Humanoid robots are often experienced as unnerving, a psychological phenomenon called the “uncanny valley.” The Uncanny Valley is quite a problem for ‘humanoid’ robot designers – who currently struggle to make their robots 100% convincing. A newly proposed solution involves ‘dehumanizing’ ‘humanoid’ robots. By, for example, removing the robot’s face to expose bare electronic circuit […]
Ig Nobel Prize winner Scott Carver, at the University of Tasmania, and colleagues demonstrate and explain the wombot—their wombat-sized robot for wombat research—in action, in this ABC News report: The 2019 Ig Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to Patricia Yang, Alexander Lee, Miles Chan, Alynn Martin, Ashley Edwards, Scott Carver, and David Hu, for […]
Not yet, anyway. This video took a lot of work: The makers talk (in an IEEE Spectrum interview) about how they went about making it: How Boston Dynamics Taught Its Robots to Dance Aaron Saunders, Boston Dynamics’ VP of Engineering, tells us where Atlas got its moves from …Strictly speaking, the stuff going on in […]
Questions arise in and about the study “Questioning the Effect of a Robotic Cat in the Treatment of Terminal Restlessness,” by Jun Kako, Kohei Kajiwara, Masamitsu Kobayashi, Yasufumi Oosono, and Hiroko Noto, Journal of Palliative Medicine, vol. 23, no. 2, 2020, p. 158. The authors, at Hiroshima University and Kyushu University, Japan, explain: First, it […]
Over several million years, Venus Flytraps have been triggered to snap shut by flies. A new research project has shown they can also be triggered by a mouse – viz. a computer mouse [As shown in the video above]. The many and varied possibilities of creating ‘Cyborg Plants’ has been investigated by Harpreet Sareen of […]
The ever expanding list of professional activities that are in imminent danger of replacement by AI and/or robots has a new addition – Topiarists. A topiary-bot is currently under test at Wageningen University, The Netherlands, as part of the the university’s TrimBot2020 project. Which is seeking to “advance the robotics and computer vision technology needed […]