New technology could both (1) improve a now-awkward medical procedure and (2) inspire a more focused re-make of a beloved science fiction movie. The Boston Globe reports: To see inside the digestive system, doctors have to thread a scope up or down – potentially doing damage along the way – or get their patients to […]
Tag: robot
Anticipating the robotic ostrich
Evan Ackerman writes in the IEEE Spectrum Automation blog: I’ll bet you didn’t know that DARPA was even interested in a robotic ostrich, did you? I sure as heck didn’t. But I suppose it shouldn’t be that surprising, since DARPA seems to want robotic versions of just about anything that’s capable of extreme levels of performance, and an ostrich apparently […]
Turingesque test: Is this narrator a human being?
Today’s Know-Your-Technology Challenge question: Is the narrator of this video a human being, or a simulation? BY THE WAY: The video is about an invention called iFling, developed at the University of California, San Diego. Evan Ackerman’s (IEEE Spectrum) Automation blog calls it a self-balancing robot good at “picking up ping-pong balls and chucking them at […]
A many-armed-god sort of robot
There are many ways to describe what happens in this video. Karaman and Frazzoli and friends, the scientists and engineers behind it, choose one of the less poetical ways: “The RRT* algorithm is used together with the Ball Trees algorithm and a memoization technique for asymptotically-optimal path planning in high-dimensional configuration spaces for manipulation purposes.” They also […]