Brains, Bots and Bodies

If iRobot is a bellwether for the future of personal robotics, then the market is not just hype.  iRobot’s second quarter revenue increased 43% over the same time last year with profits totaling $16.5M, or about 24% of Q2’s $67.2M revenue.
“In the second quarter we achieved our 16th consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue growth despite [...]

Chetan Kapoor is a roboticist at The University of Texas and CEO of Agile Planet.  We spoke about how his firm’s control software might change the world in the years ahead, what is driving robotics growth, and why business should take note.

SciVestor sat down with Matt Mason, Director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He discusses how the Institute might change the world, why Moore’s Law is important to roboticists, and why business should keep an eye on CMU.

SciVestor Executive Director Jonas Lamis narrates the Autonomous Vehicle Roadmap that was presented at RoboBusiness 2008. This presentation is based in part on Robot Central’s observations, research, and opinions of emergent technologies from the DARPA Grand Challenge series of competitions. It highlights progress and challenges in the technologies necessary to facilitate civilian [...]

The SynTactic Analysis using Reversible Transformations (”START”) system is a super information-finding technology that was developed by Boris Katz and his associates of the InfoLab Group at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It’s a system that’s been running since 1993–long before Google came along.
The system has two syntactic modules: One for [...]

New free research presentation available from SciVestor. You can download it here.
This presentation is being presented at RoboBusiness 2008. It highlights progress and challenges in the technologies necessary to facilitate civilian autonomous vehicles. We discuss a plausible technology driven autonomous vehicle roadmap from 2010 - 2030. The presentation highlights several emerging technology vendors [...]

While iRobot has been busy designing robots for cleaning your gutters, a team at Chonnam National University in Korea has been busy designing another robotic pipe cleaner. In this case, the pipes are human arteries.
News of this robot was recently covered in The Telegraph:

A microscopic robot small enough to travel [...]

Eight universities have been granted a collective $2.5 million Partnerships for International Research and Education grant from the National Science Foundation. Five U.S. universities and three Korean universities make up the partnership. The grant is designed to be consumed over five years. The universities that make up the partnership are:

Bryn Mawr
Drexel University
University of Pennsylvania
Virginia Tech
Swarthmore [...]

Carnegie Mellon’s Field Robotics Center and Robotics Institute is one to demonstrate its competitive nature and technical prowess.

In 2004 they traveled the farthest in the premiere DARPA Grand Challenge.
Their robots placed second and third in the 2005 run.
They’re trying it again this October at the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge.
Now, the X Prize foundation has thrown [...]

My first robot was an MC68HC11-based RugWarrior Pro I named “Beto.” When I opened the box he came in, I found a couple of motors, tires, a small board, tons of little things to solder, and a few other bits and pieces of robo-guts. Over the next week or so, my kids [...]