A researcher in The Netherlands has developed a smart eye-surgery robot that allows eye surgeons to operate with increased ease and greater precision on the retina and the vitreous humor of the eye. The system also extends the effective period during which ophthalmologists can carry out these intricate procedures....[Read the full article]
fredag 28 oktober 2011
Fast high precision eye-surgery robot developed
A researcher in The Netherlands has developed a smart eye-surgery robot that allows eye surgeons to operate with increased ease and greater precision on the retina and the vitreous humor of the eye. The system also extends the effective period during which ophthalmologists can carry out these intricate procedures....[Read the full article]
fredag 21 oktober 2011
The eyes have it: Computer-inspired creativity
Constraints on creativity imposed by computer-aided design tools are being overcome, thanks to a novel system that incorporates eye-tracking technology....[Read the full article]
onsdag 19 oktober 2011
Unlocking the key to human intelligence
What if machines could think like us — comprehending social cues, visual prompts and spoken words just like a human would? For Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) Professor Patrick Winston, the Ford Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science and leader of the Genesis Group at CSAIL, uncovering the true nature of human intelligence is the next grand challenge.
To solve the puzzle of how humans think, Winston is employing classic engineering methodology to build systems that think and comprehend as people do using computational methods.
Motivated by a desire to advance artificial intelligence and create systems that operate in a manner consistent with high-level human thinking, Winston feels there is a substantial difference be...[Read the full article]
tisdag 18 oktober 2011
Robotic bug gets wings, sheds light on evolution of flight
When engineers outfitted a six-legged robotic bug with wings in an effort to improve its mobility, they unexpectedly shed some light on the evolution of flight. The wings nearly doubled the running speed of the 25-gram robot, but was that good enough for takeoff?...[Read the full article]
Tree-dwelling animals were the first to fly, new research suggests
A six-legged, 25 gram robot has been fitted with flapping wings in order to gain an insight into the evolution of early birds and insects....[Read the full article]
Robotic bug gets wings, sheds light on evolution of flight (w/ video)
(PhysOrg.com) -- A six-legged, 25 gram robot has been fitted with flapping wings in order to gain an insight into the evolution of early birds and insects....[Read the full article]
måndag 17 oktober 2011
A team for an emergency
Earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes -- natural disasters always catch us by surprise, no matter how many early warning systems are in place. This makes it all the more important for rescue teams to get a quick overview of the situation at hand. In SENEKA, a Markets Beyond Tomorrow project, Fraunhofer researchers are working to network the various robots and sensor systems first responders use so that they can react more quickly and efficiently in the case of an emergency to search for victims and survivors....[Read the full article]
söndag 16 oktober 2011
This Week In Bots: Thinking, Charming, Walking, And Life-Saving Droids
Meka is intended to design a robot that builds emotional links between humans and the machines themselves, and at the recent Intelligent Robots and Systems event, Professor Sentis of the University of Texas showed off Meka's most recent iteration. He's created a system called Self-Organizing Incremental Neural Network, SOINN, which means instead of mutely and un-intelligently following pre-programmed tasks, his Kawada Industrie's robot called Hiro can actually perceive and interpret information about the real world environment around it, and process existing knowledge, to complete an assigned task. For example, by training an inquisitive robot like Hiro to do a number of tasks--with the robot querying for help when it's not sure about something--he thinks it'll ultimately be possible to as...[Read the full article]
Don't parlez-vous? Google enhances Translate app
Google enhances Translate app The inclusion of Siri on the iPhone 4S has brought a lot of attention generally to the topic of voice recognition on mobile devices. Now, Google is updating a feature in its Translate app for Android devices that can handle speech-to-speech translation among 14 languages. In all, Google is adding a dozen languages to English and Spanish, which were the two languages initially featured in the app. In a company blog post, Google explains how it works: You speak into your phone's microphone, and the Translate app will translate what you've said and read it aloud....[Read the full article]
Do Androids Dream of Electric Authors?
By PAGAN KENNEDY Published: October 14, 2011 One day, I stumbled across a book on Amazon called Saltine Cracker. The book was co-edited by someone called Lambert M. These books, or booklike products, lie in wait for the distracted shopper, someone who might think, Oh good, I really need a tome on Spearmans law of diminishing returns, so Ill just go ahead and pay $84. And with one overhasty click on the Place your order button, the shopper can pay a lot of money for a book that turns out to be warmed-over Wikipedia. VDM Publishing puts a notice on the cover of its books, boasting high-quality content by Wikipedia articles!...[Read the full article]
Automation: Leading the way
Australia 's rapidly expanding multi-billion dollar mining technology and services industry is leading the drive for innovations to boost productivity and efficiency. As Australian mining exports increase, mining companies are investing significant resources into the development and implementation of remote automation and unmanned machinery to meet this demand. The isolated geographical locations of many Australian mines, in addition to safety considerations, make remote automation and unmanned machinery an attractive option for mining companies. While traditional automation and robotic technology in the mining industry has comprised standalone autonomous equipment managing a selected process, today it is possible to connect these discrete processes resulting in an integrated, productive m...[Read the full article]
lördag 15 oktober 2011
Ping-pong robots debut in China (w/ video)
(PhysOrg.com) -- Last week some oohs and ahhs were in order as two ping-pong playing robots made their debut at Zhejiang University in China. The two robots played against each other and with humans. True, this was not the first time the world witnessed robots playing table tennis. There was Topio, a robot made by Vietnamese robotics firm, TOSY....[Read the full article]
fredag 14 oktober 2011
Meka's robot head makes eyes at next-wave users (w/ video)
(PhysOrg.com) -- You've seen robots in the form of alpha dogs and insect swarms capable of military deployments but the next wave of robotics also includes a special breed of "sociable" robots for use in medicine, eldercare, and education. These are the robots that demand scientists’ skills toward making robotic parts that can mimic their human counterparts, and be responsive to social cues....[Read the full article]
onsdag 12 oktober 2011
Talk to the virtual hands: Body language of both speaker and listener affects success in virtual reality communication game
New research finds that the lack of gestural information from both speaker and listener limits successful communication in virtual environments....[Read the full article]
Violent games emotionally desensitizing, research suggests
After excessively violent events, shoot 'em up games regularly come under scrutiny. In Norway, several first-person shooter games disappeared from the market for a while after the killings. Does intense fighting on a flat screen display also result in aggressive behavior in real life? Researchers have found brain activity patterns in heavy gamers that differed from those of non-gamers....[Read the full article]
All for one, 'R-one' for all (w/ video)
Robots for everyone. That's James McLurkin's dream, and as the director of a Rice University robotics lab, he's creating an inexpensive and sophisticated robot called the "R-one" to make the dream a reality....[Read the full article]
Robotic telescope network with access via Internet to be built
Internauts will be able to connect to 17 telescopes on four continents to share observation time. A world network of robotic telescopes is to be developed as part of a European citizen science project that has just kicked off in Spain. The network, to which any citizen will be able to connect and share observation time, will offer free open access via the Internet....[Read the full article]
Goal to build more than 30 more KASPARs to help children with autism
Researchers in the UK have a goal to build over 30 more KASPAR robots to help children with autism....[Read the full article]
tisdag 11 oktober 2011
Japanese scientist unveils 'thinking' robot
Robots that learn from experience and can solve novel problems -- just like humans -- sound like science fiction....[Read the full article]
måndag 10 oktober 2011
US Army purchases robotic scouts (w/ video)
(PhysOrg.com) -- By being the first to scout out an unknown building or peek over a wall, a small dumbbell-shaped robot will be taking over some of the riskiest tasks in the US Army. The robot’s maker, ReconRobotics, Inc., recently announced that the US Army has requested to purchase 315 of the Recon Scout XT robot kits and an equal number of SearchStick devices for $4.8 million. The company expects to deliver the products by the end of October....[Read the full article]
Berkeley robot uses tiny, spiny toes to climb cloth
(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists working in robotics know that nature holds the best ideas for making robots that can perform with speed, agility, and efficiency. At University of California, Berkeley, the Biomimetic Millisystems Lab is at the forefront of mimicking nature. Its lab mission is “to harness features of animal manipulation, locomotion, sensing, actuation, mechanics, dynamics, and control strategies," in its work with small lightweight millirobots....[Read the full article]
söndag 9 oktober 2011
Pollen research not to be sniffed at
POLLEN may annoy allergy sufferers in springtime but, viewed under the microscope, a pollen grain is a thing of beauty. The exhibition Pollen Under the Microscope celebrates the purchase of cutting-edge microscope technology to identify pollen grains and speed up our understanding of nature. Some of the smallest images come from the new microscope technology, the Pollen Classifynder system, developed by Massey University in New Zealand. CSIRO and the Atlas of Living Australia purchased the microscope and automated image detection system to rapidly identify pollen - the tiny DNA-carrying grains so vital to agriculture and biodiversity....[Read the full article]
11 Unusual Ways Steve Jobs Made Apple The World's Most Admired Tech Company
The human brain is divided into two hemispheres: left and right. It's faster, mostly gray matter and is optimized to perform linear-sequential processing. That means the left hemisphere is best at processing information in a single-dimension, one sequential item after another. The left hemisphere stores words....[Read the full article]
Vision-guided robot automates vegetation analysis
After two sets of images are captured by the system under different stages of plant growth and illumination conditions, each image is processed using algorithms provided by MATLAB from The MathWorks (Natick, MA, USA). Each RGB image is captured, then converted to a normalized excessive green (NEG) channel, represented by NEG = 2.8 ( g/r + g + b ) ( r/r + g + b ) ( b/r + g + b ) to emphasize the green channel. Before training, these images were pre-processed to measure specific morphological features of the plants within the images. After the plant perimeter, inner area, width, and height of a plant were measured, the features converted to five normalized featuresheight/width, height/perimeter, perimeter/area, width/area, and height/areato minimize the influences of the image size of each...[Read the full article]
Spin-based magnetologic gate to replace silicon chips
The University of California, Riverside has received a $1.85 million National Science Foundation grant to develop a new way of electron-spin-based computing beyond the scope of conventional silicon electronics. For spin-based computing, data is held in the spin state of the electron. This involves developing a new type of building-block device known as a magnetologic gate that will serve as the engine for this technology similar to the role of the transistor in conventional electronics. For the logic operations, electrons move through the graphene and use its spin state to compare the information held in the individual magnetic electrodes....[Read the full article]
Monkeys Control Virtual Limbs With Their Minds
Now, by implanting electrodes into both the motor and the sensory areas of the brain, researchers have created a virtual prosthetic hand that monkeys control using only their minds, and that enables them to feel virtual textures. Using the first set, the monkey could control a virtual monkey arm on a computer screen and sweep the hand over virtual disks with different textures. By giving the monkey rewards when it identified the right texture, the researchers discovered that it took as few as four training sessions for the animal to consistently distinguish the textures from one another, even when the researchers switched the order of the visually identical disks on the screen. Although the monkeys are all adults, the motor and sensory regions of their brains are amazingly plastic, Nicolel...[Read the full article]
iOS 5 Voice Assistant To Be 'World Changing'
One of the big surprises to come from iOS 5's debut at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference back in June was the lack of any news about voice actions or voice controls. Apple purchased a company called Siri in April 2010, and many had assumed that Apple was building Siri's voice action technology into iOS. Speculation that voice controls would be introduced into iOS 5 began to rise again several weeks ago when traces of it were spotted in one of the iOS 5 betas . The other big clue is that Apple has yet to issue a Gold Master for iOS 5, meaning the features of the platform aren't 100% complete and still under development....[Read the full article]
tisdag 4 oktober 2011
People as 'sensors': Twitter messages reveal NFL's big plays and fans
Using millions of Twitter subscribers as living "sensors," engineers have found a way to monitor fans' levels of excitement and to keep track of the action in National Football League games -- without ever switching on a TV. SportSense is a computer program the engineers created to analyze NFL fan tweets in real time....[Read the full article]
The Rise of Artificial Intelligence Personal Assistant
There's a rising number of impressive AI assistants that are beginning to be able to truly help us deal with tasks like managing diaries, booking restaurants or taxis, and even helping us writing our latest blog posts. And some, like Guile 3D Studio and Creative Virtual, are even managing to generate revenue. Guile 3D Studio is a Brazilian company founded in 2001 by Guile Lindroth, a system analyst, artificial intelligence specialist and 3D graphic artist. The result is an amazing AI assistant called Denise....[Read the full article]
Embedded Vision Alliance debuts
Embedded Vision Alliance debuts Founded in May 2011, the Embedded Vision Alliance now has 17 member companies. Founded in May 2011 by BDTI (Berkeley Design Technology Inc.), an independent technology-analysis and engineering-services firm, the Embedded Vision Alliance now has 17 member companies, said Jeff Bier, BDTI president. This will create new markets and high-growth opportunities for suppliers of electronic vision equipment and components, Bier said. Industrial machine-vision suppliers that are currently vertically integrated may want to consider broader-sourced business models and explore opportunities in other vision markets....[Read the full article]
Speech Recognition Tool Comes Up 'Speechless'
Videos The breast-imaging reports, which were reviewed from January 2009 to April 2010, were almost evenly divided into two categories. In one, 307 reports used conventional dictation transcription in which the radiologist dictates the report and a team transcribes and reviews the report. The other 308 reports used automatic speech recognition (ASR) in which the radiologist dictates the report and software immediately transcribes the report onto a computer screen. Dictation was conducted using a handheld speech microphone, the Pro-Plus LFH5276 from Philips Healthcare....[Read the full article]
Computational biomarkers can identify at-risk heart attack victims
Subtle markers of heart damage hidden in plain sight among hours of EKG recordings could help doctors identify which heart attack patients are at high risk of dying soon, researchers from the University of Michigan, MIT, Harvard Medical School, and Brigham and Women s Hospital in Boston have discovered, The findings could help match tens of thousands of cardiac patients with life-saving treatment in time. Missing 70 percent of high-risk patients Today s methods for determining which heart attack victims need the most aggressive treatments can identify some groups of patients at a high risk of complications. Using data mining and machine learning techniques, the researchers sifted through 24-hour continuous electrocardiograms (EKGs or ECGs) from 4,557 heart attack patients. These could be p...[Read the full article]
Tiny Robot Makes Big Jumps with Explosive Microrockets
We've seen all kinds of crazy jumping robots, from humanoids to grasshoppers to soft and flexible spheres. But when you start making small robots, like seriously small robots (on the millimeter scale), you have to find new ways to get them to jump, and the Army Research Laboratory has teamed up with the University of Maryland to develop a couple clever ideas. To move, it relies on on the rapid conversion of stored chemical energy to gas in a chemical reaction, which is just a fancy way of saying either rocket motor or controlled explosion. First Leaps Toward Jumping Microrobots by Wayne A. Churaman, Aaron P. Gerratt, and Sarah Bergbreiter from the Army Research Laboratory and the University of Maryland Microrobotics Lab was presented this week at the 2011 International Conference on Intell...[Read the full article]
Red Lambda eyes way to crack cloud provider complexity
Red Lambda eyes way to crack cloud provider complexity New IT security and monitoring software platform is designed to manage cloud services data Software firm Red Lambda has today announced an early release programme for its new MetaGrid security and operational intelligence software platform. Powered by the companys AppIron grid computing platform, MetaGrid is designed to unify operational silos and situational awareness, visualise and analyse network security and operational anomalies, and automate IT operations across so-called 'Big Data' environments, like those of cloud services providers. The company said MetaGrid's first four (unnamed) customers currently deployed under the early release programme work in network and cloud infrastructure, social web, and government contractor arena...[Read the full article]
Boston Dynamics' Bigger BigDog Robot Is Alive
UPDATE 9/30 4:05 a.m.: Video of Boston Dynamics' new, bigger quadruped, called AlphaDog, is here. Boston Dynamics, the company that brought the world the beloved BigDog quadruped robot, is now showing off its newest beast. The official name is LS3 (Legged Squad Support System), but it seems that the Boston Dynamics guys are calling it BullDog instead. Marc Raibert, the flower-patterned-shirt-wearing founder and president of Boston Dynamics, discussed the LS3 project in a keynote talk today at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems....[Read the full article]
måndag 3 oktober 2011
Innovative idea could help underwater exploration
A PhD student’s innovative design for a robotic fish that could aid underwater exploration has earned him the chance to showcase his idea to industry experts around the world....[Read the full article]
Meet MABEL: World's fastest two-legged robot with knees
Recently, a team of researchers at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor made a robot run like a human....[Read the full article]
ABB robot provides automated luggage storage and retrieval at new Yotel in Manhattan
2011-10-03 - “YOBOT” housed in lobby’s glass enclosure provides increased storage security and a unique, high-tech amenity consistent with Yotel brand...[Read the full article]
Boston Dynamics unwraps military robot AlphaDog (w/ video)
(PhysOrg.com) -- Boston Dynamics has taken the wraps off its newest prototype combat escort, AlphaDog, which was developed with funding from DARPA and the US Marine Corps. Waltham, Massachusetts-based Boston Dynamics last week revealed the video that shows AlphaDog's capabilities for troop support. Those who have seen the video are calling the quadruped robot such names as Mule Poodle, Monster Mutt and BigDog-on-Steroids, but AlphaDog is its name. The robot is described further as the prototype for the formally named LS3. The latter stands for Legged Squad Support System....[Read the full article]
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