Tag: Robots

Designed and sold by 3D printing shop Thin-Air 3D, the Sticky Note Bot 2 (SNB2 for short) is a modular desktop organizer in the stylish form factor of a little robot. Now, if only it could do some of my actual work for me instead of just sitting there holding paper and pencils.

A group of researchers at the University of California Berkeley have trained a dog to walk on various terrain in under twenty minutes using machine learning. Using a ‘deep reinforcement’ form of artificial intelligence, the robot can quickly acclimate to traversing almost any ground cover it finds itself on.

Korean 3D printing company Glück produces the Sculpia printing platform. And in this video, it demonstrates the platform’s capabilities by creating an army of humanoid robot body parts. “Finally,” I imagine Skynet thinking to itself while making plans to mass produce a whole line of Terminators.

We’ve already seen a quadruped robotic dog equipped with a submachine gun, so obviously, it was the next logical step towards humanity’s demise to strap a rocket launcher to one. Spotted at a recent military convention, You can purchase a robotic dog like this for about $2,700, but the ninja costume and rocket launcher, you’ll have to find yourself.

A group of researchers at Texas’s Rice University have developed a method of turning wolf spider carcasses into robotic grippers, making the legs open and extend when a small amount of air is applied inside the carcass and close and grip when the air is drawn back out.

Because terrible ideas come in all shapes, sizes, and price points, someone bought a $3,000 robot dog (knocked-off of Boston Dynamics’ SpotMini) on AliExpress, then went and strapped a Russian PP-19 Vityaz submachine gun to the top of it.

Researchers at The University of Tokyo have covered a robotic finger with skin created from actual human skin cells. It’s also capable of repairing itself when a collagen sheet is applied. And repair itself, it’s going to need to because I’m taking that Terminator finger down!

Developed by researchers at Northwestern University, this tiny robotic crab is so small it can stand on the edge of a penny. Not the side of a penny, the EDGE. Now that’s small. So small there could be a whole army of them in your bed right now, and you wouldn’t even know it.

Because the robotic apocalypse can’t come soon enough for some people, researchers at China’s Zhejiang University have programmed a swarm of small drones to navigate autonomously to avoid obstacles. In this case, those obstacles are the entirety of a bamboo forest.

Because picking up poop is one of the least desirable aspects of dog walking, Toyota recently applied for patents related to a dog-walking robot that can even clean up after a dog takes care of its business.

What good is a robot servant if it can’t even peel your breakfast banana without smashing it to bits? With that in mind, researchers at the University of Tokyo’s ISI Laboratory have used AI to teach a pair of robotic hands how to delicately peel bananas.

Do you have a knot in your back? Do you trust a robot to massage it out without snapping your neck in the process? If you do, you’re in luck, thanks to Massage Robotics’ MR-01, a $310,000 fully autonomous massage robot with two 6-axis collaborative robotic arms that operate using cloud artificial intelligence.

Inspired by the legs and feet of a peregrine falcon, engineers at Stanford University’s Cutkosky Lab have developed a set of SNAG (“stereotyped nature-inspired aerial grasper”) robotic legs that can perch on different sized branches and grasp objects in a manner similar to the bird of prey.

I was just thinking the other day somebody should combine a donut and a drone, and apparently Boston-based Cleo Robotics was already on the case, developing the $9,800 Dronut X1 – the world’s first bi-rotor ducted drone that can operate in much tighter spaces than traditional drones.

Since “just because you can” is as good a reason as any to do something these days, the engineers at iSax Laboratories took it upon themselves to try building a MIDI-controlled robotic trombone. The result? Well, the result is what you’ll hear below, which is by no means the best trombone playing I’ve ever heard.

Seen here looking like a typical nuclear family of the future, this is YouTuber LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER showing off a facial recognition robot (the one on the right). It appears to be powered by a Furby inside the clear plastic computer case, which is modeled after a classic Apple Macintosh.