A team of researchers from the Dynamics Laboratory of Robotics at the University State of Oregon has made significant progress in robotics core, which should lead to robots that not only can walk and run efficiently but also use little energy in the process.

By achieving an optimal design approach to the fundamentals of robotics, this study is one more than they are getting closer to everyday reality robots capable of assuming complex missions efficiently enough, and the creation of prosthetics that are controlled much better by their users or even help some people who use wheelchairs to gain a certain ability to “walk”. (more…)

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech’s) and the Universities of Columbia and Arizona have managed to build and schedule two “molecular robots” (DNA was inserted) capable of performing complex tasks at a microscopic scale. Robots, like their larger relatives, they can move, stand, turn and perform precise work for which they are scheduled. In an article published for days in Nature, the authors have been explaining hardly how these “Nanobots” are destined, in years, to completely revolutionize a multitude of areas, from industrial engineering to the medicine. (more…)

Mike Dobson, a British engineer from the University of Berkeley, is the creator of CubeStormer, a robot that has the ability to solve the famous Rubik’s cube in just 12 seconds. The strange thing is that the robot is built primarily with pieces of “Lego Mindstorms”.

The device has four mechanical arms and a digital camera. The entire system is controlled by computer with special software called “Cube Explorer” created by Herbert Kociemba, which scans the faces of the cube and find the quickest solution. (more…)

Who would not want a robot that can make the bed or pick up the clothes washed and dried to store it safely? Well, a team of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley has taken a decisive step toward that goal, to make an autonomous robot can reliably folded piles of towels without having seen before.

Robots that can do things like assemble car parts have been around for decades. The robot that folds towels, however, does something very new, as stressed members of the development team, including Jeremy want to set-Shepard Matins and Pieter Abbeel.

The kind robots that assemble parts of cars are designed to work very well structured environments, allowing them to perform repetitive tasks with high precision, but only in carefully controlled environments. Out of such scenarios, their capabilities are much more limited. (more…)

In an effort to fill gaps in knowledge on key ocean processes, ocean sciences division of the U.S. National Foundation for Science (NSF) has allocated nearly a million dollars to finance the work of a team of scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. The team will develop a new generation of robots for ocean exploration.

Jules Jaffe and Peter Franks will lead a group of scientists responsible for designing and deploying autonomous underwater explorers, or AUEs. The AUEs capture the details of oceanographic processes critical for many tiny inhabitants of the marine environment.

Although the scientific community is able to obtain details of large-scale ocean processes, marine scientists has arisen between the need to focus on more localized areas. By monitoring more specific areas of currents, temperature, salinity, pressure and biological properties of AUEs provide valuable new information on various ocean phenomena. (more…)