Rambles at starchamber.com

I’ve started following the BotJunkie blog for fun stories and videos about robots. It reminds me how close I came to a career in robotics. I like the blog’s tag line: “From the folks who brought you OhGizmo.com, BotJunkie obsessively chronicles Man’s inevitable descent into cybernetic slavery.”
BotJunkie has plenty of weird stuff like snake-like locomotion [...]

Read Full Post »

Last week I went to the Media Lab’s h2.0 conference at MIT. “h2.0″ stands for human 2.0; the conference centered on the surprisingly close relationship between using technology to cope with human disabilities and using technology to augment human capabilities. That is to say, people with disabilities are leading the way on human augmentation of [...]

Read Full Post »

Read this story and you may well conclude a robot uprising is right around the corner.
Carl Zimmer’s recent post Evolving Robotspeak describes robotics research done by social evolution researcher Laurent Keller in Switzerland. Plenty of folks have used genetic algorithms to “breed” robots, but this is the first time I’ve heard of someone using family [...]

Read Full Post »

We’re definitely entering a new realm with robotics. Before robotic motion was always painfully awkward and stilted, not something you would ever mistake for the smooth motion of an animal. But these days you can find plenty of examples of remarkably fluid “un-robotic” behavior. Things will progress very rapidly from here. The YouTube video below [...]

Read Full Post »

I’ve been amazed to see how quickly web video has transitioned from novelty to mainstream. So often now interesting links come along with video. Here’s the latest, an electric pack mule.

When I read that Boston Dynamics had made a stable robot quadruped, I was intrigued enough to follow the link and look at the [...]

Read Full Post »

Could you beat the EAP? At the recent artificial arm-wrestling contest, you almost certainly would have. EAP stands for electroactive polymer, also known as artificial muscle, and earlier this month, the best
artificial arms wrestled with a human opponent and lost decisively. (Note: the human opponent was a girl!)

We always hear about artificial intelligence, but never [...]

Read Full Post »

Fun with robots: IEEE Spectrum is featuring an article about modular robots. The Rambles news staff spotted this one a year ago, but apparently they’ve invested some real money in a robot that can pull itself together like a slime mold out of lots of tiny other robots and move one of four completely different [...]

Read Full Post »