Posts Tagged ‘Skynet’

DLR Engineer Hits Robot Like a Girl, Robot Takes it Like a Man

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

As we reported in the past, DLR is the proud creator of Justin a very advanced humanoid robot. Lately they have been working in a very robust robotic arm and hand system.

The videos below show how they punish their robots with hammers and baseball bats in order to demonstrate how well they endure the impact while retaining accuracy and calibration. Also notice how the hand can perform very similarly to its human analogue and uses flexible “tendons” to convey the motion.

These robotic limbs (especially the hand) look incredibly similar to something Skynet would design. One thing is for sure, the guy with the bat will probably loose his smile once the robot learns how to take the bat from him and retaliate.

Via IEEE Spectrum and Hack a Day.

Robots Brains on the Clouds

Monday, March 7th, 2011

Skynet is slowly becoming a reality. A Google researcher suggests that the future of robotics is in cloud-computing. This means that robots could offload their more complex tasks to remote servers that could do the heavy computations. It also means that robots could instantly learn new skills when confronted with a new situation by downloading new apps.

Android Cellphone NXT Robot

Android Cellphone NXT Robot

Having the robot brains in the cloud would allow for much smaller, less-power hungry units that will simply connect their sensors and actuators to a remote server in the cloud via the internet. This could allow, for instance, regular smart-phones to control robots and perform complex tasks.

The presentation below summarizes the concept and provides application examples.

Cloud Enabled Robots

Also a very recent and mysterious project that will help robots connect to the cloud is MyRobots.com.

Via IEEE Spectrum.