Check out this great page, the "Unmanned flight machines for fight & monitoring" Gallery. It’s in German, so I’ve linked to the Google translation. It shows a huge list of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) along with descriptions. A lot of these I’ve never seen before. Also included are some details on each’s purpose, construction, and electronics. Great read.



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Oh man, I want one of these! Unveiled on September 18th at, "An exhibition of major achievements of the national 10th Five-Year program," The "Huitong" robot, "possesses functions including sense of sight, audio dialogue, sense of force and sense of balance. This humanoid robot with independent intellectual property realizes complicated human actions, such as Taijiquan (or shadowboxing) and saberplay."

Yeh buddy, "Saberplay." I can just picture an army of hundreds of these with swords coming after me. Apparently, the Chinese don’t want to be outdone by the Koreans and Japanese.


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A team of folks from across the pond, University of Southampton, claim to have invented the best artificial hand so far. That’s quite a claim for the 6 motor device. The, "team has designed a prototype that uses six sets of motors and gears so each of the five fingers can move independently."

Replacing the hands we were originally designed with is no small task, but, "the new hand – called the Southampton Remedi-Hand – can be connected to muscles in the arm via a small processing unit and is controlled by small contractions of the muscles which move the wrist."

The new artificial hand weighs less than a real hand and has a realistic range of movement. "The researchers say it has the first artificially-made opposable thumb."

When do they make the chainsaw attachment?


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The Modesto Bee has an article talking about soccer robots. Raul Rojas of the infamous German team, the FU-Fighters, gave a talk to the University of California at Merced about his team.

‘"The soccer field is a good laboratory," said Rojas. "It’s small enough, but it’s also very complex. The game is very fast."’

University of California at Merced plans to start a team.


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I ran across the website for a robotics company called RidgeSoft today. They have a few good robotics related tutorials on their website on various topics, ranging from Shaft Encoders to Robot Navigation. Unfortunately, some of the articles are directly related to their own robotic platform, but such is life.


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