Guardian Unlimited has a short piece on Michael Dickinson’s lab at  California Institute of Technology, where he researches bees and other flying insects abilities to fly. Here’s an older video of Dickinson telling why he studies flies. In some of their latest research:



The constructed a robotic scale model of the fly’s wing and found that the maximum thrust happened at the end, middle, and start of the flapping motion.

Dickinson hopes to create a fully robotic, life-size bee for military applications. The thought of these doing surveillance is even scarier than the spy drones from Honeywell that everyone was talking about.


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And you thought all that business about synthentic hands replacing real ones, viz Star Wars, was Hollywood trickery. Well, you thought wrong! It would appear that the Cyberhand Project is bringing a long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, to the here-and-now.


The Cyberhand Project website claims the new hand will feed natural sensory data back to the patient and be controlled like a regular hand – by brain waves.

There are also vidoes of the hand in action on the website. My question: How is this thnig powered?

Via Slashdot.


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I predict 2006 will be the year of the RoboOne robots. First, Hitec gets into the action with its RoboNova robots, and now Volks Inc. is selling their very slick "Robofie" robots. Just from looking at the movies, it would appear that the Robofie is a bit more dexterous than RoboNova (here are some videos of RoboNova). Since I can’t read Japanese, I can’t determine any more about them, other than it looks like they hired the costume designer from Power Rangers to design them.



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For all you crafters out there you’ll definitely want to check out Red Current’s “Robot Mania” post. She’s assembled a huge collection of crafty robot links. Everything from robot quilts, tote bags, and fabric prints, to paper fighting robots.

My personal favorites are the stuffed robots at StuffedRobots.com and Jess Hutchinson’s knitted robots, which I’ve posted about previously, and this robot cake. The only bad thing is that Ms. Red forgot to include GoRobotics.net in her “robot fans” links! Oh well, I’ll forgive her.



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You may have seen the new Manoi robot from Kyosho featured on Akihabara News or Engadget, the the thing that sruck me, was its uncanny likeness to Chroino, which made big waves at this year’s RoboNexus 2005 conference (photos). Engadget claims they’re built around the Kyosho KHR-1 robot body, but I contacted Tomotaka Takahashi, the creator of Chroino and asked him about Manoi. His reply:

The robot will be sold for around $1,250 USD.

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