robotics

Drivers who want to know energy tradeoffs between gas guzzlers and electric cars may find some help at the ChargeCar project, where researchers have begun investigating how to customize electric vehicles to meet individual commuting needs. A smart power management system could even boost electric vehicle efficiency and extend battery life.

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Having one of those days where even a hearty bowl of Fruit Loops and Jack Daniels can't get you out of bed? A telepresence robot can come into the office for you, elevating telecommuting to a decidedly new level. The somewhat humanoid 'bots, produced by Mountain View, California-based Anybots, are controlled via video-game-like controls from your laptop, allowing you to be "present" without actually being in the office.

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Autopsies, for all the useful information they provide, have significant downsides. They are often upsetting to the deceased's family, they prevent people from receiving certain kinds of religious burials, and they leave a bit of a mess. To correct for those problems and more, a team at the University of Bern, Switzerland, has developed a robot that can perform virtual autopsies.

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As much as we love the actual future here at Popular Science, we love the past's vision of the future almost as much. So we basically freaked out when our good friends over at Pink Tentacle discovered this spread from a 1969 issue of the Japanese magazine Shonen Sunday.

These pictures show a predicted 1989 where computers have changed how we live. The above photo depicts a classroom full of children learning on computers, watching a video of a teacher, and receiving beatings from enforcement robots.

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Last year, after untold millions of dollars, DARPA failed to renew a Lockheed program to design a UAV based on a maple tree seed. While that program, backed by tons of cash and one of the world's largest aerospace companies, amounted to bupkis, a University of Maryland project to create a maple seed UAV has finally accomplished what DARPA and Lockheed couldn't.

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If knowing is half the battle, then firefighters waging war on a blaze start at a serious disadvantage. A lack of information concerning what’s going on inside a fire means firefighting personnel often must speculate which way the fire is moving, where the hottest spots are, and most importantly, where people might be trapped by the flames. The Fire Spy Robot hopes to tip the scales back in firefighters’ favor by providing valuable intel from inside infernos even while helping to extinguish them.

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Drones already rule much of the skies over modern day battlefields, and could someday begin ferrying cargo to forward bases and troops. The U.S. Air Force put out a call this week for a fully autonomous unmanned air vehicle that can deliver cargo within a combat radius of 500 nautical miles.

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In theory, designing a robot that continuously juggles a single ball should not be difficult. Calibrating the machine would be a pain but once you got the thing running, it should continue to juggle the ball until some variable intervenes. In a perfect world, this would occur elegantly, but here on Earth things just don't come off so beautifully. However, through some smart design and precise math, researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have created the Blind Juggler, so named because it juggles a ball continuously, even when variables are introduced, without the use of sensors.

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A couple of months ago, Sandia National Laboratory, in conjunction with Boston Dynamics (they of Big Dog fame) and DARPA, announced the creation of a robot that could jump 25 feet in the air. Designed for use in urban combat, the robot, named the Precision Urban Hopper (PUH), would give special forces troopers their own lightweight, easily deployable ground UAV.

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