robots

An 81-year-old man constructed a machine that allowed him to remotely fire a .22 semi-automatic pistol, then set it up in his driveway and killed himself. Reportedly, the man's relatives had been encouraging him to move out of his home and into a care facility.

Instead, he did some research on the Internet and built what was only described as a complex machine—the local paper that broke the story is keeping wraps on how it actually worked.

Two years ago we showed you Boston Dynamics' incredible BigDog—one of the world's most ambitious legged robots—being developed for DARPA and the U.S. Army. With its advanced system of hyper-responsive hydraulic joints and a suite of sensors, accelerometers and gyroscopes, the BigDog's most stunning achievement is it's ability to walk, climb and maintain its balance on diverse terrain, even after slipping on ice or receiving a kick to one side. All while carrying several hundreds of pounds of supplies on its "back."

What do you get when you cross stitch taxidermy with the mug of a dead robot? Well, if youre the artist/robot teacher France Cadet, you get a wall full of interactive robo-trophies programmed to react to their environment.

We all know that in the distant future powerful robots will cater to our every whim and work as we know it will cease to exist (at least we're keeping our fingers crossed). But in the near future?

Click here for a photo gallery of our favorite bombshell fembots from television and film.

Fembots were a pop-culture staple long before Austin Powers battled them-witness the popularity of The Bionic Woman, The Stepford Wives and Blade Runner. But what is it about curvaceous cyborgs that stirs the imagination?

Camel racing has long been popular in the Middle East, but the sport has come under scrutiny for its practice of employing little boys as jockeys. Many of these children were kidnapped or otherwise illegally brought into employment in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates from foreign countries, including Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Faced with pressure from human-rights groups, Qatar has outlawed the practice of hiring child jockeys and passed a law requiring all riders to be at least 18 years of age.

For a video of the soccer-playing bots in action, click here (WMV Format).

As World Cup soccer rages in Germany this month, 350 teams from around the world will convene in the city of Bremen to compete in the robotic equivalent, the 10th annual RoboCup World Championship. The goal, so to speak, of this event is highly ambitious: to create android athletes that could whip the human world-champion soccer team by the year 2050and, along the way, advance the field of artificial intelligence.

How It Works

Cost: $15,000
Time: 10 Months

From the Jetsons' Rosie to Richie Rich's Irona to Robby of Forbidden Planet, we've been promised digital domestics that look and act a lot like . . . a maid. But that isn't going to happen anytime soon, robot experts say. The problem? Today's machines are a long way from having the anthropomorphic qualities-above all, sight-found in human help.

Here’s something that engineers designing the next generation of
unmanned combat air vehicles may not have considered: A well-placed lightning strike could rewire the plane’s artificially intelligent (AI) brain, transforming the craft into an enemy of the state bent on destroying a major city. Absurd? Maybe. Good plot for a thriller? Evidently: It’s the source of the action in the new movie Stealth, in which an AI-controlled fighter jet turns evil.

First off, let me just say that i'll enjoy watching The Thing, a 600-pound creature made of orange rock, stop an oncoming 18-wheeler with his shoulder every bit as much as the next guy. But it's not the action scenes that get me excited about a movie like The Fantastic Four, which premieres on July 8. Whenever a new comic-book movie debuts, I get a kick out of seeing how the filmmakers finesse the science.

MOTION

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
SQUAREBOOT ASSEMBLY
CONCEPTS TO UNDERSTAND
SUBSYSTEM INTERFACES
MOTION SUBSYSTEM INVENTORY

SQUAREBOOT ASSEMBLY

In the Squarebot design, the Motion Subsystem is tightly integrated with the Structure Subsystem.