The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, are hard at work, trying to find a way to make satellites less earth-shatteringly expensive, something called the Phoenix project.
They’ve come up with something that’s pretty much Wall-E, in space, in actual life. The plan is to have space robots pluck functional antennas off ...
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It's the sort of ceremony that's so magical it can only occur on even-numbered years. Inventors, educators, entertainers, college students and media folk gathered at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, PA tonight for the 2012 inductions to the Robot Hall of Fame, a Carnegie Mellon-sponsored event created to celebrate the best of our mechanical betters.
This year, the field included four categories, judged by both a jury of 107 writers, designs, entrepreneurs and academics and the public at large, each faction constituting half the voting total. The show kicked off, however, with the induction of 2010 winners, the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers, the da Vinci Surgical System, iRobot's Roomba, the Terminator and Huey, Dewey and Louie, a trio of robots from 1971's Silent Running.
The first 'bot to secure its spot in the class of 2012, was the programmable humaoid Nao, from Aldebaran Robotics, which beat out the iRobot Create and Vex Robotics Design System in the Educational category. The PackBot military robot from iRobot took the Industrial and Service category, beating out the Kiva Mobile Robotic Fulfillment System and Woods Hole Oceanographic's Jason. Boston Dynamic's Big Dog ran over some stiff competition in the form of Willow Garage's PR2 and NASA's Robonaut to win the Research title. And WALL-E triumphed over doppelganger Johnny Five and the Jetsons' Rosie in the Entertainment category. Relive the festivities in four minutes after the break.
Continue reading Robot Hall of Fame inducts Big Dog, PackBot, Nao and WALL-E (video)
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Robot Hall of Fame inducts Big Dog, PackBot, Nao and WALL-E (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Oct 2012 23:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Pixar changed animated film history and pretty much cinema history, taking the quality of content and obviously visuals into another level, being the first to take advantage of technology moving ...
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It's that time again: time for Carnegie Mellon to roll out the red carpet and welcome the crème de la crème of the robotics world into its halls. Since 2003 the school has been selecting the best of the best and inducting them into the Robot Hall of Fame. Past honorees have included everything from LEGO Mindstorms to the Terminator. This year's list of nominees is no less impressive, with celebrity bots Johnny 5 and WALL-E pitted against each other in the entertainment category, while NASA's Robonaut takes on the PR2 and BigDog under the banner of research bots. There will also be two other inductees awarded a spot in the hall in the consumer and education category and the industrial and service field. Best of all, for the first time ever, Carnegie Mellon is letting the public vote on the inductees. And, while PETMAN was snubbed yet again, he's not letting that get him down -- the Boston Dymanic's biped just keeps on struttin'. Hit up the source link to cast your vote before the September 30th deadline and check back on October 23rd to see who's granted a podium speech.
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Robot Hall of Fame voting begins for class of 2012, Johnny 5 learns where BigDogs sit originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Aug 2012 11:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Everyone has seen the movie Wall-E, and guy or girl – they have all shed a tear. And if you are like this guy, who loved the movie so much, you can make your own life size version of Wall-E!
Now, I have heard of people recreating the DeLorean from Back ...
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Prop maker and hobbyist Mike Senna has been working on a remote-controlled, life-size replica of Disney-Pixar‘s WALL-E since 2010. It is now complete and we have a real, functional WALL-E on our planet. 
Senna is no stranger to building robots. He previously built a perfect R2-D2 replica in 2003, which he took to events organized by City of Hope. He saw the effect it had on the children and so being the good guy that he is, he wanted to build a robot that had “more emotion.”
This project took about 3,200 to 3,800 hours to build from scratch. He averaged 25 hours a week on the project while working as a computer programmer at the same time. You can find more pictures and background on Senna’s WALL-E build over on his blog. Honestly, isn’t this is the best Wall-E replica you’ve ever seen?
[via Geekosystem]
Wall-E is one of our favorite Pixar movies, and even though we’ve seen a lot of ways to recreate the cute robot, we hadn’t seen anything like this before.
Meet the Wall-E Origami, by origami master Brian Chan. He seriously did this with one square of paper and nothing else. ...
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Old technology meets new technology here, and in this case they can actually interface very well despite their age difference. YouTuber Aliencurv modified an old 1983 TRS-80 portable computer with 20kb of memory to control a 2012 Wall-E robot. I hear ya. That’s crazy and pointless you say. I agree. And it’s still awesome. 
With the easy addition of a Bluetooth module, it can intercept the TRS-80′s keyboard input and beam it somewhere else. After that, it just took a terminal program and some extra code to turn the keystrokes into information that Wall-E can use. With that in place, you have yourself a remote controlled robot.
That computer is almost 30 years old. If not for this mod, it would be a useless paperweight. It is proof that by thinking out of the box, we can use some of our old gadgets and rescue them from obsolescence, while doing some cool things.
[via Hack A Day via Geekosystem]
One of our favorite Pixar movies was Wall-E, with its incredibly cute protagonist and heart-warming story. We can totally understand how somebody would like to have him in their room.
If re-watching the movie just doesn’t cut it anymore, maybe it’s time to upgrade our pc’s case mods to look something ...
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