Syfy's 'Robot Combat League' Makes Major Tech Dream Come True

via mashable.com

Robot Combat League, Syfy's new reality series pitting 12 expensive, 8-feet-tall humanoid machines against each other in tournament-style face-offs, ends Tuesday night with the final two robots. And while this season lasted only three months, it has been years in the making.

"I really couldn't believe how technologically advacnced they were," Chris Jericho, the show's host and popular WWE wrestler, told Mashable. "It's like being attacked by a Terminator. If you got hit by one of these things it would literally cave your head in."...

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Watch this: quadrocopters perform amazing pole-catching acrobatics

via theverge.com

Quadrocopters can do more than take part in elaborate dances — they're making the jump into gymnastics. Dario Brescianini, a student at ETH Zurich's Institute for Dynamic Systems and Controls, has programmed the mini-drones to perform stunts and juggle poles between themselves. It all takes place in ETH Zurich's Flying Machine Arena, a space decked out with a motion capture system and wireless networking to provide the perfect testing ground for tiny airborne vehicles.

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A Robot Army Is Destroying The American Workforce

via businessinsider.com

The age of robots has been talked about since the beginning of the last century.

People have long fantasized about robots serving as our personal assistants. But now that they're here, we're competing against them for jobs.

The rise of robots in the workplace is "absolutely" at least partially to blame for the lack of jobs in America, MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee said in a recent interview on 60 Minutes.

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Countries Where Robots Are Taking Over

via businessinsider.com

Robots are taking over factories around the world.

The International Federation of Robots tracks the growth in usage, production, and trade in robots, and the numbers have grown at a tantalizing rate. Robot sales jumped by 38 percent in 2011, and the worldwide stock of robots is estimated to be in the range of 1,153,000 - 1,400,000 units — up from a minimum stock of 1,021,000 units in 2009.

South Korea lead the way in robot density in 2011, with 347 robots per 10,000 workers in the manufacturing industry. What's more impressive is the tremendous spike in robot density; South Korea had 287 robots per 10,000 workers in 2010.

Here are the countries where robots are taking over manufacturing...

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How a Robot Will Steal Your Job

via gizmodo.com

On a visit to Standard Motor Products' fuel-injector assembly line in South Carolina, Atlantic writer Adam Davidson asked why a worker there, Maddie, was welding caps onto the injectors herself. Why not use a machine? That's how a lot of the factory's other tasks were performed. Maddie's supervisor, Tony, had a bracing, direct answer: "Maddie is cheaper than a machine."

Davidson's complex, poignant story, Making It in America, revealed some chilling data about where American manufacturing is headed. It's a matter of simple math. Maddie makes less in two years than a $100,000 machine would cost, so her job is safe—for now.

Elsewhere in America, robots are getting cheaper and more sophisticated, and they're landing better, more advanced jobs. They are driving cars, writing newspaper articles, and filling prescriptions, displacing people with years of schooling and training under their belts. It sounds like a classic sci-fi story, but that disconcerting future isn't in the future. It's here today.

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If Foxconn Replaced Its Humans With Robots, Would You Feel Better?

via readwrite.com

Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that manufactures devices for Apple, Nokia, and Sony, has over 1.2 million employees, mostly in factories on the Chinese mainland. By 2016, it would like to replace as many of those as possible with robots that can do the job 24/7.

That would address the human rights concerns about the company's working conditions. But is it worth putting 1.2 million people out of work? It's the classic globalization question.

Foxconn declared its intentions to go robotic last year, announcing that it had 10,000 robots online, ramping up to 300,000 this year. The goal as stated in the 2011 Xinhua article was to get to 1 million robots by 2014. This TechWeb post from January (which was brought to my attention by John Biggs at TechCrunch today) says Foxconn would reach the goal this year.

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Mind-Controlled Robots Bring Us One Step Closer To Our Avatar Future

via gizmodo.com

It's been speculated—in big budget movies, no less—that one day mankind will never leave its computers, and will instead explore the world through virtual reality and robots. And here's the cutting-edge research that will make that nightmarish future possible.

Researchers at the CRNS-AIST Joint Robotics Laboratory have created an android that can be controlled using thoughts alone. But it's not quite at the point where a user can don an electrode-embedded cap and their robot avatar will run off into the streets. At the moment the user chooses and concentrates on flashing images which then give the robot instructions on a given task.

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These Are The 10 Coolest Military Robots You've Never Heard About

via businessinsider.com

Like it or not, robots are swiftly making their way deeper and deeper into battlefield operations.

Though the airborne drone seems to take precedent, both in combat operations as well as media coverage, there are a few robots bubbling beneath the public consciousness that hardly anyone talks about.

Here are a few of the coolest bots no one seems to notice.

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The Robot Doctors of the Future Are Coming

via gizmodo.com

Remember how in sci-fi tomorrowland we were promised that doctors would be followed around by robots who knew your medical history by rote and could make sure that nothing gets missed? Well, we've woken up in the future because shit just got real.

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Scientists take mind-controlled robot for a stroll (video)

via engadget.com

What if you could control a robot -- wait, don't answer yet -- with your mind? Pretty great, right? That's what the Virtual Embodiment and Robotic Re-embodiment (VERE) group is working on, and it's made some pretty good, you know, strides. New Scientist details a test utilizing fMRI brain activity-sensing technology to control a robot in France from a laboratory in Israel. The volunteer was able to perform tasks like walking around a room, following a person with the small 'bot and locating a teapot, using visuals from a camera embedded in the robot's head. There's a "small" delay in the technology, but researcher Ori Cohen insists that it's possible to anticipate and compensate for it.

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Real-life Avatar: The first mind-controlled robot surrogate

via extremetech.com

An Israeli student has become the first person to meld his mind and movements with a robot surrogate, or avatar. Situated inside an fMRI scanner in Israel, Tirosh Shapira has controlled a humanoid robot some 2000 kilometers (1250 miles) away, at the Béziers Technology Institute in France, using just his mind.

The fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) reads his thoughts, a computer translates those thoughts into commands, and then those commands are sent across the internet to the robot in France. The system requires training: On its own, an fMRI can simply see the real-time blood flow in your brain (pictured below right). Training teaches the system that a particular “thought” (blood flow pattern) equates to a certain command. In this case, when Shapira thinks about moving forward or backward, the robot moves forward or backward; when Shapira thinks about moving one of his hands, the robot surrogate turns in that direction.

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10 Robots with Very Specific Tasks

via mentalfloss.com

What do we want robots to do for us? The field of robotics is making great leaps in robot abilities, but these abilities come one at a time. We won’t have Rosie from The Jetsons until the various specific tasks are combined into one machine. When that happens, they will take over. But until then, you’ll have to choose the purpose of your robot, and hope it can do that specific task well. Here are some of the most recently-unveiled robots and what they can do.

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How robotic technology is helping students [infographic]

via holykaw.alltop.com

Education technology is a crucial element of the modern classroom, with interactive technologies such as blogs, wikis, mobile devices, whiteboards and more gaining prominence. It’s not surprising that robots might not be far behind. A new project at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology is using $100 million in grants and over 300 researchers to build and deploy an army of robots to deliver English instruction to South Korean school children.

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Meet E.M.I.L.Y.: The Robotic Lifeguard

via nbclosangeles.com

A remote controlled robot lifeguard is diving into the waters at Zuma Beach in Malibu, where LA County Lifeguards are the first in the country to practice rescue missions with the $10,000 tool meant to help swimmers caught in a riptide.

The bright red cylindrical device has been dubbed E.M.I.L.Y. (Emergency Integrated Lifesaving Lanyard).

“If it’s a classic riptide and people are struggling but they are not struggling to the point of drowning, we can deploy E.M.I.L.Y. to stabilize them until a lifeguard can get there and bring them in,” said Captain Remy Smith with LA County Lifeguards.

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The amazing robots that do the 'Thriller' dance in sync

via theweek.com

The video: MIT's Patrick Bechon and Jean-Jacques Slotine have come up with a novel way to get robots to synchronize their activities, drawing inspiration from how bacteria interact. And to demonstrate their work, Bechon and Slotine chose a dance number that has seen more than its share of inspiring ensemble performances: Michael Jackson's "Thriller." The researchers programmed a group of humanoid robots from Aldebaran Robotics to dance in unison by sensing their environment and coordinating their movements through a central server — rather than trying to awkwardly follow one another directly. (Watch a video below. ) This way, even if a robot gets out of step, it can catch up with its peers by communicating with the hub. Bacteria and some insects employ a similar technique — called quorum sensing — by sending out molecules that help them figure out how many organisms are around, and then coordinate their activities accordingly.

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Robotic Digital Art by Markus Vogt

via unrealitymag.com

We’ve seen some great artwork from our Deviant Art people before but once in a while you get something that’s pretty extraordinary. That’s where Markus Vogt comes in. It’s one thing to have a great interpretation of a movie. It’s another to pay tribute to specific characters.

But it’s another to virtually create an entirely new world of your own based off of characters and worlds you may have seen. Which is what I think Markus has done here. While this is only a small sample and exists in only his “Character” sets, you’ll see the robotic futuristic style that made us choose his work.

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Can robotic supports replace wheelchairs for many?

via techi.com

The Tek Robotic Mobilization Device developed by Istanbul, Turkey-based AMS Mekatronic, bridges the gap between bulky wheelchairs with the inherent problems that come with them and mechanical engineering that will give many paraplegics more and easier access to their world.

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TED Future: Hypersonic Gliders, Liquid Batteries and Flying Robots

via allthingsd.com

This morning, the TED conference brought researchers out of the lab to show off their latest gadgets — if you can use the word “gadget” to describe a hypersonic Mach 20 glider, autonomous and collaborative flying robots and a long-lasting liquid battery.

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Your custom robot army is here - Tech Article

via news.cnet.com

My Robot Nation is aiming to make it possible for almost anyone to design their own 3D robot model--and have it delivered to their door. Eventually, the company wants to expand to a wide variety of products but is using robots as a way to establish itself.

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South Korean Prison To Feature Robot Guards

via forbes.com

The BBC reports that a jail in Pohang, South Korea, will soon begin a one-month trial of three new robots, which will be there in a support capacity to monitor for “abnormal behavior.” The robots, which stand about five feet tall, were developed by the Asian Forum for Corrections. The robots are wheeled, and equipped with cameras and other sensors to monitor the inmates.

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