I am personally very excited to adopt a few extra robotic limbs, because I have a desperate need to improve my ski-boxing. Other people are probably interested in extra robotic limbs for less exciting reasons, like helping them do their jobs without getting injured. We’ve seen a bunch of research into this area recently, along with a variety of prototypes, and many of them seem like they have the potential to be useful and practical for ski-boxing and whatever else. The diff…

Wings are great for crusing over long distances and carrying heavy loads, but they aren’t that great if your aircraft needs vertical agility. Rotors, on the other hand, are great for vertical agility, but they aren’t that great for long distances and heavy loads. Any aircraft that wants to fly efficiently can be designed for cruising or hovering, but not both. Lots and lots of people have tried to figure out a way of making some sort of compromise work. Mostly, this involve…

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!): MARSS – July 17-21, 2017 – Montreal, Canada Summer School on Soft Manipulation – July 17-21, 2017 – Lake Chiemsee, Germany Living Machines Conference – July 25-28, 2017 – Stanford, Calif., USA RoboCup 2017 – July 27-31, 2017 – …

Artificial intelligence software could generate highly realistic fake videos of former president Barack Obama using existing audio and video clips of him, a new study [PDF] finds. Such work could one day help generate digital models of a person for virtual reality or augmented reality applications, researchers say. Computer scientists at the University of Washington previously revealed they could generate digital doppelgängers of anyone by analyzing images of them coll…

Over the last several years, a team of roboticists at the University of Tehran has been working on increasingly large and complex life-size humanoids. For their latest project, however, the Iranian researchers decided to build something smaller—and cuter. Surena Mini is a knee-high robot with a sleek 3D-printed body, articulated limbs, and a round head with two camera-eyes. Twenty small servomotors power its arms, legs, and neck, allowing the little robot to walk, gesture, …

NASA’s Space Robotics Challenge (SRC) took place last month, full of virtual Valkyries wandering around a virtual Mars base trying to fix virtual stuff. Anyone was allowed to participate, and since the virtual nature of the competition means there was no need for big expensive robots that mostly didn’t fall over, anyone actually could (and did) participate. Of the 93 teams initially signed up to compete, NASA selected 20 finalist teams based on their performance completing s…

How many computers do you own? If you picked a number close to three (say, laptop, tablet, and smartphone) you’re way off. The answer is probably dozens. There are computers in your car, in your appliances, in your thermostat, and maybe even in your light bulbs. Every year the number goes up. Today, visible computers are just the slimmest tip of the iceberg. Most computers are hidden away, quietly performing their jobs without you even being aware of the work they do for…

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!): ICAR 2017 – July 10-12, 2017 – Hong Kong RSS 2017 – July 12-16, 2017 – Cambridge, Mass., USA MARSS – July 17-21, 2017 – Montreal, Canada Summer School on Soft Manipulation – July 17-21, 2017 – Lake Chiemsee, Germany Living Mac…

iRobot’s Roomba robotic vacuum is, arguably, the most successful robot ever made. Over 10 million of them are cleaning floors all over the planet, and they’re doing so reliably and affordably and autonomously enough that people keep on buying them, which is something no other consumer robot has ever been able to replicate. Leading the small team that designed the Roomba was Joe Jones. What started out as his personal side project at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1988…

You’d think computers spend most of their time and energy doing, well, computation. But that’s not the case: about 90 percent of a computer’s execution time and electrical energy is spent transferring data between the processor and the memory banks, says Subhasish Mitra, a computer scientist at Stanford University. Even if Moore’s law continued on indefinitely, computers would still be limited by this memory bottleneck. This week in the journal Nature, Mitra and collaborato…