November 20, 2008

NASA is looking for the right stuff, or in this case, the right name for the next Mars rover. NASA, in cooperation with Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures' movie WALL-E from Pixar Animation Studios, will conduct a naming contest for its car-sized Mars Science Laboratory rover that is scheduled for launch in 2009.

November 20, 2008

A miniature CSIRO submarine being used to study the health of Tasmania’s waterways has officially been named ‘Searise’.

A year-two student from Burnie Primary School, Jacob Wise, made the winning suggestion in a competition run by CSIRO Education and CSIRO’s Tasmanian ICT Centre. Entries were judged by an independent panel of experts including a children’s author and a teacher.

November 20, 2008

Humanoid robots have been used to show that that functional hierarchy in the brain is linked to time as well as space. Researchers from RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Japan, have created a new type of neural network model which adds to the previous literature that suggests neural activity is linked solely to spatial hierarchy within the animal brain. Details are published November 7 in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology.

November 20, 2008

A robot rover designed by a Bremen university team has won an ESA contest to retrieve soil samples from a lunar-style terrestrial crater. Eight student teams fielded rovers during the event, their progress monitored by an advanced 3-D viewer already flight-tested in space and planned for eventual deployment on the Moon.

November 19, 2008

Michal Glogowski’s snow-shoveling robot is currently just a concept, but Roofus seems like it could definitely make human lives a bit easier.

Roofus is a robotic snowplow that can shovel and dump snow either autonomously or via remote control. The 220-pound robot is specially designed to clear off flat roofs, especially on those large commercial buildings that otherwise require a lot of man-hours.

November 19, 2008

Hey, online gamers, artificial intelligence researchers need your help! As part of an international team of researchers, Northwestern University has officially released the first online game in which human players partner with artificial intelligence (AI) software –- in this case with the goal of solving a treasure hunt in a virtual world.

November 19, 2008

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — At the RoboDevelopment Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, Calif., Microsoft Corp. today announced the general availability of Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 (Microsoft RDS), the newest version of its robotics programming platform.

November 3, 2008

At first, the two robots had two completely different musical styles. But after a few weeks of “jamming,” the robots began to synchronize their music and sing more or less in harmony.

October 29, 2008

Researchers from Georgia Tech are designing a robot to take the place of service dogs that help disabled people with everyday activities. Like a service dog, the robot can fetch objects and open drawers on command.

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