Dyson is finally entering the robotic age. Giving credence to our speculation last month, the vacuum cleaner maker has indeed come out with its own Roomba rival. Ominously named the 360 Eye, this robot doesn't look like any of the robot vacuum cleaners you've set your eyes on, and that starts with the robot's own eye.
Unless you look really close, this robot peregrine falcon would almost look like the real thing from a distance, especially while flapping its wings high above the sky. That resemblance to a real avian predator, however faint, might just be enough to scare away other birds that would other wise ruin crops or even endanger human lives.
Our robotic future, so full of promise, could be our undoing. So says futurist and CEO of Poikos, Nell Watson, who recently spoke at The Conference in Sweden about all things robots. The issue lies in artificial intelligence and a robot's acquisition of knowledge, and the lack of understanding about ethics that are present in both.
Vacuum cleaner manufacturer Dyson could be working on a Roomba rival, if a new teaser video is anything to go by, as the British firm prepares for a new product launch next month. Details on Dyson Project N223 are scant, with nothing but a product's-eye-view of the engineering team to go by.
Robots, each an individual entity, could one day all operate under the same cloud-based hivemind. Such is the goal of RoboBrain, a single online network that aggregates data from thousands of sources into something any robot can tap into. While still in development, RoboBrain aims to provide robots not only with vast amounts of data, but also systems that can be merged together to give the robot a more complex understanding of the world around it.
Think "Night at the Museum" but with robots: the Tate Britain gallery may be open to human visitors during the day, but it's populating the darkened halls with remotely-controlled robots at night as part of an interactive art installation. For the next five nights, a flock of four telepresence 'bots will be let loose among the gallery's halls, controlled from afar by live-stream viewers as part of the After Dark project.
Behold our robotic future: the Aloft Hotel in Cupertino will be introducing the A.L.O Botlr, a robot butler that provides concierge service to guests. The robot is the brainchild of Savioke, and was backed by Google ventures and AME Cloud Ventures.
Robots are typically very complicated devices, full of parts that need a long assembly time and a myriad of hands working on them. A new concept may change that, as researchers at Harvard and MIT have been working on a robot that builds itself. Like a Transformer lying in wait, this one can morph into a new shape.
Sentient machines have long been considered an inevitable part of our future, and every year we come a little closer to seeing that belief become reality. DARPA has resulted in an impressive array of powerful machines, and researchers across the globe have tasked themselves with ever-improving our mechanical counterparts. Though there's still a long way to go before humanoid bots are working alongside us, the reality of interacting with robots in our everyday life has never been closer, and that poses a serious question: are we ready?
A Korean baseball team, The Hanwha Eagles, are evidently pretty bad. For the fans, it might be a “lovable loser” scenario, like the Cubs here in the USA. Attendance seems to be poor, too, which can negatively affect morale. The team has come up with a way to artificially make it seem better than it is, and it’s a terrible idea.
Our future robotic neighbors will be as vulnerable to injury as their human counterparts, and as such will have to learn to adapt to compensate for whatever goes wrong until someone gets it fixed. To do this, some researchers in Paris deliberately broke a robot's leg to teach it an important lesson.
Japan is looking to trump the long-running RoboCup, planning to host a Robot Olympics event in Tokyo in 2020. The event would take place alongside the summer games, with prime minister Shinzo Abe saying it would demonstrate the current state of robotic technology.
