Check out this video of modified Segway bots being used to simulate human targets in a live fire sniper training exercise. The bots are programmed to react much like real humans would. After a target is hit the bots are programmed to scatter.
The Segway bots have attached to them a realistic looking upper-body and wear black hooded sweatshirts. They can even enter buildings.
CMU Biorobotics Unified Snake Climbing
Carnegie Mellon University’s Biorobotics Lab shows off their new modular snake robot, Unified Snake. Watch as it climbs up a pole, performs rolls, and sidewinds.
CMU
CMU Biorobotics Unified Snake Rolling
This work considers two issues: snake robot locomotion and modular robot design. We achieve snake robot locomotion by designing gaits, which are cyclic internal motions that allow the mechanism to interact with the environment to propel itself forward. Our gaits enable snake robots to maneuver through a variety three-dimensional terrains and include swimming and climbing. The robots, themselves, are a modular chain of single degree of freedom units each powered by a low-cost, yet modified, hobby servo that we call the Super Servo. We have updated the internal electronics in the servo as well as created new mechanism designs so as to optimize efficiency and robustness.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biorobotics/index.html
MIT's Firefly Floating Helicopter
3D Images From Firefly Free Floating Helicopter Display
The Flyfire canvas can transform itself from one shape to another or morph a two-dimensional photographic image into an articulated shape. The pixels are physically engaged in transitioning images from one state to another, which allows the Flyfire canvas to demonstrate a spatially animated viewing experience. Flyfire serves as an initial step to explore and imagine the possibilities of this free-form display: a swarm of pixels in a space.
I stumbled across an old but awesome video of a self healing chair which falls apart then reassembles itself. This chair explodes then puts itself back together again!
Watch this cool robotic device, control this giant flying kite. Quite an impressive machine!
Kite Flying Robot
It is made by FESTO, a German company with specialty in automation.
Japanese researchers have taught two robots how to play musical instruments. One plays flute, the other saxophone. The robots reproduce, play sounds and musical tunes they hear another player perform.
A robot and human are playing music together. Waseda University
The robots have a sort of catalog of their instrument’s various sounds, which they use to learn and reproduce what a live person or another robot might play to them.
Even more, the robot has a CCD camera which it uses to take ques from other players.
Here is a diagram from the project’s website:
Robots learn to play musical instruments (saxophone and flute) at Waseda University in Japan
Here is one of the robots learning to improve its rhythm by listening to a human player.
Here is the video of the two robots playing a pre-programmed duet.
This is a homemade automatic crossbow. Quite the custom built piece of machinery.
Slightly off topic, but awesome!
http://www.awhite.fsbusiness.co.uk/x_bows.html
These cyborg insects can be remotely controlled via a radio transmitter attached to the bug’s back. The insect is powered by Nickel-63, a radioactive isotope which is able to supply power for a small amount of electronics for up about 100 years. Too bad that bug won’t live that long!
Cyborg Insect Spy Robot
Maybe this technology could be applied to other typed of insect robots, like this water strider.
The primary objective of the Insect Cyborg Sentinels Project is to develop cybernetic insects for the purposes of living surveillance and reconnaissance micro-air vehicles, MAVs. By eliminating the energy needed for flight and focusing energy efforts on controller and sensor packages, a cybernetic MAV, or CMAV, can be harnessed for the purpose of long endurance stealth missions.
These animatronic heads move their mouth with the sounds which appear to be produced by a speaker behind them. Watch the eyes, they go looking off in separate directions! Cool, but I think I’ll hold off on dropping the $75,000 the artist who made these wants to sell them for.
These three animatronic heads are part of an art piece being sold at Art Basel Miami Beach 2009 for $75,000. The heads are connected to servos behind the mold of the artist’s face that are controlled by a computer. The movements and sound are on a 15 minute loop and both sing together and uncomfortably look around the room individually.
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