Several DARPA challenges, in the desert, and in an urban environment, have showcased autonomous vehicles which navigate harsh and complex terrain with zero human interaction. It appears that Google’s foray into this emerging field has produced a formidable opponent to the DARPA challenge’s winning teams.

The car might be able to run autonomously most of the time, but the times it cannot… That scares me!

Apparently the only accident so far was when someone rear ended the Google car while stopped at a stoplight! Robots will end up replacing us  .

Check out this infographic from NYT:

Google's Autonomous Toyota Prius

It would be perfect if they made Pac-Man look more like this Pac-Man with several hundred LEDs, we wrote about earlier!

Check out the creator’s website: http://pacman.elstonj.com/
Found at [Botropolis]

Panasonic’s fledgling robotics department has created a dishwashing robot capable of grasping utensils and dishes with the appropriate force, and placing them into a dishwasher.

Panasonic hopes to develop their robotics line into a one billion dollar per year business by 2015, or about 1.5% of their current revenue. Also in the video, some of Panasonic’s other robots.

Other dishwashing robots:

This video shows STAIR (STanford Artificial Intelligent Robot) unloading items from a dishwasher autonomously. Using machine learning algorithms, the robot is able to understand the image, and pick up objects — even the ones that were not seen before. This video is 3-x speed. More details at: http://ai.stanford.edu/~asaxena/learninggrasp/

Cool, but a little slow!

The ARMAR Humanoid Robot putting a cup in the dishwasher:

Here is one of the better ones:
The Willow Garage’s PR1 mobile robot. Here it is doing the dishes.

And another video of it grabbing a beer.

This guy even cleans up a messy living room!

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It features a small laser scanner as well as a color camera and other sensors.

Watch it fly below.

They’re limited to “inchworming,” so they’re not very mobile, or otherwise comparable to what we know electromechanical robots can do. The main advantage of the chemical robots is that they do not need an electrical source of power. The robots gain energy through chemical reactions with their environment.

This technology is still very new, so don’t count out an army of advanced chemical polymer gel bots busting down your door some time in the future.

This Gel bot inchworms

Researchers at the Shuji Hashimoto Laboratory in Tokyo, Japan have taken the first steps towards creating an electronics-free robot. They have developed a chemical gel capable of autonomous movements without any electrical inputs. Their robot combines polymers that change their size based on the chemical environment. The surrounding gel and the tension built into it amplify this reaction, rendering the robot capable of walking by clenching then expanding its bridge-like form.

[via]
[Chemical Robotics Group]