"PathFinder, Image Guided Robot For Stereotactic Neurosurgery, Clinical Results"

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=47357

"Two papers reporting on patient and laboratory evaluations of the efficacy of PathFinder, the image guided robot for stereotactic neurosurgery, were presented at the American Society of Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery, June 1st-4th, in Boston USA."

Robotic vending

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,19509-2270466,00.html

"Still see vending machines as boxes for hawking Doritos, and Marlboro Lights?" Get hip to the new wave of automated high-tech retailing that is changing the way we buy everything from PlayStations to pizzas. Designed for today’s impatient, want-it-now consumers, today’s internet-enabled vending units take cash, credit cards, even mobile-phone payments in exchange for the latest gadgets, sneakers or DVDs. Tap on to a touch screen, swipe your card, and you can walk away in seconds with a new iPod or mobile phone. Best of all, you need never confront a human salesperson."

"Robot backers turn to Linux"

http://news.com.com/Robot+backers+turn+to+Linux/2100-11394_3-6094380.html

"What the world needs now, according to a Japanese research group, is a low-cost programmable robot."

"Little Bird helicopter flies unmanned for first time"

http://www.gizmag.com/go/5863/

"The Little Bird has achieved a major milestone in its development by flying unmanned for the first time. The payload for the first unmanned flight weighed 740 pounds, but could have carried an additional 550 pounds of payload. A more advanced configuration, which is expected to make its first flight later this summer, adds an additional 800 pounds of payload. Add all that up and the weapon payload could be as great as 2000 pounds, flown autonomously while its payload or sensor is guided from a remote site or another platform. We suddenly see a future of battlefields with flocks of warbirds, all networked, armed and very, very dangerous ... and not a pilot in sight!"

"Eyeball robot likes to watch"

http://blog.scifi.com/tech/archives/2006/07/14/eyeball_robot_l.html

"The End of Medicine: How Silicon Valley (and Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your Doctor"

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=071206C

"Your doctor can't be certain what's going on inside your body, but technology will. Embedding the knowledge of doctors in silicon will bring a breakout technology to health care, and we will soon see an end of medicine as we know it."

"Direct visualization and personalized self-testing will replace current indirect poke-and-guess diagnostics. Docs will be thrown out of work. "Geeks are at the gates" of medicine.""

Lecturer selected for Lego's Robot Development

http://www.cieonline.co.uk/cie2/articlen.asp?pid=&id=13558

"A senior lecturer at the University of Wales in Newport has been selected to be part of a team of 100 robotics professionals and enthusiasts that will help Lego develop their next generation robotics product, NXT, due for release in the autumn of 2006.

Dr Torbjorn Dahl, who is head of the Intelligent Systems Research Group in the Department of Computing, beat off stiff competition from almost 10,000 people who applied for a place in the programme which offers an opportunity to influence Lego's product and policies with regards to robotics.

All members had to sign a non-disclosure agreement promising to keep the details of Lego's new robot development kit secret until it is released commercially. The selected members were sent a prototype to evaluate and develop further.

"It's a great privilege to be chosen as a programme member - Lego's robotic development kit has been a huge commercial success and is used for education by thousands of schools world-wide," said Dr Dahl."

MANOI

"SRI deploys portable speech-to-speech translation system in Iraq"

http://www.digitalmediaasia.com/default.asp?ArticleID=16712


"SRI International, an independent research and development organisation, has delivered its Iraq Comm speech-to-speech (S2S) translation system to the US forces in Iraq. To date, 32 units have been shipped to Iraq for an investigative fielding of two-way language translation between English and Iraqi Arabic. The Iraq Comm system will be used by the US military personnel responsible for training Iraqi military and police forces."

Doctors

"To Peter Hunter, the future of medicine looks like this: You visit your doctor after weeks of feeling fatigued and lethargic. She takes a blood sample, records your DNA profile, does a quick CT body scan, then uploads the raw data to a workstation. Within minutes, software stitches together a head-to-toe living, breathing digital reproduction of your innards, which the doc can poke and prod just like the real thing. Turns out you have lung cancer. Rather than focusing on one treatment, your physician can test various scenarios on your digital doppelgänger - surgery, radiation, chemotherapy - and watch how your system reacts. The cure is the simulation that doesn't kill the virtual you.
This actually sounds really cool. But what it means is that AI and robots will be taking over the role of doctors even more quickly, putting most doctors out of work."

Real-life Gundam

http://www.digitalworldtokyo.com/2006/07/reallife_gundam_robot_runs_on_1.php

"Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (ASIT) has just unleashed the latest in a long line of bipedal robots to come out of the R&D labs of this country. The HRP-2m Choromet is a 35cm tall, 1.5kg Gundam lookalike that is driven by Linux and for once, we're actually told the flavor in use: ARTLinux in this case.

Although the droid was actually announced in May, there is some new info in the latest English press release. Under the hood Choromet, which has been shown in prototype form under different names at past robot shows, runs on a 240MHz CPU and has 32MB of memory, so we're assuming he's not Vista-ready.

As for availability, Choromet was designed to be "small and inexpensive," apparently, so we could be seeing the 'bot on shelves before too long. Mind you "inexpensive" in Japan is often equivalent to most folks' "How much!!?""

Toyota Overview of “Toyota Partner Robot”

http://www.toyota.co.jp/en/news/04/0311.html

Robotic Nation by Marshall Brain

http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm

Flying robot helps farmers avoid dangerous chemicals

http://nationmultimedia.com/2006/06/19/business/business_30006731.php

"You want to put fertiliser or pesticide on your crops, but don't want to expose yourself to such toxic substances.


Maybe you want to survey an unknown area to see the view from the sky, but it's too risky and expensive to send someone to do the surveillance.


The mechatronics laboratory at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) has developed an autonomous flying robot to help farmers fertilise fields and conduct aerial surveillance. "The robot has minimised human risk factors as it is controlled by a computer on the ground," said Sukon Puntunan, a doctoral student at AIT, who helped develop the flying robot."

Robotic Teacher

http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/007124.php

Robotic Lawyers

http://www.engadget.com/2005/11/10/law-firm-set-to-offer-robot-lawyers/

100 Mitsubishi Wakamaru Robots Sold Last Year

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002456677_robot30.html

Toyota Robots Coming to the Home in 2010

http://www.temple.edu/ispr/examples/ex05_06_06.html

Peripheral: Bigelow Orbital Module Launched into Space

http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/060712_genesis-1_launch.html

"Thanks to a boost today from a Russian and Ukrainian rocket-for-hire company, a U.S. private space firm has sent a novel expandable module toward Earth orbit—and a step forward in providing commercial space habitats.

Bigelow Aerospace of North Las Vegas, Nevada is flying prototype hardware that the firm anticipates will advance habitable structures in space to carry out research and manufacturing, among other tasks.

The Genesis-1 module was lofted skyward atop a Dnepr booster under contract with ISC Kosmotras. The rocket—a converted Cold War SS-18 Intercontinental Ballistic Missile—roared out of its silo from the Yasny Launch Base, an active Russian strategic missile facility.

"That's one small step for Bigelow...one giant leap for entrepreneurial space," reported Mike Gold, corporate counsel for Bigelow Aerospace in Washington, D.C.—on hand for the Dnepr liftoff. "We've had a successful launch. Of course this is just the first step in what's going to be a long mission. We're eager to get more information in regards to the progress of the mission," he said.

Bankrolling the expandable space module concept—now roughly a $75 million investment—is businessman, Robert Bigelow, owner of the Budget Suites of America Hotel Chain among other enterprises, and head of Bigelow Aerospace."

50 Terabyte DVD

http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/5936/

"Modified bacteria may allow for huge optical storage capacities.

If we look at the evolution of optical storage, there have been incremental leaps in capacity every few years. First, those old CDs of around 700 megabytes. Next, we found DVDs, and only recently has the 8.5 gigabyte media become available to the public. And soon over the horizon, Blu-ray. It is expected that these 25 gigabyte discs will change they way we watch movies. Some companies are even developing Blu-ray discs to house anywhere from 50 to 200 gigabytes. They may be years away, but I would love to backup my entire hard drive to a couple of disc's. And now, bacterium may allow for storage in the terabyte range.

Announced earlier this week at a nanotechnology conference taking place in Brisbane, Australia this week, Harvard Medical School Professor V Renugopalakrishnan detailed some interesting experiments. Through using genetically modified bacteria, they were able to create a light-sensitive protein. As this tiny little creature will react to differences in light, it could conceivably become the ones and zeros encoded onto any type of optical media.

The research is in its early stages, and the affected bacteria reverted to their original state after only a few hours. It took some work, but Renugopalakrishnan and his team tweaked the Halobacterium Salinarum bacteria's DNA so they could produce proteins capable of retaining their changed state for years.

The theory is that if this protein were painted onto a blank DVD or some other type of flat medium (eg. tape drive), storage volumes would be massive. There was the suggestion of a system to allow for the replacement of hard drives. It is unclear however if these bacteria could come close to the read/write speeds of magnetic storage medium. And one thing never mentioned, but somewhat obvious would be the environmental benefits. If all our optical storage were made from bacterium, then all of those AOL CDs could live in the landfill without rick of pollution.

I won't be greedy, but perhaps they could start by growing me a ten terabyte USB flesh drive?"

Microsoft, Colleges to Develop Robotics

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/12/AR2006071201670.html

Robotic smells are almost here

http://www.popgadget.net/2006/07/robotic_smells.php

Man Uses Chip to Control Robot With Thoughts

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/12/science/12cnd-science.html?hp&ex=1152763200&en=e2ad13e9af8d6fc6&ei=5094&partner=homepage

MANOI Robot Kit

http://www.digitalworldtokyo.com/2006/07/say_ahoy_to_manoi_the_freakyco.php

Holographic storage promises 10 TB disks

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid5_gci1194277,00.html

BBN Technologies wins DARPA artificial intelligence work

"The goal of the project is to combine specialized knowledge with common-sense knowledge to create a reasoning system that learns as well as a person, and can be applied to complex tasks. Such a system would expand the kinds of tasks a computer can learn."

http://www.washingtontechnology.com/news/1_1/daily_news/28912-1.html

1,000 Cores on a Chip

http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17076&ch=infotech

Robotic Bartender

"Motoman has recently revealed their latest robotic creation and it’s not for making cars, it makes drinks. Motoman's RoboBar is a robotic bartender capable of serving a drink every 10-15 seconds with 100% consistency to maximize quality and regularity. Customers order using a touch screen and RoboBar makes the drink using its robotic arms and gives it to the customer through a drink delivery chute. The RoboBar only consumes 30 cents per hour of electricity, which makes it much cheaper than a human bartender and customers won’t have to put up with its attitude or leave it a tip, which means they’ll have extra money for buying more drinks.

As much fun as human bartenders can be I won’t be sad to see them go, if it means my drinks will be cheaper, faster, and available 24 hours a day. How long before we have robotic sushi bars? And what does Bar Bot have to say about this?"

AutoAmbulator: Robotic Rehab for Neuro-Disease Patients

http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2006/07/autoambulator_r.html

Robotic Display-Measurement System

http://www.photonics.com/content/products/2006/July/11/83341.aspx

Robonova-1 Robot Available on Hammacher

http://www.i4u.com/article6043.html

Robotic Firefighter

http://www.nevadaappeal.com/article/20060711/NEWS/107110032

Cost Quote

"A bipedal walking robot today costs more than a Ferrari," Hirukawa said. "If we can find a nice application and sell a million of them, the price would fall to that of a cheap car."

Robotic Tree

http://blog.scifi.com/tech/archives/2006/07/10/breeze_robot_tr.html

Maxtor Shared Storage II holds 1 terabyte

http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/07/10/mss2/index.php

Robot Physical Therapist

http://www.news14charlotte.com/content/entertainment/tech_talk/default.asp?ArID=123221&AC=True

Freescale starts production of MRAM

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060710-7224.html

Intel aims for 32 cores by 2010

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/07/10/intel_32_core_processor/

ASIMO the Crossguard

http://asimo.honda.com/movie/wm_stream/asimo_psv_300.wmv

The Inner World of Ripley the Robot

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5503683

"A child can speak eloquently using just a few words. But computers tend to make clumsy communicators -- even if they know the definition of every word in the dictionary.

New research suggests that's because words and the rules for using them represent just the tip of a linguistic iceberg.

"Language is inherently a social activity," says Deb Roy, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It's far more than just a vocabulary and a grammar. That's just the surface stuff."

Roy is part of a team of scientists trying to develop robots that can communicate more effectively with people. In the process, they're learning a lot about what lies beneath the surface of human language."

Intel promises "100's of cores" per processor within 10 years

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/03/06/idfspring2006_tera_scale/

"Intel announced a new research program that aims to develop "future platforms that will develop capabilities well beyond those of today's computers." The program, named "tera scale computing research" involves about 80 projects and "hundreds of researchers" around the globe, Intel said. Within 10 years, the company hopes, the initiative will create processors with "10's or even 100's of cores."

"Once in a generation an opportunity like this comes along to bring dramatically improved computing benefits to millions of people," said Justin Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer. He believes that new and more powerful platforms will enable what he describes as user-aware computing or applications that show human-like characteristics."

"The program’s name, Tera-Scale Computing, refers to the terabytes of data to be handled by platforms with teraflops of computing power."



http://www.intel.com/technology/magazine/computing/tera-scale-0606.htm

Cores

"Intel said there may be as many as 100 cores packed on a single processor in 2016."

Quote

"The stakes are high. Carmaker Honda believes that robots will become its most important business. If Honda and other proponents are correct, the size of the robotics industry could end up overtaking the PC industry."

Wakamaru

ASIMO Video