7 covetable toys that blurred the line between robot, pet and friendChildhood pals Keller Rinaudo, Phu Nguyen and Peter Seid had a simple motivation for creating the smartphone toy robot Romo. As Rinaudo told CNET, it was because most personal robots on the market are simply “sucky.” Rinaudo, Nguyen and Seid — who founded the company Romotive — set out to build a personal robot that […]
In short: A drone with claws, a giant envelope of air, some congratulationsHere, some staff picks of smart, funny, bizarre and cool stuff on the interwebs this week. First, happy (late) World Poetry Day! Celebrate the occasion with 8 talks from spoken-word poets. Just when you thought Vijay Kumar’s robots that fly and cooperate were creepy enough, he and his team have developed a drone that can […]
TED Radio Hour asks: “Do We Need Humans?”Today, TED Radio Hour asks two questions many of us are scared to pose: will human beings have a purpose as robots become more adept at performing tasks and projecting emotions? And as technology gets more advanced, how does interaction between human beings change? In this episode — the third in season two — Sherry […]
X marks the spot: The TEDx blog editionThis week, TEDx took a break from posting talks as the team recovered from TED2013. However, their blog kept rolling with some wonderfully unique spins on the conference and more. Here, find some great pieces from the TEDx Blog. Dance, tiny robots, dance! The best moments, in GIFS Just now, session 1 of TED2013 ended, […]
Make your smartphone a personal robot: Keller Rinaudo at TED2013Sometimes, it feels like your smartphone is your friend. But if Keller Rinaudo has his way, your phone may be more like a pet. Rinaudo, the co-founder and CEO of Romotive, has created Romo, a smartphone robot. Your phone docks into a robotic base that looks a bit like a powdery blue tank. When you download the Romo app, […]
Robots as part of daily life: Rodney Brooks at TED2013We’ve heard a lot about robots at TED over the years. Demos of amazing specialized robots … talk about what robots can and can’t do … and will they take jobs from humans and is that a good or a bad thing? What’s missing is a concrete example of a multi-purpose robot that can indeed […]
The best robots at TEDIn session 1 of TED2013, we are meeting many new robots. First, we watched the amazing clip above of a troupe of tiny humanoid Nao robots dancing intricate choreography in unison. (They were presented by Bruno Maisonnier of Aldebaran Robotics at TEDxConcorde and beamed straight to the TED stage.) Next, Rodney Brooks unveiled Baxter, the human–like […]
Dennis Hong debuts a robot that dances to “Gangnam Style”Dennis Hong shared seven species of robots in his talk at TEDxNASA 2009, from the soccer-playing DARwIn to the cliff-gripping CLIMBeR. In this new video, Hong — the director of the Virginia Tech robotics lab RoMeLa — introduces us to CHARLI, a lightweight robot designed to walk and move like a human. Or, you know, […]
When flying robots meet mind controlEverything is a remix, Kirby Ferguson told us at TEDGlobal 2012, explaining that the essence of creativity is the welding together of others’ ideas to form something new. We couldn’t help but think of this when we saw an article on TheVerge.com about researchers at Zhejiang Univeristy’s CCNT lab who have combined brainwave technology and airborne robotics […]
Robots that fly … and cooperate: Vijay Kumar on TED.comHere’s the third talk from TED2012 (still going on). Yestrday, Vijay Kumar wowed the TED audience with his (and his team’s) flying quadrotors, small, agile robots that swarm, sense each other, and form ad hoc teams, and he premiered a very special music video — created specially for TED — which has gone viral less than a […]
The James Bond of robots: Vijay Kumar at TED2012Photo: James Duncan Davidson Welcome to Autonomous Agile Aerial Robots i.e. flying robots that can move like anything. Vijay Kumar, a professor at University of Pennsylvania, makes robots related to unmanned airplanes. But those are big and heavy and aren’t autonomous — they need humans to pilot them. The robots he works with are tiny. […]
