More swarmbots

EMMELOORD, Netherlands (Reuters) – Motorists nostalgic for the time they could sit tight while attendants braved windswept garage forecourts to fill their tanks may yet see those heady days return — compliments of a Dutch robot.
Dutch inventors unveiled on Monday a 75,000 euro ($111,100) car-fuelling robot they say is the first of its kind, working [...]

“There is a quite an interesting human size robot that comes from UAE, REEM-A. It has some interesting skills as dynamic walking (of course), object recognition, voice recognition, self localization and mapping, long battery life and face recognition. Recently, the development team announced that the second prototype, REEM-B, will be presented in February 2008. The [...]

“A new study from UCLA showed that monkeys, like humans, learn faster by being actively involved in the learning process rather than just having information placed before them, according to a story in ScienceDaily. In the study, two rhesus macaque monkeys learned to put up to 18 photos on an ATM-like touch screen in a [...]

Say hello to RoboCup’s tiny competitors, the NanoCup!
“A total of five teams from North America and Switzerland built microscopic competitors that were around “six times smaller than an amoeba and weighed no more than a few hundred nanograms.” The wee devices showed their stuff in the oh-so-fascinating Nano Cup soccer match, which had to be [...]

“The 2007 installment of RoboCup has begun; individual events opened to the public today. RoboCup is an international robotics symposium and competition whose goal is to advance the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence to the point that in 2050 a robot soccer team can defeat the human world champions. This year, RoboCup is located [...]

I met Jed Berk and his wicked Blubber Bots at the Reboot 2007 conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. Had good fun interactig with them via bluetooth and touch. It’s amazing how quickly you begin to relate to these machines as “living” entities.
According to creator Jed Berk (who will also help save your pet from drowning), [...]

I am extremely excited to break even more good news today; Pleo pre-orders started today!!
After quickly converting the dollar price to danish kroner (DKK) I immediate went to order it, BAM!!! I was hit by a brick in the head, when reading this:
We ship to addresses in the United States.
Oh no!! Pleo is [...]

Good news robotics freaks! Today NASA JPL released a version of their robotics framework for the public.
CLARAty is the Coupled Layer Architecture for Robotic Autonomy. The first release of its software, version 0.10-beta, is now available publicly at http://claraty.jpl.nasa.gov.

CLARAty is an integrated framework for reusable robotic software. It defines interfaces for common [...]