Bad Robot, No Cookie!!!

Solar arrays can provide energy to pump water to watering troughs for cows, improving water quality on remote pastures and saving money too. Farmers can more sustainably manage their pastures if cows are not all clustered around small creeks, eroding the banks.

One example of a worst case scenario is Dick Lester’s Spring Valley Ranch in Cherokee County, Iowa. He had one tiny creek that his cattle were trampling to death, reducing their own water supply.
He needed to pump water 150 feet up the hill to three separate watering troughs so the cows would spread out and not trample the creek’s stream banks, fouling their own drinking water supply and reducing the flow by eroding the stream banks.

Read more of this story »

ImagingLab Robotics Library for DENSO communicates directly with DENSO controllers to command and control DENSO robotic arms through LabVIEW software.

Compact Iyeron CMOS monochrome camera with camera link captures full frame 4096 x 3072 resolution images at usable rates that compete strongly with linescan cameras.

CMU researchers combine machine vision and intelligence to develop agricultural solution that formally could only be accomplished manually.

By integrating a 3-axis digital accelerometer with a 2-axis analog gyroscope in a single module, the new device improves performance, boosts reliability, reduces size and shrinks cost, for multiple applications in remote controllers, personal navigation systems and other portable devices.

Using a GE commercial certified flight management system, AAI’s Shadow unmanned aircraft performs first demonstration flight of UAS operating in the US national airspace.

Four universities working under the European Union’s Rawseeds project have developed set of free benchmarking tools that allow roboticists to effectively compare different Simultaneous Localization and Mapping approaches and algorithms against each other for the first time.

To better understand how a three-dimensional vortex forms, University at Buffalo researchers are conducting experiments using lasers and rectangular flapping “wings” in a water tank.

CyPhy Works is awarded $2.4M by the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, under the Technology Innovation Program, to develop technologies for small, hovering, Unmanned Air Vehicles to be used for the inspection and monitoring of large-scale civil infrastructure elements such as bridges and dams.

The roving, walking robotic soldiers of the “Terminator” films are becoming less sci-fi and more certain future every day. Now, a team of robotics researchers from the Virginia Tech College of Engineering will build a team of fully autonomous cooperative battle-ready robots as part of a 2010 international war games challenge that could spur real-life battle bots.