Robotics

FIRST Champion Robots (and the Students Who Built Them)

Last Saturday, Atlanta’s Georgia Dome was packed with students cheering on the FIRST Robotics Competition national championship. We covered the final matches via live feed, but these up-close photos truly capture the event’s electric atmosphere. Even on the live stream, the excitement at the FIRST Robotics Competition Championship on Saturday was palpable. But these photos…

Tech News Kyle VanHemert Apr 20

Festo Scientists On Schedule For Doctor Octopus Transformation

The Festo researchers who built this prototype robotic arm claim that they were inspired by the form and function of an elephant’s trunk. But anyone familiar with Spider-Man’s nemesis, Dr. Otto Octavius, knows what they really had in mind. It’s only natural that under-paid, unappreciated scientists would spend their time working on a project that…

Tech News Kyle VanHemert Apr 17

FIRST Robot Competition Championship 2010

The championship match of the 2010 FIRST Robot Competition is starting soon. Many teams have fallen and many robots have fallen apart. But now it’s just the best student-made bots of the lot, battling for all the glory. Watch inside! https://gizmodo.com/first-2010-americas-engineering-whiz-kids-face-off-in-5518948 You can watch the stream of the event, provided by NASA, here. Learn about…

Tech News Kyle VanHemert Apr 17

FIRST 2010: America’s Engineering Whiz Kids Face Off In Robot Duels

Tomorrow, squads of rough and tumble robots will face off in an elaborate competition involving hard-hitting soccer in a robo-ready jungle gym arena. The craziest part: all the bots are built by high school students. At tomorrow’s FIRST Robot Competition Championship, student-made robots will demonstrate their mastery of a series of daunting challenges, ranging from…

Tech News Kyle VanHemert Apr 16

Battle Royale: Nike Sneaker Chick vs. Giant Spiky Robot!

Nike Japan commissioned this spot, featuring a lithe pixie-rebel fighting a rad, bad robot. Why aren’t US ads this kind of anime-cool? (Via Bryan Edward Hill)

io9 Marc Bernardin Apr 15

Bank’s Headquarters Are So Big That You Need Robot Guides

Turns out that there’s a financial center in Madrid, Spain which is so damn big and confusing to navigate that you’ll desperately need these multilingual robots to guide you around. Here’s how it works—in-action video and all: You stroll up to where the mechanical swarm is waiting, tip-tap your way through a menu on a…

Tech News Rosa Golijan Apr 7

Incredibly Creepy Japanese Android Gets Facelift, Still Incredibly Creepy

Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro is at it again. He’s improved upon his hellish personal twin android with a new model, the uber realistic Geminoid F. It’s totally just like Lt. Cmdr. Data, except you get night terrors. As you can see in the video, the facial expressions really are uncanny. There’s a frown in there,…

Tech News Jack Loftus Apr 4

The Robo-Skateboard: For Pipedreams Only

Costing about $1,000 and weighing 33 pounds, the Robo-Skateboard out of the Shibaura Institute of Technology in Tokyo will shred pipes of the dream-based variety when it arrives in 2013. The board operates much like the Segway: Learn forward, go forward; lean back, go backward. Four load sensors in the corners assist with maneuvering, which…

Tech News Jack Loftus Apr 4

Robot Journalist Advancements Including Interviewing and Photographs

Newly upgraded robot journalist, improvement from previous versions, including ambient anomaly detection ability for seeking of stories. Upgrade robot abilities including subject photographing and subject interviewing automatically. Further including abilities to publish stories to internet instantly. People will become worried: robot journalist is overturning professions. Old robot journalist previously existed LINK. Now numerous improvements for…

Artificial Intelligence Kyle VanHemert Mar 22

Robot Pokemon: Kojiro Would Destroy Asimo with Musculoskeletal Jujitsu

Kojiro here is the work of Tokyo’s JSK Robotics Laboratory. With his 60 degrees of motion, provided by a network of Super Effective! artificial muscles and tendons, he’ll utterly destroy Asimo in the inevitable slow-motion robot battle in their future. I say slow motion because, I mean, look at this thing. He’s getting more hand…

Tech News Jack Loftus Mar 7

The Body of a Tank, the Brain of an Android

We’ve come across plenty of robots that were controlled by phones before, but usually those phones were being controlled by human hands. Some California hackers, however, are building bots that harness Android for their robo-brainpower. Their first creation, the TruckBot, uses a HTC G1 as a brain and has a chassis that they made for…

Tech News Kyle VanHemert Mar 6

RoboPlow Is Man’s Secret Weapon In the Battle Against Mother Nature

Though it seems like the weather’s warming up now, think back to February when Mother Nature was piling on the snow with callous indifference. Feel that bitter cold on your face, that strain in your lower back. Now meet RoboPlow. This is the idea that every geek has had, but the guys at IdeaLaboratories were…

Tech News Kyle VanHemert Mar 6

Robot Skin Is On The Way

British material-design company Peratech recently inked a deal with MIT to create pressure-sensitive, electronically responsive “skin” for robots. This means, of course, that sooner or later we’ll have a terrifying robotic version of Buffalo Bill. Peratech’s signature product is a kind of sensitive metal-and-silicone material called quantum tunneling composite, or QTC. This technology lies at…

io9 Alex Eichler Feb 27

Control 20 Spotlights in Vancouver’s English Bay From Your Web Browser

I spend all day online, but sometimes I like to pretend that I’m doing something exciting out there in the real world. Vectorial Elevation let me control 20 gigantic spotlights in Vancouver. I almost forget I was in my sweatpants. The site is one component of a telerobotic art installation that includes twenty spotlights scattered…

Tech News Kyle VanHemert Feb 26

A Robotic Band With a Wiimote-Wielding Frontman

In what may be a precursor to the hippie/robot showdown we’ve always hoped for, musician Patrick Flanagan has founded Jazari, a three-piece robotic drum circle with some impressive grooves. If that’s not fun enough, it’s all controlled by two Wiimotes. Last week we looked at Marv, a robotic vibraphone that banged out an impressive rendition…

Tech News Kyle VanHemert Feb 20

The Science (Fiction) Of Embodied Cognition

Science fiction has long played with the idea of projecting unified personalities/minds/”souls” into different bodies. The premise is baked into the plots of stories like Avatar and Caprica. But how would it work in the real world? That’s what the science of “embodied cognition” is all about. The basic idea in this new(ish) research area…

io9 John Pavlus Feb 3

Repo Men’s Organ Home Shopping Channel Offers Sex For Mattresses

Universal has created a web page for Union, the company that sells robotic organs to those in need — until they default on their payments, that is. Check out the goods and the highly sexualized commercials of our near future. According to the site, The Union has: The world’s most cutting-edge technology in organ replacement.…

Movies Meredith Woerner Feb 3

Is The “Uncanny Valley” Pseudoscience?

Are humans doomed to find humanoid robots creepy? The widely-accepted “uncanny valley” hypothesis proposes just that. But when Popular Mechanics did an investigative report on this influential theory, they discovered it’s not based any scientific research. Popular Mechanics editor Erik Sofge writes: Despite its fame, or because of it, the uncanny valley is one of…

io9 Annalee Newitz Jan 21

Four Robots, Four Different Ways To Climb Walls

Here are four robots that leave me unsettled in four unique ways. The robots in this clip, developed at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, each employ their own distinctive method of wall-climbing. This snail-inspired bot uses hot glue. One of the robots is equipped with magnetic treads for sticking to any metal surface.…

Tech News Kyle VanHemert Jan 19

Fall Into the Uncanny Valley With Your Own Robot Double

Need a gift for the robot aficionado who has everything? A Japanese company is giving consumers the opportunity to buy a moving, talking robot that looks just like them, only creepier. For a limited time, Japanese robotics company Kokoro will offer two animatronic dopplegangers to consumers willing to shell out 20.1 million yen per unit.…

io9 Lauren Davis Dec 14

FIRST Champion Robots (and the Students Who Built Them)

Festo Scientists On Schedule For Doctor Octopus Transformation

FIRST Robot Competition Championship 2010

FIRST 2010: America’s Engineering Whiz Kids Face Off In Robot Duels

Battle Royale: Nike Sneaker Chick vs. Giant Spiky Robot!

Bank’s Headquarters Are So Big That You Need Robot Guides

Incredibly Creepy Japanese Android Gets Facelift, Still Incredibly Creepy

The Robo-Skateboard: For Pipedreams Only

Robot Journalist Advancements Including Interviewing and Photographs

Robot Pokemon: Kojiro Would Destroy Asimo with Musculoskeletal Jujitsu

The Body of a Tank, the Brain of an Android

RoboPlow Is Man’s Secret Weapon In the Battle Against Mother Nature

Robot Skin Is On The Way

Control 20 Spotlights in Vancouver’s English Bay From Your Web Browser

A Robotic Band With a Wiimote-Wielding Frontman

The Science (Fiction) Of Embodied Cognition

Repo Men’s Organ Home Shopping Channel Offers Sex For Mattresses

Is The “Uncanny Valley” Pseudoscience?

Four Robots, Four Different Ways To Climb Walls

Fall Into the Uncanny Valley With Your Own Robot Double

Southwest Is About to Limit Power Banks on Flights

Damn, the ‘Power Rangers’ Reboot Could’ve Had Four Movies

The Live-Action ‘One Piece’ Team Wants to Go the Distance

‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’ Will Please Gross Horror Fans

Somehow Paramount’s ‘Avatar’ Movie Has Leaked, Too

The World Is Basically Begging for Another iPod

Anker’s EufyMake E1 Finally Brings Printers Out of the Dark Ages

OpenAI Says Elon Musk Is ‘Injecting Chaos’ with Recent Legal Maneuver

This Loud-Ass Party Speaker Almost Got Me High AF

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The Best Gadgets of March 2026

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