Robotics Articles

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Welcome to Robot Shop
RobotShop, the World's Leading Source for Domestic Robot Technology. Here you will find personal robots, robot toys, robot kits and robot parts for building your own robots. If you are looking for robot pet care, robot floor cleaners, robot vacuums, robot pool cleaners or robot mowers, to do your household chores, this is the site for you. We also bring robots back to life™ via our Robot Repair Center. Read more...

Sense and Sensor Abilities
Many kinds of sensors are available to detect information about the physical world, ranging from thermometers for temperature to chemical sensors for pollutants to seismometers for earthquakes. Robotics research, at the Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering and elsewhere, is leading to the development of intelligent sensors that can adapt to changing environments or move to better locations to collect the best data. Tiny, two-wheeled and wireless, RoboMotes are designed to create networks of sensors that move and reconfigure themselves to adapt to new situations. Developed at the University of Southern California's Robotic Embedded Systems Lab, each golf-ball-sized RoboMote includes a wireless network interface, two wheels with odometers; a solar cell for power; a compass for direction; and bump and infrared sensors for obstacle avoidance. Because of their small size and low cost, RoboMotes make it possible to experiment with larger numbers of sensors in dynamic networks. Read more...

Where no humans can go (or want to go)
While the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers have become some of the most prominent robots in the solar system, NASA has teamed with NSF to test future robotic rovers in one of Earth's most inhospitable landscapes: Antarctica. In January 2004, the Tumbleweed Rover, which is being developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, left the NSF's Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station on an eight-day mission across Antarctica's polar plateau. Shaped like a six-foot beach ball, Tumbleweed sent back information about its position and surrounding conditions to a JPL ground station during its 40-mile, wind-driven roll. The test confirmed the rover's durability in an extremely cold environment, with an eye toward using the devices to explore the Martian polar caps and search for water on other planets. Read more...

Electrical Engineers Monitor Environment with Robotic Sensors
More than 80 percent of the earth's natural forests have been destroyed, and research shows 45 percent of lakes are too polluted to be safe for drinking, fishing or even swimming. We all know our environment is changing, but there's still a lot to learn. With new technology, we may soon have a clearer picture of exactly what's happening. Buried deep within some of our nation's most pristine wilderness is some of the most innovative technology electrical engineers have ever developed. Read more...

Vision and Robotics Research
Research in robotics and vision at UR spans a wide range of topics and applications, however one unifying aspect of the various projects is the focus on techniques requiring no or little calibration and thus are suitable to use in natural everyday environments. For example Randal Nelson and Raj Rao are each working on different variations of appearance based recognition which does not need any prior CAD models of the objects. Olac Fuentes has devised and implemented a way of grasping and manipulation a wide variety of objects with a Utah/MIT hand without the use of any object models. Martin Jägersand has developed a method which can learn Visual-Motor manipulation models on-line during the manipulations, instead of requiring a-priori calibration, and shown how to use the method to solve several everyday manipulation problems. Chris Brown and several students are working on vision for a mobile robot. Another benefit is that uncalibrated manipulation techniques lend themselves to better man-machine interfaces, where the robot is instructed for instance by the user pointing at objects (while wearing a "cyberglove" or with the mouse in a picture), or by drawing a "virtual sketch" in a "Mac draw" like program of the desired manipulation. This focus on uncalibrated methods is in contrast to most robot vision systems currently in use, where a carefully engineered environment, and an accurate a-priori model are required, and the manipulation task is described in how many millimeter the robot needs to move in a fixed world coordinate frame. Read more...

Robot Vision
If you're in an industrial setting using Machine Vision you will probably find an Adept robot at work. The company has spent many years interfacing their robots with vision based tools to allow for identification and assembly of parts. One of the most basic problems with industrial assembly is a process know as parts feeding. In this scenario objects/parts that are required for product assembly are contained in a large bin. The assembly process requires a single part to be isolated from the bin of parts. Adept has pioneered the use of vision in solving this part picking problem. Read more...

The Eyes Have It: Robotic Vision and Guidance
As vision and guidance systems get less expensive and more user-friendly, they will be increasingly integrated into robotic work cells as the range of applications for vision continues to grow. This is particularly true in the food-processing industry. ‘‘We, at BluePrint Robotics, specialize in food packing robotics. Our focus is mainly wrapper loading, tray loading, carton/case loading, and kit assembly,’‘ said Joseph Crompton, Director of Software and Controls Engineering. The robotics company is a member of the BluePrint Automation Group, based in Boulder, Colorado. Kit assemblies are made of several components that a robot inserts into trays, containers, boxes or cartons. Read more...