The quadcopter craze continues. This time with a very small, very cool, open source kit. The Crazyflie Nano Quadcopter sells in two versions (both under $180) and will continue to develop and improve as more smart kids tinker with the open source code. One of the cool bits, especially for…
While the full details of the RoboMe Robot Toy are not out, we do know that it will use an iOS device (iPhone) as the robots face. The RoboMe is made by WowWee, a company known for making robotic toys. RoboMe will use speech recognition for learning names, can be…
If your house is smelling a bit funky, why not kill two birds with one stone. Vacuum your carpets while deodorizing the air. A company called Robot Add-ons has a cool Roomba accessory in the form of a air freshener that mounts onto the vacuuming robot. The RoomAroma add-ons will…
Smart folks from the Korean Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) Center for Intelligent Robotics (CIR) have created a robot to help out with household chores. This is the third version of the CIROS Robot and was shown at Robot World 2012. CIROS can recognized many common objects around the…
Typically solar panels are mounted in a fixed orientation which works pretty good. However, when you want to ring every bit of energy out of the sun it is best to use sun trackers. Solar trackers tend to be 40 percent more energy efficient than fixed mount systems. A solar/sun…
The robot-obsessed team at Boston Dynamics has created a Cheetah Robot that can run 28mph. That is pretty damn fast for a robot, but keep in mind that the Olympian Usain Bolt got up to 27.78mph during his 20-meter sprint. Either way, this Cheetah Robot is going to haunt my…
People in Linz, Austria were lucky enough to see an amazing swarm of 50 Quadcopters performing a synchronized lightshow. A smart group from the Ars Electronica Futurelab and Ascending Technologies GmbH launched 50 AscTec Hummingbird quadcopters at the same time. The AscTec Hummingbird Quadrocopters put on a pretty cool lightshow. …
Ubi, a play on ubiquitous, is a tiny android based computer that plugs in to a standard wall outlet like a nightlight. Ubi has WiFi, voice recognition (your voice is the keyboard and mouse), Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, an 800 MHz ARM Cortex-A8 CPU, and 1GB of RAM. The idea…