It could be a rule of modern urban warfare: Send the robot in first. After all, it’s better to risk an unmanned air or ground vehicle than an infantry squad. While the United States has already deployed thousands of robots in Iraq and Afghanistan, its allies are lagging behind. Following the lead of DARPA’s high-profile Grand Challenge and Urban Challenge, both Singapore and the United Kingdom are staging robotics competitions this August to develop their own autonomous war machines.
To assist humans around the house, robots will need to be able to deal with the unfamiliar. But while researchers can preprogram robots to do increasingly sophisticated tasks, they face a much bigger challenge in teaching them to adapt to unstructured environments. A robot developed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, however, is able to learn to use objects that it has never encountered before.
The robot–called the UMass Mobile Manipulator, or UMan–pushes objects around on a table to see how they move. Once it identifies an object’s moving parts, it begins to experiment with it, manipulating it to perform tasks.
The Web would be useless without search engines. But as good as Google and Yahoo are at finding online information, much on it remains hidden, or difficult to rank in search results. On Tuesday, however, Adobe took a major step toward opening up tens of millions of pages to Google and Yahoo. The company has provided the search engines with a specialized version of its Flash animation player that reveals information about text and links in Flash files. It’s a move that could be a boon to advertisers, in particular, who have traditionally had to choose between building a site that’s aesthetically pleasing and one that can be ranked in a Web search.
Students at Art Center College of Design created their visions for the “Next Lunar Rovers” in a transportation design project sponsored by NASA. The design brief, which tasked students with designing the optimal lunar rover for the next moon mission, called for the designs to support the unique functional challenges of such a vehicle while inspiring everyone that sees it to want to go for a drive on the moon. The designs were also meant to serve as an icon to jumpstart interest of the public in lunar expeditions. Here are the student’s proposals for such a vehicle.
Zappos.com is going robotic with the use of robots to handle some of their warehouse work. The company has bought a Kiva Mobile Fulfillment System from Kiva Systems. The system comprises of several orange-colored robots, called Kiva workers that can handle a plethora of different jobs involving inventory in warehouses.
Zappos will use these robots to speed up the process of finding, packaging and shipping a customer’s order. The robots will work in the company’s Kentucky warehouse and will streamline the process of getting customers’ shoes (which is Zappos’ main product) shipped.
