New Florence. New Renaissance.

Cutting-Edge Robots

“International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2009) in Kobe, Japan, where researchers from around the world will gather to discuss the latest advances in robotics--from cutting-edge climbing machines to robots that politely ask for directions.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania will present the latest version of RiSE, a four-legged robot that can both scamper along the ground and rapidly climb a tree or a pole….

…Researchers at the Institute of Automatic Control Engineering at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), in Germany, have designed a robot that can find its way around a city without GPS or preloaded maps. It does so by asking pedestrians for directions and using gesture tracking and voice recognition to interpret commands. It also uses human tracking, obstacle detection, and map building to guide itself around a busy city.”

MIT Technology Review

Kiva Warehouse Robots

“Robots have been around a long time, of course. The newness of Kiva, which has four patents, with another 14 pending, is the way in which Mountz's team has integrated three technologies: WiFi, digital cameras, and low-cost servers capable of parallel processing. The servers work in real-time, receiving orders, immediately dispatching robots to bring the required pods to the worker fulfilling the order, and then returning the pods to their storage locations. The robots receive their orders wirelessly, while using cameras to read navigational barcode stickers on the warehouse floor.

In combining these technologies, the 125-employee company is bringing a potentially breakthrough innovation to warehousing and distribution, which supply-chain research firm Armstrong & Associates estimates is $37.5 billion-a-year business. "Kiva represents the first really 'new' technology in order fulfillment in years," wrote analysts at Aberdeen Group after touring the Zappos warehouse last year. “

BusinessWeek

Below is a fun video put together by the company – its bots not carrying their typical pallet payloads of but performing the Nutcracker

Popular Science Best Products of 2007

From engineering to gadgets to alternative fuels, Popular Science lists innovations from around the world.

Dean Kamen's FIRST

Kamen. inventor of the Segway transporter and holder of a remarkable and varied string of patents, organizes through the FIRST entity an annual robotics event to encourage our young to do more in science and tech. In this year's competition teams have to "figure out how to build a robot that was capable of tossing inner tubes onto a moving rack in specific sequences and locations, all the while fending off interfering maneuvers from other robots"