Unbreakable Quadrotors Last spring, Parrot released a cool slow motion video (see Video 1) featuring the famous AR Drone flying through water, fire, glass and crashing into a wall. While this video is really cool, it was performed under controlled conditions (see Video 5 for the making of). Still folks from Game of Drones took […]
NooTriX Editor
Vacuum Robot Love Story: Cute Commercial Inspired by Wall-E
The german company Vorwerk issued a cute ad video (see below) featuring their new vacuum cleaner robot Kobold VR200. The story is inspired from the Disney-Pixar’s great movie Wall-E: a toy robot falls in love with the new shiny robotic vacuum. When looking at Kobolds, one quickly has a déjà vu feeling. The Kobold has […]
Starwars BB-8 Droid Working Miniature Version Awakens
Update: Sphero released two other miniature Star Wars droids: The famous R2D2 and the BB-9E, the dark astromech droid of the First Order that debuts in Episode VIII – The Last Jedi Starwars episode VII (The Force Awakens) revealed the now famous round droid BB8. And of course, every fan wants one. Makers can make […]
Wall-E Disney-Pixar Movie
This Pixar gem is a romantic robotic love story. One of all time best robot movies to share with your kids. The main character is a small waste collecting robot named Wall-E, left behind by humans who had quit a too polluted planet. The cute little robot had to clean up the earth and make […]
Solar Roads: The Next Green Electricity Power Plants?
The production of enough solar electricity to cover all needs of our modern society, requires large areas of land that are not always available. One solution is to use houses top roofs and building facades. A more recent alternative is to use roads. This idea is backed by the observation that a given road section […]
Turning Footsteps Energy into Green Electricity
In his February 2016 TED talk, former US vice-president discusses the current state of global warming (see Video 1). During the latest decade, temperature climbed to values never reached before. Extreme violent events such as Hurricane Katrina became even more frequent. However, Al Gore is optimistic: the amount of green electricity produced by CO2 free […]
Warka Water: Collecting Water Out of Thin Air
According to the 2015 report of UNICEF, 663 million people around the globe struggle to find reliable sources of water to drink. Thousands of people including a huge percentage of children die from illnesses related to poor water quality. During the period 2000 to 2006, a total of 2163 water-related disasters were reported according to […]
Apple Watch Controls Your Vacuum Robot
Neato Robotics, maker of the first laser-based systematic cleaning vacuum robot continues to surprise the market with new innovations. After being faster than iRobot (maker of the famous Roomba) at releasing a wifi-enabled vacuum robot, they are now the first to make a robotic vacuum controlled from a smartwatche. On march 1st 2016, they announced […]
Computers with Emotions Talk by Peter Robinson
The importance of emotional expression as part of human communication has been understood since the seventeenth century, and has been explored scientifically since Charles Darwin and others in the nineteenth century. Recent advances in Psychology have greatly improved our understanding of the role of affect in communication, perception, decision-making, attention and memory. At the same […]
Robots can Help Understand Humans Talk by Pierre Yves Oudeyer
A great mystery is how human infants develop: how they discover their bodies, how they learn to interact with objects and social peers, and accumulate new skills all over their lives. Such development is organized and progressive, and results from the complex growth processes and interaction between brain mechanisms, the physical and the social environment. […]