Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Robots for the moon (google Lunar X PRIZE)

Hi fans of robot videos. In these vids you can see some robots and some hardware from teams enrolled in Google X PRIZE. If you don't know yet what Google X Prize is, then you should know that it is something just amazing. The rules are quite simple, but the target is something very difficult. Google X Prize is a 30 million dollars competition to land a robot on the Moon, then travel 500 meters over the surface of the Moon and send some images and data back to planet Earth. Teams must be privately funded (at least 90% privately) and they must be registered by December 31, 2010. The first team to complete these difficult mission objectives will be awarded $20 million. The full first prize is available until December 31, 2012. Then, the first prize will be $15 million. The second team will get $5 million. Another 5 million dollars will be awarded in some bonus prizes. The final deadline for winning the prize is December 31, 2014. I just love space expolration and this looks like something really great. In next 10 years, it looks like the moon will be really crowded place, with NASA, China, Russians and even private companies there and that is something really great. Take a peek on these vids where you can see where the teams are now, some of the stuff looks really good, but there is really long journey in front of them.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Yaskawa Motoman shows off its abilities

Hello robot fans, in these cool new videos you can see Motoman SDA5D, two handed robot from company Yaskawa that can carry 5 kilograms in each hand. In these videos you can see how it shows off its abilities using lego blogs. This robot is really amazing, because it is human sized, it can recognize various shapes and colors of blogs using its 3d and color senzors. Blocks of lego can be mixed up and it will just find the block it needs. It is really not very hard to imagine that this and more advanced robots will do more and more work that people are doing now so in next 20-30 years milions and milions homan workers will lose their job and because of this probably whole human society is going to change.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Real breakdancing robot

Hello, robots are getting every day to be able to do more and more things only people could do before. In these videos you can see one new robot that can do breakdancing! Well, in fact it is not the first robot than can do breakdancing, but this one is probably the most sophisticated. It's name is Manoi PF01 and in contrast to precedent robots, everyone can buy this one for 1500$. Creators of this robot cooperated with some of the best breakdancer in the world. Check out this cool robot video where you can see that this robot is really very good dancer and not just because it wears such cool clothes. I think that no one is going to beat this robot in "the robot" dance :)