Robots Flipping Bottles In this year's RoboCon in Japan, teams of high school students built a bunch of bottle-flipping robots that can nail the internet challenge better than most of us.
A humanoid robot Engineers in Japan have constructed two humanoids that successfully replicate human-like movement during physical activity. The robots, named Kengoro and Kenshiro, can perform multiple push-ups, crunches, stretches and other whole-body exercises – feats not possible for earlier versions of human-mimicking bots to perform. Kengoro and Kenshiro’s developers say the humanoids may help researchers better understand how humans move during athletic sports, aid in the development of artificial limbs and whole bodies, and advance the design of crash-test dummies.
Inside the Japanese Hotel Staffed by Robots If there’s one place on Earth you can already get a glimpse of our robot-assisted future, it’s Japan. Routinely at the forefront of robotics research, the country has brought us some of the weirdest automatons, most lifelike androids, and cutest helper-bots. Nowhere is this more evident than at Nagasaki’s Henn-na Hotel, a hotel run by robots that opened this year. Walk into reception and a mechanised dinosaur will guide you through check-in; go to your room and a luggage bot will wheel your suitcase along beside you; get ready for bed and your own robot companion will turn out the lights. Henn-na Hotel CEO Hideo Sawada sells his offering as part of a utopian vision where robots take over manual labour so humans can turn their attention to more creative pursuits. Replacing staff with robots might reduce labour costs, but their appeal to visitors needs to last beyond novelty value. Motherboard host Ben Ferguson checks into the robot hotel in the first episode of our new travel series Voyager, made possible by travel tool KAYAK (http://www.kayak.co.uk/). The robot workers he meets are courteous and communicative, but can they emulate the human warmth of their flesh-and-blood counterparts? Could robots really be our future holiday companions, or do man and machine ultimately get lost in translation?
Robot Fail Horrible Japanese invention! Beer pouring machine. This thing sucks!
Ζιζανιοκτόνο με λέιζερ Μια μηχανή της εταιρίας Carbon Robotics που χρησιμοποιεί τεχνητή νοημοσύνη και λέιζερ ακριβείας, ώστε να καίει τα άχρηστα χόρτα που φυτρώνουν ανάμεσα σε άλλα καλλιεργούμενα φυτά και εμποδίζουν την ανάπτυξή τους.