The Air Force recently experienced a robot invasion — Lego robots, that is — as hosts of the FIRST LEGO League US Open Championship. This year’s competition in Dayton, Ohio, assembled 60 of the best teams of kids ages 9 to 14, who designed, built, and programmed their robots to tackle a real-world problem.
The good folks at Festo are up to their usual biomimicry mischief again. This time, they’ve made a robotic appendage based on the fluid dexterity of an elephant trunk. The “hands” of this new mechanical arm are sensitive enough to grab items as fragile as a tomato without harming them, making it ideal for manufacturing.
This week (and pretty much every other week), our enthusiasm for robots knows no bounds.
In another example of African ingenuity, a Tongolese student named Sam Togo has made a walking humanoid robot using only spare TV parts. Sam says that the next steps for his robot (named SAM10) will be to program it to sense objects in its path and to greet people with a “hello.” Watch a video after the jump.
Remember Robonaut 2, NASA’s latest robotic astronaut? Well, now it looks like this awesome android might be launching as soon as September. Check out NASA’s latest video of R2 being put through some final tests [after jump].
