HOME |
RSS | 
For those of you that treat your smart phone and tablet like it’s your best friend, you may now be able to get one step closer to having an actual companion. Google and the company iRobot have teamed up to create the AVA robot which rolls on wheels and uses a tablet computer as its “head.”
AVA is a pedestal shaped bot on wheels which can autonomously navigate itself through a crowd without breaking anyone’s ankles. While containing a great deal of its own functionality, AVA’s head is a tablet computer. Any tablet computer. iPad2, Galaxy, you name it – iRobot claims they want AVA to be “head agnostic”.
iRobot, the company that invented the Roomba household vacuuming robot, is developing a robot that locomotes by inflating and deflating sections of its outer skin, moving contents inside toward its destination. Kristina Grifantini writes at MIT’s Technology Review:
This week at IROS 09 (Intelligent Robots and Systems), iRobot and the University of Chicago unveiled a soft, blobby robot that looks something like an inflating marshmallow.
The new robot, called chembot, changes the shape of its stretchy polymer skin using a technique called “jamming skin enabled locomotion”. This means that different sections of the robot inflate or deflate separately; controlling this inflation and deflation enables the robot to move. DARPA, which is funding the project, hopes to use the robot to squeeze into small holes or under doors, which I’m guessing would be used for sophisticated surveillance.
Link via Geekologie | Company Website
