Robotics

The firefighting robot, called the Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot (SAFFiR), is being designed to move autonomously throughout the ship, interact with people, and fight fires, handling many of the dangerous firefighting tasks that are normally performed by humans. The humanoid robot should be able to...

A “Cheetah” robot gallops at speeds of up to 18 miles per hour (mph), setting a new land speed record for legged robots. The previous record was 13.1 mph, set in 1989. The use of ground robots in military explosive-ordinance-disposal missions already saves many lives and prevents thousands of other...

The Army has identified physical overburden as one of its top five science and technology challenges. To help alleviate physical weight on troops, DARPA is developing a highly mobile, semi-autonomous legged robot, the Legged Squad Support System (LS3), to integrate with a squad of Marines or...

Chad R. Frost supervises the Autonomous Systems and Robotics (ASR) technical area in Ames Research Center's Intelligent Systems Division. ASR staff develops advanced automation and control technologies to...

Chad R. Frost supervises the Autonomous Systems and Robotics (ASR) technical area in Ames Research Center's Intelligent Systems Division. ASR staff develops advanced automation and control technologies to...

The emergency room may look a bit different in five years. And when I say "different," I mean that mobile robots will be waiting on you and collecting your blood pressure and pulse rate. Computer engineers at Vanderbilt University have a new idea about improving a hospital's emergency department, proposing...

This week's Question of the Week addresses another technical development from Google. In early October, the search giant announced that it has been testing robotic cars on U.S. city streets. The vehicles, equipped with a complex array of sensors and cameras that allowed them to steer around...

As someone who’s driven a number of years for hundreds of thousands of miles, I normally don't like someone telling me how to drive. I'm guiding the car at a speed I feel comfortable with, see the road obstacles ahead, and (supposedly) know where I’m going. Well, researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology...

The increasing presence of robots in industrial applications has been well documented. But robotic technology advances are also trickling down into the consumer market, creating a similar boom in the demand for personal robots. That is the conclusion of a new study by ABI Research titled “Personal Robotics 2009:...

The JPL Robot Vision Library (JPLV) provides real-time robot vision algorithms for developers who are not vision specialists. The package includes algorithms for stereo ranging, visual odometry and unsurveyed camera calibration, and has unique support for very wide-angle lenses (as used on the Mars Exploration Rover HazCams)....