Honda's humanoid robot, Asimo, was demonstrating its latest abilities at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems recently held in San Francisco. Scientists at the Honda Research Institute in Mountain View, California are working on robotics technologies to assist humans, aiming to improve robot mobility and communication. Victor Ng-Thow-Hing, Behzad Dariush, and colleagues were at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems recently held in San Francisco where Spectrum captured this video demonstrating two recent advances. The software prevents self collisions and excessive joint motions that might damage its system and is integrated with Asimo's whole-body controller in order to maintain balance.The researchers say that the ability of mimicking a person in real time could find applications in robot programming and interactive teleoperation, among other things.

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So Tufts University researchers decided to make their bots imitate caterpillars, some of which have the extraordinary ability to rapidly curl themselves into a wheel and propel themselves away from predators — really fast. It’s called “ballistic rolling” — one of the fastest wheeling behaviors in nature. Because it forms a “Q” shape before rolling away at an impressive half-meter per-second speed. ) “GoQBot demonstrates a solution by reconfiguring its body and could therefore enhance several robotic applications such as urban rescue, building inspection, and environmental monitoring.” lead author Huai-Ti Lin from the Department of Biology, Tufts University said.

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MIT's Robust Robotics Group seems to be as thrilled with the Kinect and the hacking possibilities that emanate therefrom as we are. MIT worked with the University of Washington on this project, using UW's SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) algorithms to construct these pretty models of the environment, using the data picked up by the Kinect's sensors. The SLAM maps are actually kind of a bonus on top of the main function of the project, which is to enable fully autonomous flight in areas without GPS coverage: SLAM maps are processed off site, but they're not necessary to the operation of the quadrocopter. The project has some pretty obvious military uses, which explains why it was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and the Army Research Office (way to mix up the naming conventions, guys).

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