Hiroshi Ishiguro's Huggable Robot

After a bad day, there’s nothing like a Hugvie

If you’re a fan of bizarre robots, you’ve got to be familiar with some of Hiroshi Ishiguro’s work. As the director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka University in Japan, Ishiguro’s gained a lot of fame through many of his pseudo-human creations.
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Magnificent Maneuvers

Robots designed to move like cockroaches and geckos

It’s suspected that the earliest forms of cockroaches were present over 300 million years ago during the Carboniferous period while our modern roach’s history dates back to the more recent Cretaceous period, which ended about 65 million years ago. The end of that era demolished the dinosaurs but anyone living in an urban environment knows that the cockroaches managed to survive!
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Robotic Therapy Gets Paralysed Rats Walking and Running

These rats are back in action!

Grégoire Courtine and his team at The École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) have been using a robotic harness and electro-chemical stimulation to get rats with damaged spinal cords up and running again.
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Technology as Empowerment

Joanne O’Riordan’s Address to the UN

On April 26, 2012, 16 year old Joanne O’Riordan gave a speech to the United Nations for Girls in ICT Day. Although Joanne was born with one of rarest conditions we know of, Total Amelia, her motto in life is no limbs, no limits.
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Fishing for New Ways to Monitor Water Pollution?

The SHOAL project develops robotic fish to help keep our waters clean!

SHOAL is a European research project that aims to produce a network of robotic fish to monitor pollution in aquatic environments.The project is being lead by BMT Group with support from several European universities and institutions which are focused on 5 specific aspects of SHOAL development:
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Up Next… Neo-Humanity?

Check out Russia 2045

Could we reach an age of cibernetic immortality? It’s a controversial question (to say the least) however, Dmitry Itskov is now making it loud and clear that he thinks the answer is yes and the Russian media tycoon doesn’t stand alone in his opinion. By founding the Russia 2045 movement in 2011, Itskov is now supported by a team of over 30 experts including some of Russia’s leading astronauts, physicians, mathematicians, neuroscientists and engineers (oh, and he’s also recieved the thumbs up from Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama).
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Robots with Green Thumbs

Could blending living and artificial systems help make agriculture more eco-friendly?

What started out as an undergraduate summer project at the Distributed Robotics Lab (DRL), part of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, has now turned into a long-term plan to
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BrainGate2

¨Turning thought into action¨

The Robotic arm moves  a thermos filled with coffee towards Cathy Hutchinson’s  mouth while she imagines carrying out this same motion with the very  hand she has been unable to move for the past fifteen years.
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Robots Get People Walking

Claire Lomas walks the London marathon with the help of a robotic suit

In 2007, accomplished equestrian, Claire Lomas, was told that she would never walk again after a riding accident left her paralysed from the waist down. 5 years later Claire’s about to finish the 2012 London Marathon with the help of a robotic suit.
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