Back in 2009, the same researchers had this hand doing all sorts of crazy dexterous motions... dribbling, pencil flipping, throwing & catching, etc: http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation

Actually, the fully-loaded cost for a PhD student is $75k-$80k / year (ie the amount charged to a faculty member's grant). You have to remember, PhD students' tuition is usually incurred as part of the cost since they're working in exchange for (1) a minimally-viable living stipend and (2) fully-paid tuition.

We had two PR2's in our lab (Georgia Tech's Healthcare Robotics Lab). There were ~2 people working on each at any given time.... so the $$ makes sense. And the PR2 was a great platform!

Source: my work on the PR2 http://www.hizook.com/blog/2010/10/16/pr2-robot-autonomously-delivers-medication-using-uhf-rfid-live-cnn

Novel attack... demoed at TEDxAustin back in February and posted online for everyone to see ;-) http://www.ted.com/talks/todd_humphreys_how_to_fool_a_gps.html

There are a lot of hard engineering problems to overcome, even if the system was efficient... For example, a second resonant load nearby severely de-tunes the system, antenna mounting considerations are of supreme importance (good luck putting one on a laptop full of metal), and antenna alignment is absolutely crucial! The whole WiTricity concept might be sound in theory, but the engineering challenges are monumental.

That's kind of a funny title to see this on the front page of /. on the same day that we have one of the biggest (robotics) hardware announcements of the decade: Rethink Robotics just announced their $22,000 humanoid robot. The visionary behind Rethink is Rod Brooks -- former MIT CSAIL director, co-founder of iRobot, etc etc. This new arm is a 10x drop in price compared to other comparable platforms (eg. Kuka, PR2, Barrett, Meka, ABB, etc). Hardware is definitely not dead... but perhaps "PC hardware" is...?

IMO, the "big deal" in inflatable robots comes from OtherLab... They've built giant (ridable!) inflatable robots and inflatable robot arms with insane power to weight ratios. We did a special on them at Hizook a while back: http://www.hizook.com/blog/2011/11/21/inflatable-robots-otherlab-walking-robot-named-ant-roach-and-complete-arm-plus-hand The OtherLab project is also part of the same DARPA program (M3) that spawned the iRobot inflatable arm.

Description starts by talking about rockstar developers, then makes assertions about senior developers. These two groups are not even close to equivalent. Seniority (generally) implies experience -- not "rockstar" status.

This is a common misconception. In academia, "humanoid" will usually refer to a robot with _some_ humanoid features (eg. two arms). If you look at the "Humanoids" conference, you'll see that there are a healthy mix of legged and wheeled designs. So I thought specificity was good in this case...

Uhm... I'm pretty sure that every single one of the Intuitive Surgical DaVinci robot workstations are 3D for the operator -- and we all know that hundreds of surgeries are performed with these every day.. In this video of researchers playing "Operation" (the board game) with a DaVinci robot, you can see the operator console with separate eye pieces to give 3D effects. I personally got to play with a DaVinci at IROS (robotics conference) last year, and the operator console was definitely in 3D -- though the observer consoles are just normal 2D TVs. I was told that this had been standard for a _long_ time.

Javascript is broken in a number of ways. Just watch this video: WAT.

The fact that commutativity does not hold for "[] + {}" is just wrong! I understand the need for "pretty graphics" and "instant gratification", but a different language would have been appreciated. Heck... a background in python would at least set them up for a lifetime of scientific computing.

FYI, there was a TED talk about Ekso (formerly Berkeley Bionics): http://www.ted.com/talks/eythor_bender_demos_human_exoskeletons.html

I understand that they can communicate using reflective infrared light. My TV remote can do the same thing to reach a non-line of sight receiver. I believe they also use the reflected IR light for rudimentary distance sensing -- much like the Sharp IR sensor modules. What I'm trying to say: the hardware aspects of this project are fairly well-established -- as far as I can tell, there are no new "hardware" technologies (but I am a fan of readily-available low-cost robots). The Harvard group's big contribution (re:research) is in swarm algorithms.

There's a long history of home-made steerable vibrobots. You can probably make one of these from parts readily available in your junkbox.

A quick tangent: I've seen these in person. They're pretty cool, but I'm not sure what "technology" Harvard is licensing. Perhaps just the PCB design and code?

So a few brief items (that are updated in the Hizook article): The collaborator at Stanford is Manu Prakash; the inflatable actuators actually contract (not expand); they can be powered by either pneumatics or hydraulics; and Ant-Roach can probably support up to 1000 lbs (a bit more than just a few riders).