Plus, did you look at their paper....? Link: http://journals.aps.org/prl/pd... I've never seen a more phallic figure (Figure 1c.) in an E&M paper in my life. Some serious editor trolling going on with this paper.

Mods listed this as "spam"? That's mental. This type of actuator is awesome, and it's virtually unknown. I've even heard that there are now some academic labs actively looking to turn this into a real product. Whatever.

The same company is also working on inflatable robotics. I wrote an article about 'em a while back; it's definitely worth taking a look: http://www.hizook.com/blog/201...

They left off the most compelling example: Otherlab's inflatable arms. http://www.hizook.com/blog/201...

If Tesla makes the cars' power bidirectional, the excess capacity of cars plugged in for recharging (essentially) becomes a grid-connected battery itself. I recall seeing homebrew electric cars used as "generators" during brownouts a few years back. Tesla could do this on a massive scale using individuals' cars -- and pass some of the gains (peak power) back to the car owners.

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.