May 6, 2007 at 7:01 pm - Tags: Domestic Robots, US, MIT, Quote of the day
EPFL got an audio interview with Rodney Brooks, Director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and co-founder of iRobot, in which he speaks about the future of domestic robots:
“The projects I’m really interested in right now are getting robots to manipulate the world. Successful robots that are commercially available are all navigation machines: they navigate around and they do some tasks, like cleaning the floor […]. The real, widespread use robots, is gonna be when robots can touch the world and physically manipulate it.”
(This interview is part of a series of very interesting podcasts conducted by EPFL)
April 12, 2007 at 9:42 am - Tags: Humanoid Robots, US, Research, MIT
This news release from MIT gives details on Domo, an advanced humanoid robot research project. “A robot that can function in a real human environment”, Domo is “an assistive robot which adapts itself to people and new places”.
Many applications are envisioned:
“A robot like Domo could help elderly or wheelchair-bound people with simple household tasks like putting away dishes. Other potential applications include agriculture, space travel and assisting workers on an assembly line, says Aaron Edsinger, an MIT postdoctoral associate who has been working on Domo for the last three years.”
Following researches conducted for years at MIT (namely on Kismet and Cog), Domo has 29 degrees of freedom and incoportaes dozens of sensors that “make it able to sense when a human is touching it”. Additional details and pictures can be found here.
Image: © MIT
