At the 2006 DEMO Conference today UGOBE announced the first of their new line of Designer Life Form robotics products, beginning with the cuddly Pleo. Designed to look like a newborn dinosaur (a 1-week old Camarasaurus sauropod, to be exact), Pleo sports 40 sensors, a life-like movement system, 14 servo joints and the ability to [...]

  Made famous by his work on the ubiquitous Furby, toy inventor Caleb Chung has founded a new robotics company — Ugobe — that is reportedly working on a new robotics toy. According to a recent article by Mark Calvey in the East Bay Business Times, Ugobe execs liken their new firm to Pixar, stating that Ugobe [...]

In response to the tragic string of fatal mining accidents to hit the mining community over the last few months, a few experts are advocating that robotics technology assume a greater role in improving mine safety. The National Geographic website has a lengthy news story by John Roach on recent trends in this area, including the [...]

Tim Beyers at The Motley Fool recently interviewed noted futurist Paul Saffo, and a good part of the discussion revolved around Saffo’s belief that consumer robotics may soon have as much of an impact on society as the personal computer and the Internet. Here’s a small excerpt from Beyer’s interview with Saffo: Paul Saffo: To me, it [...]

Although not breaking news, we had to mention the latest version of the AIBO robotic pet from Sony, which was released in late 2005. This latest variant — the AIBO ERS-7M3 — boasts a number of novel new features, including updated control software and the ability to understand about 30 Spanish words and phrases (in [...]

When it comes to leading edge gadgets and novel gizmos, the Japanese consumer robotics market has few equals. One of the leaders in providing low-cost (and uniquely-styled) personal robotics products to that market has been Tamiya, which has gradually been introducing more products from their entry-level educational robotics series into North America. While available in [...]

Buried in the far corner of one of the myriad halls of CES, Honda Motor Company demonstrated the latest features of their ASIMO humanoid robot. Honda has been a leader in the development of humanoid robotics for years, and this latest version of ASIMO demonstrated two new features never before demonstrated in the United States: [...]