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Panasonic Evolta Cycling Robot to Tackle Le Mans Circuit

According to story in the Yomiuri Shimbun, Panasonic is planning to pit their diminutive Evolta cycling robot against the famed 24 Hours of Le Mans circuit in France on August 7th. The Evolta—named after the Panasonic AA Evolta batteries that power it—will try to lap the famed road course as many times in possible in [...]

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Woods Hole Robots to Explore Arctic Ocean Floor

According to a news release over at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), a vessel (loaded with a few robotic submersibles) will soon be headed to the Arctic to search for signs of life on what WHOI dubs “…the seafloor of the world’s most isolated ocean.” The Swedish icebreaker Oden will serve as the transportation [...]

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Brain-Sucking Aliens Beware:
Land Walker is here!

If you’re a Mecha/BattleTech fan who is eagerly looking forward to the day when giant walking robots are stomping about the ravaged battlefields of a post-apocalyptic earth, your dream came just one tiny step (or more accurately: a few stumbling, rattling steps) closer to fruition. As shown on YouTube, an enterprising Japanese inventor has managed [...]

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The Sawfish:
Underwater Lumber Harvesting Made Easy

When you first hear the phrase underwater logging, you may think of underwater basket-weaving, that often joked about imaginary college course. Unlike the weaving of baskets, however, harvesting lumber underwater has proven to be a viable (and profitable) business for Triton Logging, a Canadian forestry equipment firm. Many trees are submerged in dams and reservoirs, and [...]

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NC State Unveils DARPA Urban Challenge Entry

  Not content to field yet another hulking behemoth in the upcoming 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge autonomous vehicle event, North Carolina State University has teamed with Lotus Engineering to build a modified Lotus Elise sportscar for their entry. Check out this related DARPA Lotus Elise post for more information on the speedy driverless-vehicle to be, in [...]

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Citroen’s transforming car-bot

In one of the coolest combinations of robotics, visual effects and advertising we’ve seen in some time, French automaker Citroen has produced not one, but two tv ads featuring the Citroen C4 (a small vehicle primarily available only in Europe) transforming into a Transformer-esque character. In the first ad, the C4 does some warm-up exercises [...]

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Honda demonstrates mind-controlled robot hand

In news that will surely stoke the imaginations of SciFi novelists everywhere, AP Business Writer Yuri Kageyama has news of a recent demonstration by Honda in Japan showing a robotic hand — connected to magnetic resonance imaging hardware (MRI) and some powerful software — that was able to replicate some simple hand gestures of the [...]

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The Robot Car Retriever

We’ve already posted a bit about robotic vehicles here at nxtbot.com, but what about robotic garages? Now we have news that VW has developed a robotic car storage and retrieval system for storing new vehicles. It seems that the car grabber can fetch your new car for you if you happen to purchase a vehicle [...]

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DARPA 2007 Urban Challenge Announced

We’ve already posted a bit about the impressive results from the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, which tasked a bevy of robotic vehicles with autonomously navigating a 131.2 mile road course. Three vehicles managed to make it across the finish line in the time allotted for the competition, proving that full-size robotic vehicles are a tangible [...]

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