Heartland Robotics was founded in 2008 by Rodney Brooks, a co-founder of iRobot and former Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The company's mission is to bring to market a new generation of robots to improve productivity in manufacturing environments. Heartland's goal is to introduce robots into places that have not been automated before, making manufacturers more efficient, their workers more productive and keeping jobs from migrating to low-cost regions.

Heartland's management team is comprised of professionals skilled in robotics, artificial intelligence, software development and systems engineering, complemented by business managers with a track record of growing startups into billion-dollar businesses.

"Our robots will be intuitive to use, intelligent and highly flexible. They'll be easy to buy, train, and deploy and will be unbelievably inexpensive. Heartland Robotics will change the definition of how and where robots can be used, dramatically expanding the robot marketplace." Rod Brooks

http://heartlandrobotics.com/

Nick Webb is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Union College. His research encompasses a range of Natural Language Processing applications, including Information Extraction, Question Answering and Dialogue Systems, as well as Social Robotics, and Computer Science Education. He was the Principal Investigator of the NSF-funded Social Robotics Consortium of the Capital Region, and is co-PI of the Social Robotics Workshop, funded by the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT).

Honda Unveils All-new ASIMO with Significant Advancements;
"Honda Robotics" established as new collective name to represent
Honda robotics research and all product applications

UC Berkeley College of Engineering Dean's Society Event, Fall 2011

Training of robot operators at Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. Read more: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/fukushima-...

Building Gods - This film by Ken Gumbs tackles the issue of pending greater-than-human artificial intelligence and the possible ramifications. Different individuals with different backgrounds are interviewed on the subject, including a theologian, a philosopher, a brain builder and a cyborg. A wide spectrum of topics are discussed, including trans-humanism, mind-machine mergers, uploading, and artificial super-intelligence.

In the Summer 2008, they completed assembly of a novel planar bipedal robot for use at the University of Michigan. The robot, named MABEL, was designed in collaboration with Jonathan Hurst, Al Rizzi and Jessica Hodgins of the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon. Jonathan Hurst was responsible for the design of the mechanical systems of the robot. MABEL is comprised of five links assembled to form a torso and two legs with knees. The legs are terminated in point feet. The planar nature of the robot is manifested in the hips, which are constrained to revolute motion in the sagittal plane.

The OP:Sense system is a research platform for new concepts and methods in robotic surgery. It consists of three main components: light-weight robots with surgical instruments as actuators, haptic interfaces for controlling the robots and an extensive supervision system to acquire the scene in real-time (not shown here).

This video shows the current status of the system and some of the features already implemented.

OP:SENSE is supported by the European Union through the FP7 projects SAFROS and ACTIVE.

The Black Eyed Peas front man/ entrepreneur/ tech wizard, will.i.am pairs up with inventor/ FIRST founder Dean Kamen for "i.am FIRST -- Science is Rock and Roll," a groundbreaking, one-hour special promoting education, science and technology.

Carol is currently finishing her doctoral research in surgical robotics at Johns Hopkins University and running TinkerBelle Laboratory, focused on creating lovely, low-cost, do-it-yourself projects. She holds a patent on surgical skill evaluation and has been featured on PC World, the Washington Post, NPR and Engadget, among others.