Send in the robot! According to the Army, a chemical detecting payload is ready for adding on to older PackBots and can save soldiers from having to wear heavy anti-chemical gear which they can only do for 45 minutes at a time. Sounds like a perfect job for a robot. The robot (pictured via U.S. Army) is called the Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Unmanned Ground Vehicle, or CUGV. Pretty cool stuff. Clips: While it may sound like the basis for a new animated movie, this describes
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Insert double take here.  This thing is all ‘art’.  Actually, it really does take photos and poop them out.  It also posts the photos to its Flickr page via built-in WiFi.  It’s officially called ‘Charlie. Camerautomata’ and built by Taeyoon Choin.  He’s made up of camera, printer, and Roomba parts. More pics and official site here [Make]
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If you’ve been reading Robot Stock News, you know I’ve been harping for years on the need for iRobot to open some retail locations, most recently just a few weeks ago. But as it turns out, iRobot already has a retail store open. According to iRobot’s Hong Kong web site, the concept store was set to open in Hong Kong last month. It features not just the lineup of Roombas and Scoobas but also a “museum” showing the history of the company. Smart! I hope the company talks about this when they anno
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With all the talk of skyrocketing raw materials prices, I thought it was worth taking a look at nickel prices. Nickel, you may recall, is by far the biggest cost of making robots because of the large amounts of nickel used in iRobot’s large battery packs. Here’s a 3-Year Nickel chart: Here’s the 6-Month chart: Note last year’s spike in nickel prices? That cost iRobot a mean $5 million and helped spoil any upside surprise management had been hoping for (along with the millions spent fighting Ja
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If you spend any time traveling internationally for business, you understand the challenge of maintaining a high level of connectivity while keeping costs down. Let’s face it, international calling plans are expensive, and frankly the various roaming agreements can be confusing, leaving users trying to remember how much it costs to call from Prague to Paris as opposed to say Peoria or Portofino. Truphone today announced that their native VoIP client for the iPhone — developed with Apple’s own S
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