In what is pretty stunning news to me, iRobot has purchased Nekton Research for $10 million USD. The reason this is so stunning, is because Nekton is 30min down the road from me, and I’ve interviewed there! Nekton is a small business located in Durham North Carolina and specializes in underwater robots. You can see one of their robots, the Transphibian, operating after the jump. Up till this point Nekton has based it’s business on government research contracts and hasn’t done any large
Read more…

Huge hard drives Page 1 of 2 Macworld, CA - 10 hours ago If you have less money to spend or you don’t think you need a full terabyte of storage, check out the 750GB Iomega UltraMax. For those who don’t mind being …

Read more…

By Carol Gee It will be assured by a well-executed presidential transition plan. The American people are curious about whether current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates will be staying on after President-elect Obama takes the oath of office. It looks like there is some possibility that he will, based on these news items: Gates and Danzig? — A former Navy secretary praises the man whom he might eventually replace. “Obama Mulls Plan to Keep Gates at Pentagon,” from the 11/11/08 CQ Politics. To
Read more…

Previously in series: Worse Than Random A tale of two architectures… Once upon a time there was a man named Rodney Brooks, who could justly be called the King of Scruffy Robotics. (Sample paper titles: “Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control”, “Intelligence Without Reason”). Brooks invented the “subsumption architecture” - robotics based on many small modules, communicating asynchronously and without a central world-model or central planning, acting by reflex, responding to interrupts. The ar
Read more…

The Big Notebook of Fun is picked clean, my friends.  All that’s left, at this point, is a collection of questionable random items.  So, that’s what I’ll be serving today:  leftovers for dinner.  Disappointing, I know.  But sometimes it turns out to be the best of meals.  I’m making no promises, of course, but that’s the way it goes sometimes. When I’m at work my cell phone gets no reception whatsoever.  As soon as I pass through the front doors I might as well be holding a deck of cards to my
Read more…

Robots are the future, hopefully not the iRobot future where they try and take over, but funny little R2-D2 type of robots. And I’m not the only one who thinks about robots Piotr Karwas of Hideout Fims created this animated short about robots and robot bunnies. via: shape + color
Read more…

It’s the pride of Peru. The Dog of Kings. It’s hairless, has giant ears, is occasionally toothless with good looks that make the average rodent feel better about itself. It’s the Peruvian Hairless, and it just might go to the White House. In a craven election promise President-elect Obama offered his daughters a puppy but since Malia has allergies, and the new Administration refuses to cave in to the Pharma lobby and give her medicine, they need to find a suitable, hypoallergenic dog. Or just
Read more…

We all know just how cute Wall-E was during his run in the cinemas earlier this summer, and he has truly earned the title of being the cheekiest robot in the universe. After all, he had no inkling of what a bra is all about, right? Wall-E’s function in the movie is to collect and compress rubbish into a square, stacking those squares up nicely day after day without complain. Well, it makes perfect sense for Disney to tie up with iRobot with the new iRobot Roomba 530 Wall-E edition. Apart from t
Read more…

The Oklahoman, Oklahoma City, David Zizzo column: Motion made to … TMC Net, CT - 7 minutes ago Leave the vacuuming to the Roomba, the mowing to the Lawnbot and the cooking to Domino's, which fortunately delivers. If you do have to drive somewhere, …

Read more…

Pac Man can finally visit your home in his original Arcade game. Instead of simply loading it to a video game console or playing some form of handheld game, you can actually have the Pac Man Arcade in your home to visit the past and beat your records. The History of Pac Man is revisited over and over again with different designs and concepts of the round yellow guy. There are Pac Man Furniture to profess your love in your living room, and even a Roomba Vacuum Pac Man Hack to eat up your dust
Read more…