Chronicling Robots Since 2011
If the robotics world had a celebrity it would be Spot Mini of Boston Dynamics. Last month at the Robotics Summit in Boston the mechanical dog strutted onto the floor of the Westin Hotel trailed by hundreds of flickering iPhones. Marc Raibert first unveiled his metal menagerie almost a decade ago with a video of … Read more
Three and half years ago, I stood on the corner of West Street and gasped as two window washers clung to life at the end of a rope a thousand feet above. By the time rescue crews reached the men on the 69th floor of 1 World Trade they were close to passing out from … Read more
It has been two years since OceanOne, “the robotic mermaid,” first discovered the seventeenth century shipwreck La Lune, the prized frigate of King Louis XIV’s navy. Professor Oussama Khatib of Stanford, the inventor of the swimming humanoid, heralded in then a new age of subsea exploration. After the 100 meter dive labeled too dangerous for humans, Khatib, clutching his … Read more
Walking into XPONENTIAL 2018, I was dumbfounded by the keynote speech by Professor Zeynep Tufekci of the University of North Carolina. To paraphrase, ‘In the future, we will no longer need two pilots, planes will have just one captain and a dog. The dog will be there to bite the human in case he touches … Read more