HECTOR: Insect Inspired Hexapod Robot

Understanding nature has always been one of the inspirations for development of Robots and automated technology. When it comes to legged robots, developers are always in the process to make Robots move as elegantly as animals to unravel the secret of nature, when it comes to movements in animals. Biologists and engineers at the Bielefeld Center of Excellence 'Cognitive Interaction Technology' (CITEC) are just trying to do that. They developed the hexapod walking robot 'HECTOR' for this purpose.

Elektra One Electric Plane Makes its first flight

Back in July 2009 NASA announced a Green Aircraft Challenge. The contest is a flight efficiency competition for an aircraft that is capable of managing average at least 100 mph on a 200 mile flight while achieving greater than 200 passenger miles per gallon. The competition is scheduled for July 2011 with an attractive prize money of  $1.65 million. Participating Team aircrafts include those propelled by gasoline, bio-diesel, hydrogen, and electricity. A German company named PC-Aero created an Aircraft that flies on electricity alone, Its named ELEKTRA ONE. 

Mercedes Benz F1 Suspended & Exploded display.

The Mercedes-Benz World, Surrey is now exhibiting a stunning and unprecedented display into the inside of a  F1 car at Brooklands Museum. The model named Mercedes GP Petronas F1 consists of 3200 components, these components are hung up in a really artistic and amazing display which looks like an exploded views you would find in illustrated encyclopedia, except this is real. The Artist behind this amazing feat is a Dutch artist named Paul Veroude.

Credit: Mercedes Benz

BrainDriver: Thought Controlled Car

Controlling interfaces and digital environment via mind control will probably play a huge  role in the future. How about driving your car by just thinking? Thats what researchers from Artificial Intelligence Group of the Freie Universität Berlin Germany have created. This research group works under AutoNOMOS Labs funded by German Ministry of Education and Research, has been developing innovative driving interfaces for cars with off the shelf components and devices. Earlier they developed a car that could be driven via an iPhone(iDriver), iPad and an eye-tracking device.

This time they developed a car that can be controlled by the power of thinking. To do this they used an off the shelf Emotiv "neuroheadset" (EPOC), which has become the most popular device of choice in the prototyping domain. It basically maps the electrical activity along the scalp produced by the firing of neurons within the brain when you think. It was originally developed for mind controlled gaming but its application are only limited to your imagination.

I-Driver is here, drive your car via I-phone

Smartphones have come a long way these days. You can almost do any given task through a smartphone  whether its shoothing a video or surfing the internet  etc etc. Smartphone have the same kind of processing power and memory in comparison to the laptop 5yrs back. Now we have smartphone which have a 1ghz+ processor and upto 512MB system memory

We all know the iPhone from Apple is one of the biggest craze in the smartphone market. At a personal note, I m not a big fan of Apple products but the iPhone is a descent gadget.

There seems to be no limit to what our smartphones can do these days . 

Robotics Group of the Institute of Computer Science at the Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany, have developed an application for the iphone called  I-Driver. Any guesses ? 

Actually they have developed/modified a car which they call the ‘Sprit of Berlin’ this car is equipped with an array of 3D sensors  a dashboard camera GPS, WiFi and other equipment which helps control the car.