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Cleatus Robot Toys Seized for Lead Contamination

Border Protection officers and officials from the Consumer Product Safety Commission seized two containers full of FOX Sports Cleatus Robot action figures at a Seattle port in January. The Chinese-made toys, valued at almost $100K, were found to have unacceptable levels of lead in violation of the Federal Hazardous Substances Act.

Swisslog SpeciMinder and RoboCourier Robots

Swisslog Healthcare announced they will be making available two new robots to hospitals, the SpeciMinder and RoboCourier. The robots are made for Swisslog by CCS Robotics and are based on the MobileRobots MT400 bases and Motivity autonomy technology. The Swisslog press release explains what the robots are for:

SpeciMinder is designed exclusively for INTRA-departmental materials transport. For example, a large one-floor laboratory or pharmacy in which several workers frequently move goods among multiple workstations is an ideal environment for SpeciMinder. RoboCourier will be available later this year and is designed for INTER-departmental materials transport. Like SpeciMinder, RoboCourier will be able to interface with doors, but it will have the added capability of interfacing with elevators and navigating hallways. This capability will allow RoboCourier to navigate multiple floors within a hospital, meaning it can transport materials from one department to another.

For more, see the Swisslog press release. If you'd like all the hardware details on the base, check out the MobileRobots MT400 Technical specifications.

Bacteria Turn Microgears

Researchers from Argonne National Lab and elsewhere are finding ways to use the motion of swimming bacteria to move very tiny gears. The gear's shape directs a group of unsuspecting bacteria in such a way as to cause rotary motion. This motion can then be used to power tiny mechanical systems - possibly medical devices or maybe even tiny robots. Speed of the gears can be controlled by modulating the oxygen level within the suspension fluid - since bacteria love o2, feeding them more increases the speed while cutting off the supply stops motion.

Weird Force One: Robot-a-day Mission

I'm not sure exactly what Weird Force One is; person, art collective, disembodied hand. What ever it is, it's making robots; lots of tiny robots constructed from found materials. Here's how the creator(s) of this video describes it:

The Robot-A-Day creative mission undertaken by Weird Force One at the request of some sort of Robotic overlord that showed up to his new year's party and never left. Will Weird Force One really build a giant robot army over the course of the entire year???

You can check out the photo gallery on the Weird Force One Facebook page for a better at some of these robots.

Random Robot Roundup

CMU scientists announced significant progress in deciphering how the brain encodes language, resulting in a testable neurosemantic theory predicting what area of the brain will activate for specific nouns. Find out more in the press release or the research paper (PDF format). Adam Claflin sent us links to his handmade robots which look like a cross between BEAM robots and art objects. If you see one you like, you can probably pick it up on his Etsy site. If you're looking to buy a robot in Australia, Michael Gruber writes to tell us that his retail robot store, called the Robot E Shop carries the Metal Fighter robot made by Mini Robot of Korea. They also sell Innovati robotic systems and Gestream's tiny BeRobot humanoid. VIA, always working on smaller computers, announced the Mobile-ITX, a 6x6cm form factor x86 module. The Swirling Brain has swirled up a couple of interesting stories too, including a new artificial larnyx that synthesizes speech in response to a tongue-activate palatometer and the all-time creepiest baby-headed robot ever conceived. Know any other robot news, gossip, or amazing facts we should report? Send 'em our way please. And don't forget to follow us on twitter.

Last Refreshed 2/9/2010 7:44:54 AM