Category — robots

[videos and descriptions here]

[Read em here]

Watch as these autonomous copters take some beach ball abuse and keep flying.

“The Stanford Testbed of Autonomous Rotorcraft for Multi-Agent Control (STARMAC) is a multi vehicle test bed used to demonstrate new concepts in multi-agent control on a real-world platform. STARMAC consists of six quadrotor vehicles that autonomously track a given waypoint trajectory, and perform higher level optimal control strategies online. In order to make such a testbed easy to use, we focused on a small and light, lowcost design, which presented numerous opportunities for innovative work.”

“The resulting vehicles can fly safely in both indoor and outdoor environments, can carry computing and sensing resources sufficient for autonomous operation and perception, and have simple, reconfigurable construction with low maintenance requirements.”

[via diydrones | Starmac Stanford]

[New Scientist]

[by notanartist on Flickr]

photo by JJ San

Slideshow:

[sketches by Maura Cluthe | Flickr Set]

“Calgary doctors have made surgical history, using a robot to remove a brain tumour from a 21-year-old woman. Doctors used remote controls and an imaging screen, similar to a video game, to guide the two-armed robot through Paige Nickason’s brain during the nine-hour surgery Monday.”

[full story]