The Biologically Inspired Robotics Laboratory at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) has created many unique robots. This research paper describes the process of designing and constructing one of the newest creations, a robotic cockroach. Weighing over 30 pounds, the CWRU Robot V is much larger than its real-life counterpart but its design closely approximates the movements of an actual roach....

The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is a subsidiary of Xerox Corporation. One of its most intriguing areas of study is "modular reconfigurable robotics," which is a technology that allows a robot to take itself apart and put itself back together again in a new form. This lets the robot customize its design for a given task. Several different models of robots have been constructed at the PARC, and...

The School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University's Robot Hall of Fame honors "landmark achievements in robotics technology and the increasing contributions of robots to human endeavors." The website groups robots into two categories: Robots from Science and Robots from Science Fiction. Robots from Science includes "real robots that have served useful or potentially useful functions and...

The Alpha Lab at the University of California at Berkeley researches and develops robotics systems for high-precision manufacturing. Specifically, it combines mathematical algorithms and industrial automation to build low-cost, reliable tools for "feeding, fixturing and grasping." The projects section of the lab's Web site describes a number of experiments and model implementations for robotics...

The School of Computer and Communication Sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology is "one of the major European centers of teaching and research in information technology.� This website describes the research of the Biologically Inspired Robotics Group. Its research focuses on the intersection between computational neuroscience, robotics, nonlinear dynamical systems, and adaptive...

In a very original study on human-robot interaction, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University conducted a series of experiments to determine if people would be more willing to interact with a robot with human-like features as opposed to one without. The particular "behaviors tested were the ability to convey expression with a humanoid face and the ability to indicate attention by turning towards...