This website highlights robotics research from the Robotics and Manufacturing Automation Laboratory at Duke University. Their work is "devoted to the development of command and control systems for cooperative robots." Their website provides descriptions and some demonstration videos of their work in multiple industrial robot control, mobile robot development, sensor fusion, robot-World Wide Web...

This article from EE Times tracks the status of Team Overbot, "a group of enthusiasts, engineers, and partners" who are building an autonomous robot vehicle for the October 8, 2005 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Grand Challenge. The annual Challenge, sponsored by DARPA, requires designers to develop an autonomous robot vehicle that can successfully make a trek through all kinds...

Honda is widely known as a major car manufacturer, but it is also an innovator of new robot technologies. The company's "humanoid robot research and development plan" seeks to create a highly mobile, intelligent robot with the potential to benefit society. After many years of work, considerable progress has been made, and this is described in detail on this site. An overview of the development of...

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 Popular Science website, posts a range of articles on Science, Technology, History, Philosophy, Arts, and News & Ideas. Links to related books available through Amazon.com are provided at the end of each of the (fairly short) articles. The website also includes information on the Nobel Prize, including a list of all the Nobel Prize winners through 2001.

Scientist have created the world's first radio-controlled animal by wiring a computer chip directly into the brain of a living rat. The rats, each wired with three hair-fine electrical probes to their brains, can be directed by remote control by an operator typing commands on a computer up to 500 meters (1,640 feet) away. Developed by Sanjiv Talwar at the State University of New York 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...

Gabriel Hugh Elkaim, an Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of California at Santa Cruz has posted this blog called Robotica Exotica. This fun webpage contains "musings about robots, autonomous vehicles, and technology." Entries are posted frequently and previous months are kept in an online archive. Recent entries include a bit titled "Educational Robot comes packed with...

Recent news coverage on the Mars Rover has sparked a renewed interest in robotics. Projects like the Personal Exploration Rover (see under Education in this report) are bringing this technology to K-12 classrooms, while others are exploring the ways scientists can match the technology to the needs of people. This Topic in Depth offers a closer look into research on robotics and the many uses of...

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...