Summaries | Headlines

Simulation Reveals How Body Repairs Balance After Damage (September 26, 2007) -- Scientists have created a computer simulation that sheds new light on how the nervous system reinvents its communication with muscles after sensory loss. The findings could someday be used to better ... > full story

Robot For Lunar Prospecting Under Development (September 23, 2007) -- A robotic prospector is being built for NASA that can creep over rocky slopes and then anchor itself as a stable platform for drilling deep into extraterrestrial soils. Called "Scarab," this ... > full story

Humorous 'Bot' Recognizes Jokes (August 17, 2007) -- Researchers recently unveiled a "bot" -- more accurately a software program -- that recognizes jokes. All bad jokes aside, their research represents a step forward in computers reaching the ... > full story

Bedside Visits By Robots And Doctors May Get Patients Home Faster (July 24, 2007) -- Robotic telerounding may significantly reduce the length of stay of patients undergoing laparoscopic gastric bypass surgery if used to supplement standard postoperative visits, or "rounds," made by ... > full story

A Walking Robot Goes Mountaineering (July 16, 2007) -- Scientists around Florentin Wörgötter, Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience at the University of Göttingen, have simulated the neuronal principles that form the basis of this adaptivity in ... > full story

Robotic Arm Inspired By Elephants (July 9, 2007) -- Robot arms are expensive to build and dangerous to operate. If a robot system malfunctions, people can be injured. This is not the case of ISELLA, a bionic robot arm that is kind on the purse and ... > full story

Coaching Computer Canines In Clambering (July 8, 2007) -- The mutts are metal, the size of toy poodles, with four pointy feet ending in little balls. They need to learn how to make their way on those little feet across a treacherous terrain of broken rocks. ... > full story

Guessing Robots Predict Their Environments, Navigate Better (June 13, 2007) -- Engineers at Purdue University are developing robots able to make "educated guesses" about what lies ahead as they traverse unfamiliar surroundings, reducing the amount of time it takes to ... > full story

Rescue Robot Tests To Offer Responders High-tech Help (June 11, 2007) -- NIST engineers are organizing the fourth in a series of Response Robot Evaluation Exercises for urban search and rescue responders. A simulated structural collapse of a municipal building will allow ... > full story

Surgery By Satellite: New Possibilities At Medicine's Cutting Edge (June 7, 2007) -- Robots that perform surgery can be driven by surgeons who no longer stand by the patient, but direct the operation from a computer console. In most cases the surgeon is seated at a console within the ... > full story

Miniature Robot For Precise Positioning And Targeting In Neurosurgery Wins Award (June 6, 2007) -- While recent advances in neurosurgery have made it possible to precisely target areas in the brain with minimum invasiveness -- using a small hole to insert a probe, needle or catheter -- there ... > full story

Fastest Industrial Robot On The Market (May 8, 2007) -- Researchers have designed a manipulator-type robot that is twice as fast as all existing robots. To achieve this feat, they have worked on optimizing both the shape of the robot and its control ... > full story

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Robotic surgery -- Robotic surgery is the use of robots in performing surgery. Three major advances aided by surgical robots have been remote surgery, minimally invasive surgery, and unmanned surgery. Major potential ... > full article

Industrial robot -- An industrial robot is an automatically controlled, reprogrammable, multipurpose manipulator programmable in three or more axes. The field of industrial robotics may be more practically defined as ... > full article

Robot calibration -- Robot calibration is the process of identifying the real geometrical parameters in the kinematic structure of an industrial robot, i.e., the relative position and orientation of links and joints in ... > full article

Humanoid robot -- A humanoid robot is a robot with its overall appearance based on that of the human body. In general humanoid robots have a torso with a head, two arms and two legs, although some forms of humanoid ... > full article

Android -- An android is a robot made to resemble a human, usually both in appearance and behavior. The word android has been used to denote several different kinds of artificially constructed beings: a robot ... > full article

Computer vision -- Computer vision is the science and technology of machines that see. As a scientific discipline, computer vision is concerned with the theory and technology for building artificial systems that obtain ... > full article

Robot --

A robot is a mechanical or virtual, artificial agent. It is usually an electromechanical system, which, by its appearance or movements, conveys a sense that it has intent or agency of its own. The ... > full article

Artificial intelligence --

The modern definition of artificial intelligence (or AI) is "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes ... > full article

Computer -- A computer is a machine for manipulating data according to a list of instructions - a program. Computers can be extremely versatile. In fact, they are universal information processing machines. ... > full article

Trigonometry -- Trigonometry is a branch of mathematics which deals with triangles, particularly triangles in a plane where one angle of the triangle is 90 degrees (right triangles). Triangles on a sphere are also ... > full article

Web crawler -- A web crawler (also known as a web spider or web robot) is a program or automated script which browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. This process is called Web crawling or ... > full article

Search engine optimization -- Search engine optimization (SEO) is a subset of search engine marketing, and deals with improving the number and/or quality of visitors to a web site from "natural" (aka "organic" or "algorithmic" ... > full article

Alan Turing -- Alan Mathison Turing (June 23, 1912 - June 7, 1954) was a British mathematician, logician, and cryptographer. Turing is often considered to be a father of modern computer science. Turing provided an ... > full article

Data mining -- Data mining, also known as knowledge-discovery in databases (KDD), is the practice of automatically searching large stores of data for patterns. To do this, data mining uses computational techniques ... > full article

Computing power everywhere -- Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) integrates computation into the environment, rather than having computers which are distinct objects. Other terms for ubiquitous computing include pervasive computing, ... > full article

Computer animation -- Computer animation is the art of creating moving images via the use of computers. It is a subfield of computer graphics and animation. Increasingly it is created by means of 3D computer graphics, ... > full article

Search engine -- A search engine or search service is a document retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system, such as on the World Wide Web, inside a corporate or proprietary ... > full article

Security engineering -- Security engineering is the field of engineering dealing with the security and integrity of real-world systems. It is similar to systems engineering in that its motivation is to make a system meet ... > full article

Bioinformatics -- Bioinformatics and computational biology involve the use of techniques including applied mathematics, informatics, statistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, chemistry and biochemistry to ... > full article

Computer simulation -- A computer simulation or a computer model is a computer program that attempts to simulate an abstract model of a particular system. Computer simulations have become a useful part of mathematical ... > full article