Posts of the Year

As I make arrangements to close down things in the lab and prepare for a bit of turkey and ham, I thought I’d put up some of my favourite blog posts from the last year:

Finally, for a bit of fun, check out the Austrian Hexapod Dance Competition:

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  • I thought this might interest you:

    Vehicle-safety systems
    Stopping in a hurry

    Dec 11th 2008
    From The Economist print edition
    Cars are getting better at avoiding collisions. Before long they may be communicating with each other to make roads safer

  • Smart Robot Capable of Hunting For Its Own “Food”

    By Soulskill on note-to-robots-i-am-not-food

    coondoggie writes “Ok, maybe this is getting a little too close to bringing Terminator-like robots to life. For starters, eco-friendly engine builder Cyclone Power this week inked a contract from Robotic Technologies, Inc. (RTI) to develop what it calls a beta biomass engine system that will be the heart of RTI’s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR). The purpose of EATR is to develop and demonstrate an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling — in other words it needs to ‘eat.’ According to researchers, the EATR system gets its energy by foraging, or what the firms describe as ‘engaging in biologically-inspired, organism-like, energy-harvesting behavior which is the equivalent of eating. It can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable.'” We can only hope they don’t team up with the Multi-Robot Pursuit System project to “search for and detect a non-cooperative human.”

  • Hey Milan – I hadn’t seen any of those! I’ve been away in Australia giving a lecture. Thanks for the links. The missile defense one is rather interesting!

  • Our own little message board, right here.
    My PhD basically. Recognising places from photographs. Very soon the talk should be up on videolectures.net, so I’ll post about it then.

  • Getting and maintaining commenters takes absurd amounts of effort. If I miss even a single day of posting, traffic drops of dramatically the next day.

  • This is most likely the best article that ever cross my reference. I do not see why anybody should disagree. It may be too easy #for them# to comprehend…anyway nice work i’m coming again here for Extra Great Stuff!!

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