cute rHex

I love this little guy.  I don’t know why.  I guess because the biomimetics are still ‘old’ (as in, probably, a whopping three to six years ago in the development stages of this piece) and so his floppin’ legs are like a spastic puppy whipping its way through the terrain as if it had no [...]

biomimetic car

This adorable and available-in-many-colors little creature was designed by Nissan and could be seen at this year’s CEATEC convention (2008) biomimetic car by Nissan.

Busy as bees, Nissan is in the process of working on a crash prevention system that makes use of the type of technology that bees use in practicing crash avoidance.  Research on [...]

SILO-6

The SILO-6 is an autonomous walking machine intended for the detection and location of antipersonnel land mines.  It has also been used as a testing machine for other organizations to use in their study of walking theory.  The development of this biobiot was inspired by the locomotion techniques of mammals, arthropods and insects alike. As [...]

biobot controlled by rat brains

“Gordon” is a biobiot controlled exclusively by living brain tissue. Stitched together from cultured rat neurons, Gordon’s primitive grey matter is removed from rat fetuses and disentangled from each other with an enzyme bath, and then specialized nerve cells are laid out in a nutrient-rich medium across a five-by-five inch array of 60 electrodes. This [...]

another walking bot project

This project is  by the people at the Department of Engineering Mechanics at the University of Duisburg in Germany.  The whole thing began all the way back in 1992. The goal of creating this robot was, like most of the bot projects at the time, to achieve autonomous walking of a six-legged walking machine in [...]

firefighting robot

In current development is a new kind of bot inspired by the pill bug.  Still just existing in sketches is the OLE, which stands for for “Off-road Loescheinheit” or “off-road extinguishing apparatus” (in German).

It is part of the industrial design program at the University of Magdeburg-Stendal, west of Berlin. The idea is that a robot [...]

QRIO, Sony’s official rep robot

Sony’s QRIO (pronounced “curio”) was originally designed to be a bipedal humanoid entertainment robot to be released as a commercial product following the huge success of the little dog Aibo.  QRIO 1’s slogan was “Makes life fun, makes you happy!”  Standing approximately 2 feet tall and having the battery power to last for one hour, it [...]