NYT Story on Grand Challenge

From the article:

The race has forced developers to refine the software at the heart of the vehicles' navigation systems. The hardware used by many of the vehicles, including radar, vision systems, laser trackers and fast microprocessors, has remained largely unchanged over the past 18 months. In contrast, there has been tremendous refinement of the software, which employs artificial intelligence techniques, several developers said.

Access to the article may require registration. I'm not sure.

Robotics Articles in OCT 05 IEEE Spectrum

There are two robotics-related articles in the current IEEE Spectrum.

• The Rise of the Body Bots: About exoskeletons, with accompanying photo essay; and
  
• I, Roboticist: A piece about building a robot to go fetch a beer from the fridge.

Enjoy.

Next: A Robot to Butter Your Toast

And there you were thinking there's no future for robotics.

Link via Boing Boing.

Stanford Wins

Stanford University won the 2nd DARPA Grand Challenge in a modded VW Touareg.

It's On

DARPA Grand Challenge finalists go at it in the desert starting tomorrow, SAT 8 OCT. Pic is one of Virginia Tech's two bots that made it to the finals.

Defense Tech on Nano UAVs

No time to comment seriously: Just follow the link.