This recent CNN article by Keller Rinaudo, CEO and co-founder of Romotive, sheds light on why we think (and hope...) robots will take off in the very near future.
As for many other things in life, money is one of the reasons...
Read the rest of this entry »
GEEK, an American print magazine launched in 2006, is “a lifestyle magazine for geeks of every kind”. The February edition of GEEK features Max Versace, one of the Neurdon founders, in a broad-band interview with Matt Casey in topics ranging from robotics cutting edge technology, to robotics ethics,… to sci-fi movies.
Read the article here.
The iRobot Roomba cleaning robots is still the most famous, and probably widespread robot in the world. Despite this has made many people happy not to clean their floors (e.g., me), Roomba is not exactly the robot many of us would have expected to keep the best selling position in the robotic industry for so many years. Who is next? Read the rest of this entry »
Robots are everywhere. So they say... yesterday morning I was chatting with a colleague of mine, who remarked how if you type "robots" in the search box on Youtube, you get a sea of results (to be precise, 361,000) showing robots coming in all different sauces and incarnation, from cleaning, to flying, to climbing, to swimming. But here is a question each Neurdon is surely asking: other than on Yourube, where are they??!! Read the rest of this entry »
The nth+1 book on how the brain works has appeared, this time at the hand of Ray Kurzweil. How many books have been written to date that claim to finally have cracked the brain, and promise that, for a mere $18.36, you can read it all? One too many... This FREE Neurdon article will save your next $20. Read the rest of this entry »
Is the era of passionate, flash-and-bones explores like Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, all the way down to their modern counterparts Neir Armstrong, over once and for all? Are humans explored just not "sturdy" enough to face the hurdles of modern space exploration? May be yes, but with a twist. Read the rest of this entry »
A new article on New scientist features Spikey, the new chip coming out of Karlheinz Meier's group. The University of Heidelberg, Germany, chip contains contains 400 "neurons". The original article (see link) describes the various networks the group was able to implement in the chip, which includes a variety of different circuits. Read the rest of this entry »
Brain-computer interface is... just what it sounds like. Some device is used to transfer information about the brain's activity to a computer, or vice versa. So we end up with two flavors of BCI: recording (for the brain-to-computer direction), and stimulating (for the computer-to-brain path). Utilizing the lucky fact that electrical signals are the language of the brain, we can do both of these things with tiny electrodes placed either in, on, or next to cells. And with this dual pathway we can then read off motor cortex information in order to move a prosthetic limb, or send seizure-combating signals into an epileptic brain. It seems so simple, right? Read the rest of this entry »
João Ranhel – Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE) Recife, Brazil.
The idea is pretty simple, though it is remarkable: “neurons represent information and compute as they form cell assemblies”. This notion is quite old, going back to early- and mid-twentieth century. The first evidences probably came from observations of muscles activities, once increasing or decreasing the number of active motor units changes the amount of force produced by a muscle. Read the rest of this entry »
Piloting ain't easy. In addition to getting an intuition of the physics of flight, a pilot has to learn how to fly by instruments and how to fly safely with other aircraft. A speck on the horizon may be another aircraft heading straight toward the pilot, at which point changing a course is necessary before the speck starts growing and it may be too late to avoid a collision. With an increasing number of airplanes in the sky, and the perspective of even more unmanned aircraft claiming a share of that space, there is a growing need for technology able to capture the basic skills of learning how to avoid aerial collisions. Read the rest of this entry »