Tag Archives: Robots

Building minds by building robots

Photo of Llever Elementary students

Building minds by building robots:

Emily Conner said she likes to spent free time on the Internet at home, learning about nanotechnology and specifically, nanomedicine.

The small video devices that can be attached to tubes and inserted through natural body openings for medical exploratories and procedures sound pretty high tech.

But through nanomedicine, “people could swallow a ‘pillcam’ and would’ have to use wires,” said Emily.

That’s pretty heavy duty stuff for a J.D. Lever Elementary School fifth-grader. Emily and her classmates are getting ready for a regional FIRST LEGO League competition at the James Taylor Center on the Aiken High school campus Saturday. Eleven teams from Aiken and other areas are expected to participate, with the top performers going on to a state contest in January.

Related: Lego Learning – Fun k-12 Science and Engineering Learning – FIRST Robotics Competition – nanotechnology posts

Toyota Robots

photo of Toyota partner robot

Toyota Announces Overview of “Toyota Partner Robot”

Toyota wants its partner robots to have human characteristics, such as being agile, warm and kind and also intelligent enough to skillfully operate a variety of devices in the areas of personal assistance, care for the elderly, manufacturing, and mobility. Furthermore, since each area requires a special set of skills, Toyota is promoting the development of three different types of partner robots (walking, rolling, and mountable), each with its own areas of expertise.

Read posts about the Toyota Productions System (TPS) on the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog.

Others are making progress on human like robots including Sony and Honda. See Sony QRIO Robots in action in this flash video below:

And read more about Honda Robots: ASIMO and P3.

Tour the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Lab

Robert Scoble videotaped his visit to the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Lab and posted the video to Microsoft’s channel 9 – which has quite a few interesting videos.

They have some of the coolest people I’ve ever met and the robotics might surprise you (two of the students were building soccer-playing robots on top of Segways, other students were building surgery tools, really great stuff).

More robotics webcasts from Channel 9.

2006 FIRST Robotics Competition Regional Events

2006 FIRST Robotics Competition Regional Events in Philadelphia, Denver, Houston and more 30 March – 1 April.

Competition events are, in the words of our teams, “full of passion, excitement, joy, and sorrow…the thrill of success and the agony of defeat.” The FIRST Robotics Competition has grown to 33 regional events and the Championship.

Boston FIRST Robotics Event by Computer Science Teacher

I was amazed at how much interest in engineering and science FIRST generated. A lot of students were inspired to look at area of education that they had never ever thought about before.

One of the things I noticed this year was that the number of girls involved in FIRST continues to climb. At the Boston event three of the 44 teams were all girls. All of the teams seemed to have significant numbers of girls. People at FIRST say that there are upwards of 30% girls in the program. That could be better of course but it is growing.
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I highly recommend you drop in on one. FIRST has to be seen to really be understood.

Students at FIRST Robotics competition

See previous post: For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST)