The Norwegian oil and gas company StatoilHydro has cooperated with SINTEF and the Norwegian Univ. of Science And Technology (NTNU) since 2007 and financed the Gemini Center for Advanced Robotics in Trondheim. A new concept for a remotely operated oil & gas platform located offshore is developed including research on robotics and instrumentation systems for the new platform. The goal is to develop this platform within 2015.
Visions, ideas, innovations, awards, trends and reports from leading robotics research and development places in the world. Robotland is a free information service edited by Wolfgang Heller, Infonaut AB, Sweden. Робот Robotti ロボット 机器人 機器人 روبات רובוט ראבאט
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Next Generation Robotics from Norway
The Norwegian oil and gas company StatoilHydro has cooperated with SINTEF and the Norwegian Univ. of Science And Technology (NTNU) since 2007 and financed the Gemini Center for Advanced Robotics in Trondheim. A new concept for a remotely operated oil & gas platform located offshore is developed including research on robotics and instrumentation systems for the new platform. The goal is to develop this platform within 2015.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Philips Helping Robot Arm

Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Danish Prime Minister tests Exoskeleton HAL

The Danish Prime Minster Lars Løkke Rasmussen (right) has recently paid a working visit to Japan. During his stay he met with Prof. Sankai, inventor and founder of Cyberdyne (center), the manufacturer of exoskeleton HAL. The Prime Minister got a demonstration and was also testing the robotic device supervised by Danish robotisist Prof. Henrik Hautop Lund (left).
Denmark and Japan have established close robotics relations in recent years. In 2008 Denmark signed an agreement with Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) to purcase 1,000 therapeutic robots (Paro) for use in health care facilities. The Danish government is the first organization to make a large-scale purchase. Denmark aims to have the Paro robots in their new homes by 2011.
Cyberdyne has recently signed for collaboration with Rehabilitation Center in Odense for starting a project funded by the Danish Government. "HAL" will be introduced to a rehabilitation center in Odense University Hospital for clinical trials regarding worker augmentation.
(Tokyo 2010-03-08)
€ 1,9 Million for Farming Robots
Friday, March 19, 2010
€ 600 Million for European Robotics Research
Thursday, March 18, 2010
New Robotics Training Network offers 10 research positions
The INTeractive RObotics Research Network, INTRO, a 4-year EU funded Initial Training Network (ITN) in the Marie-Curie People Programme (FP7) coordinated by the University of Umea, Sweden is offering 10 research positions (8 PhD student positions starting in 2010 and 2 post-doctoral positions starting in 2011) in the interdisciplinary areas of Interactive Robotics; Cooperative Robot Learning, Cognitive Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and Intelligent Interface Design.
INTRO aims to create a new generation of robotic researchers with a broad understanding of the research and technologies needed to build intelligent robots that function in close interaction with humans in unstructured, changing “real word” conditions. The training has a strong multidisciplinary approach complemented by specialized domain knowledge. Young researchers will work closely with industries, endowing them with insight and understanding of the industrial product life-cycle and valuable hands-on experience of top-level industrial robot development.
Academic and industrial partners in this network are coming from Sweden, Israel, Germany, Belgium, France and UK.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
EUROP/EURON 2010

The first workshop was on real technical problems and the other workshop was about social challenges. The conclusion after the two workshops was that more technical details and more problem description from the product visions are needed.
Tackling societal challenges such as aging society, climate change and sustainable manufacturing very concrete descriptions of product visions are needed for an upcoming position paper prepared by EUROP.
For information about the Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) for robotics in Europe visit EUROP´s SRA webpage where you also can download a copy for free.
Sunday, March 07, 2010
Robots at the 2010 World Expo
Swisslog enters US mobile robot market
Friday, March 05, 2010
Swiss Fibre-optic Robot cuts costs
Music Robot plays with Humans
The Robotic Musicianship Group at the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology develops meaningful musical interactions between humans and machines, leading to novel musical experiences and outcomes.
Shimon, the second robotic member of Robotic Musicianship Group, is designed to play the marimba. It utilizes melodic and harmonic perception and improvisation algorithms, adding to the rhythmic improvisation approach taken by Haile, Georgia Tech’s first robotic drummer. Shimon is designed create rich acoustic sound and to provide communicative social cues to its human counterparts. The robot’s head provides fellow musicians visual cues that represent social-musical elements, from beat detection and tonality, to attention and spatial interaction.
Thursday, March 04, 2010
€ 3 Million for European Care Robot
A 10 partner consortium coordinated by the Manufacturing Engineering Centre (MEC), Cardiff University, UK will start a R&D project to develop a remotely-controlled, semi-autonomous robotic solutions in domestic environments to support elderly people. In particular, the project will demonstrate an innovative, practical and efficient system called “SRS robot” for personalised home care.
The care robot wil be designed to act as a "shadow" of its controller. For example, elderly parents can have a robot as a shadow of their children or carers. In this case, adult children or carers can help them remotely and physically with tasks such as getting up or going to bed, doing the laundry and setting up ICT equipment etc. as if the children or carers were resident in the house.
This objective will be realised by the following SRS innovations:
A new intent-based remote control mechanism to enable the robots to be tele-operated over a real-world communication network robustly.
An adaptive autonomy mechanism to enable a highly efficient task execution for remotely controlled service robots.
A new robotic self-learning mechanism to enable the robots to learn from their experience.
A safety-oriented framework derived through extensive usability and user acceptance studies that enable service robots to be effectively deployed into home care applications.
The prototypes created in this project will be tested at the “S.Maria Nascente” Centre in Milano and the IZA Care Center in San Sebastián. The final solution will be further developed by Hewlett-Packard and other industrial partners of the consortium for a worldwide market with significant potential and volume.
The € 3 Million research project is supported by EC funding from the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). The project comprises partners from Bulgaria, Italy, Germany, Spain and the UK.
Wednesday, March 03, 2010
Interactive Music Robot
This piece is a joint performance created by Infonaut and Quartet.cc. Quartet is an Internet Interactive Kenetic Musical robotinstrument.
The interactive music robot was developed by art roboticists Jeff Lieberman and Dan Paluska and consists of three robotic musical instruments and an installation visitor. The division of labor is simple: the user inputs a musical motif, software composes a work, and the robot orchestra delivers the performance (though one that turns out to be a highly complex affair). The five-centimeter-wide bars of a marimba are bombarded with balls fired from several meters away, robot fingers dexterously draw melodies out of a wine-glass organ, and an unconventional percussion section provides the rhythm.
The musicrobot Quartet is hosted by the Ars Electronics Center (AEC) in Linz Austria, where visitors can create their own song live, which will automatically posted to YouTube. The music robot can even be accessed via Internet.