It seems as if people in wheelchairs may be getting a little help from the military these day.  A Defense Department program to develop super-human soldiers has led private company Ekso Bionics to create a wearable robot that enables paraplegics to walk.  Ekso Bionics’ Iron Man-style exoskeletons have been quietly tested over the past year, at 10 different rehab centers and the results have been amazing!

The exoskeleton in development  is a wearable suit with exterior robot components that allows a wheelchair user to stand up and walk. It could be a life changing technology  not only for soldiers injured in battle, but for people with spinal cord injuries, multiple sclerosis, Guillain-Barre syndrome, lower extremity weakness or paralysis due to neurological disease or spinal injury.

Ekso Bionics has a goal of making an exoskeleton that is as easy to wear as a pair of jeans, and with more than 2 million people in wheelchairs that is going to translate to a lot of suits.

Ekso Bionics CEO Eythor Bender was quoted as saying

“Making a robot itself is difficult enough. To add that to the body and put it on like a pair of jeans is a whole other level,”

The exoskeleton has four electric motors that replicate a person’s hips and knees. Fifteen sensors are networked with a computer that sits on the user’s back and acts as a “brain.” A battery pack provides four hours of endurance.

It is not as simple as giving all people in wheelchairs an exoskeleton.  A candidate must have the upper body strength to transfer from a wheelchair to a regular chair and to balance with crutches in order to use the exoskeleton.

It is not cheap to use an exoskeleton.  The exoskeleton currently costs $150,000, which is a bargain for the ability to walk.

Bionic Exoskeleton, Meant For Military, Helping Paralyzed Walk is a post from: The Inquisitr

A group of crafty Harvard scientists have created a soft, flexible new type of robot that can crawl across surfaces and squeeze its way under obstacles.

Built by a team led by chemist George Whitesides of Harvard University, the robot draws inspiration from sea creatures such as starfish and squid. Rather than relying on motors, treads and wheels to move about, its motion is driven by compressed air pumped into the robot’s limbs through valves and tubes.

“Instead of basing this and other designs on highly evolved animals as models, we are using simpler organisms for inspiration,” researchers wrote in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “These organisms, ones without internal skeletons, suggest designs that are simpler to make and are less expensive than conventional hard robots, and that may, in some respects, be more capable of complex motions and functions.”

There are a few drawbacks, however. For starters, the robot is only capable of reaching speeds of around 13 meters per hour. Secondly, the robot requires being tethered to an external power source. Once they figure out how to integrate the power source into the robot, however, researchers figure similar technology could be deployed in the real world.

Check out a video of the wiggly robot below.

Source: PNAS

Harvard team creates robot that can crawl under surfaces is a post from: The Inquisitr

We all know that Angry Birds is a big thing with everything from stuffed Angry Birds to talk of a movie about the feathery creations, but I’ll bet you didn’t know that the game is now all the rage among robots.

Called the Bitbeambot, it resembles a mad Meccano creation and is the current front runner in the – believe it or not – Robots that Play Angry Birds Leaderboard with a comfortable lead over a Terminator T-100 robot that is apparently linked to a joke Twitter account.

Here’s some videos of the Bitbeambot playing Angry Birds

via Cnet

Even robots get bitten by Angry Birds [Video] is a post from: The Inquisitr

Did you know that dentists have the highest suicide rate of all professions?

Apparently it has something to do with the fact that people hate going to them even more than going to see a lawyer. From childhood the idea of going to the dentist is associated with pain, lots of pain. It doesn’t matter how much anesthetic we are given the sight of seeing that drill headed into our mouths is enough to make anything painful.

Of course it doesn’t help if you have a dentist that is incompetent but those robot friendly Japanese have once again bent their minds to the problem and come up with a training robot that is incredibly life like to the point it can shake its head, cough, gag, and even slam its mouth shut when feeling pain in its “jaw”.

Additionally the robot has voice recognition so that trainee dentists can practice their small talk as they drill and work away on your teeth.

It doesn’t end there either as the robot can store and analyze the students performance and provide feedback which can be accessed by the student online.

via Geekosystem

Realistic female robot created to feel pain is a post from: The Inquisitr

Scientific endeavour and robots help make life interesting but sometimes you have to wonder what prompts scientists to create the things that they do.

Take for example this robotic prototype from Kevin Grennan and we’re not talking about anything that is world changing but rather a robotic armpit.

Yup, you read that right – a robotic armpit with all the correct male sweat odors thanks to a chemical called androstadienone.

Apparently Grennan sees this being used on production lines in order to enhance the performance of female employees because according to him make sweat has shown in research to effect the mood in females.

I don’t know about him but the only result I have ever gotten is to be told to go have a shower.

via DVICE

Cool, Terminators can now have sweaty armpits just like the humans they’re trying to destroy. is a post from: The Inquisitr

Okay KFC has nothing to do with the story but you can be sure that they, like anyone who mass produced chicken parts will definitely be in the market for this champion chicken deboning robot from Mayekawa Manufacturing in Japan.

Not only can this sucker debone a chicken in mere seconds but it can rip through 1,500 chicken breasts in an hour and the manufacturer claims that it can do the same work as 10 full-time workers.

All this for a measly $560,000.

via DVICE

Chicken deboned in seconds – KFC drools [video] is a post from: The Inquisitr

The fact that “mysterious markings” have been found on the Great Pyramid of Giza isn’t even the single most interesting part of this story.

The strange symbols were discovered by a robot explorer. Using a bendy camera. If this post were a book, I would have read it thirty times when I was in the third grade. Even more mysteriously, the camera was inserted down “a hole in a stone door at the end of a narrow tunnel,” which in itself is one of several “mysterious passages” between the King and Queen’s tunnels in the Pyramid.

According to CNN, cracking the code of the strange hieroglyphs could help explain why the passages were made in the first place:

According to Peter Der Manuelian, Philip J. King Professor of Egyptology at Harvard University, similar lines have been found elsewhere in Giza. “Sometimes they identify the work gang (who built the room), sometimes they give a date and sometimes they give guidelines to mark cuttings or directional symbols about the beginning or end of a block,” he said.

Der Manuelian says robots are the key to unlocking the mystery:

“There are architectural explanations, symbolic explanations, religious explanations — even ones relating to the alignment of the stars — but the final word on them is yet to be written. The challenge is that no human can fit inside these channels so the only way to do this exploration is with robots.”

The next bit of exploration will be to examine stone at the far end of the chamber to see if it’s a wall… or another door.

Great Pyramid of Giza Robot Explorer Reveals ‘Mysterious Markings’ is a post from: The Inquisitr

I’m totally on-board with the scientific team behind the robot arm that can flip pancakes and that’s examine what this drone is capable of doing.

Okay so it’s really meant to show off demonstrated motion, trial-and-error and object motion tracking, but with such yummy results those ideas totally escape me.

According to Engadget it’s all about “Expectation-Maximization based Reinforcement Learning” but really it’s about a robotic arm missing the pancake most of the time…so maybe mankind isn’t obsolete, but once this arm masters pancakes it’s on to semi-automatic weaponry and eventually a terminator type near-apocalypse.

Here’s a video of the robotic arm in action:

A robot learning to flip pancakes from Sylvain Calinon on Vimeo.

Robotic Arm Almost Masters Flipping Pancakes, Mankind Nearly Obsolete is a post from: The Inquisitr

I don’t know if they do, or if they ever will as they take over the world, but in the meantime here are some great images of robots gathered from around the web by the crew at Creative Fan (who has a lot more of the great images).

Do robots celebrate Christmas? (12 great robot images) is a post from: The Inquisitr

I came across this great sci-fi movie short over at the Quiet Earth blog via a post by Alex Billington at FirstShowing.net. Now Alex isn’t all that hot over the video that has been getting a lot of web-play since being dropped on the web but I thought it was really cool and wanted to share.

It should also be mentioned that the director of this little gem, Federico Alvarez, has just signed a movie deal worth $30 to $40 million with Ghost House Picture for a script yet to be written. Who says good things can’t happen to people with imagination eh.

One of the best sci-fi short movies yet [VIDEO] is a post from: The Inquisitr

I’m sure somewhere someone is counting down the last seven days until this movie hits the theaters (I’m not) but in the meantime Michael Bay, the main man behind the movie, has let loose some facts and figures about the movie to tide us you over.

First off the important stuff – the Robots

With all that CGI work the amount of disk space used must have been massive

• TF1 took 20 Terabytes of disk space. Trans2 took 145 Terabytes. Seven times bigger!
• 145 terabytes would fill 35,000 DVDs. Stacked one on top of the other without storage cases, they would be 145 feet tall.

Tying it altogether of course is the rendering time needed

• If you rendered the entire movie on a modern home PC, you would have had to start the renders 16,000 years ago (when cave paintings like the Hall of Bulls were being made) to finish for this year’s premiere!
• A single imax shot in the movie (df250) would have taken almost 3 years to render on a top of the line home PC running nonstop.
• IMAX frame render times: As high as 72 hours per frame!

You can read all the fun facts over on Michael Bay’s blog just incase you find it hard to make it the full seven days without some sort of Transformers fix.

[hat tip to FirstShowing.net]

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen – some cool facts is a post from: The Inquisitr

The idea if melding human flesh and bone with robotic parts is something that more than a few people are looking forward while the rest of us have visions of Terminator dancing in our heads. For those eagerly awaiting for the future to become the present that day may just be getting a lot closer.

It would seem that the Hybrid Assistive Limb suit, otherwise known as HAL, will really be going into production and made available in Japan very soon for around $4,200. So for less than a bargin basement car you will be able to slip on this exoskeleton type suit and see your strength grow tenfold

This is great news for HAL’s target market: Its ability to grant its wearer tenfold strength increases during specific actions could change the lives of people with degenerative muscle diseases, or accident victims who would otherwise need long, difficult rehabilitative therapy to regain basic mobility. And with a five-hour battery life, it could be quite practical for day to day use.

Source: Geekologie

For some live action of our augmented selves check out the video

Becoming a cyborg gets closer everyday [VIDEO] is a post from: The Inquisitr

Personal wheeled transportation – it seems like everyone wants to get into the game that Segway started. Even GM is partnering up with Segway to develop a two-seater personal transportation called the PUMA. Now I’m not so sure what it the problem with something as simple as a bike or God forbid our own two legs but as you can see from the PR photograph anything developed by Segway and GM has been totally eclipsed in all forms of goofy looking.

Yes you too can wander the highways and byways looking like a reject from the Robocop factory. The Chariot as it is being called is manufactured by Exmovere Holdings and you control its movements by sensors located around your hips

Exmovere Chariot is controlled by subtle movements of the lower torso and hips. Sensors inside the cocoon-like shell of the vehicle predict the intended motion of the wearer. The Chariot requires no manual dexterity, minimal physical effort and allows wearers to closely approach and reach objects. The upright form of the Chariot allows its wearer to make direct eye contact with others. The Chariot is battery powered and can travel up to 12 miles per hour.

Exmovere is billing the Chariot as a mobility device for amputees and folks who have difficulty standing. It might be an interesting idea and may indeed be ideal for amputees but damn do you ever look goofy riding around in one.

[hat tip to Likecool.com]

Check this out – how to look goofier than riding a Segway is a post from: The Inquisitr

Well according to the latest issue of the journal Science Adam the Robot says so. Mind you he didn’t get there without some human help considering that humans had to design Adam in the first place. The thing is that unlike robots who are designed to perform repetitive tasks the scientists at Aberystwyth University in Wales and the U.K’s University of Cambridge designed Adam to take a more human approach to scientific inquiry. The idea being for him (it?) to carry scientific research automatically without human intervention.

It seems to be working because in the Science journal article it explains how Adam autonomously hypothesized that certain genes in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae code for enzymes that catalyze some of the microorganism’s biochemical reactions

The yeast is noteworthy, as scientists use it to model more complex life systems.

Adam then devised experiments to test its prediction, ran the experiments using laboratory robotics, interpreted the results, and used those findings to revise its original hypothesis and test it out further. The researchers used their own separate experiments to confirm that Adam’s hypotheses were both novel and correct–all the while probably wondering how soon they’d become obsolete.

"This is one of the first systems to get (artificial intelligence) to try and control laboratory automation," Ross King, a professor of computer science who led the research at Aberystwyth University, told Live Science. Current robots, he noted, "tend to do one thing or a sequence of things. The complexity of Adam is that it has cycles."

Source CNET News.com

While I might worry about this whole Skynet this is pretty cool stuff.

[photo courtesy of Aberystwyth University]

Adam the Robot makes scientific discovery is a post from: The Inquisitr

What’s the future?  Is it Minority Report?  Is it The Matrix? Depending on which futurist you talk to, it could be one or the other (or both).

The panel I attended early Friday afternoon showed compelling evidence that we’re living in a world of Minority Report meets Cyberpunk – if the realities of those fictional worlds aren’t here yet, they will be in a matter of moments. Why, then, are we still amazed by the things we see in HP commercials and Microsoft concept demos?

Because they’re just on the edge of what’s possible, and because they reflect a polished presentation that doesn’t seem to mesh with the reality of how such innovation is happening in this world.

One of the panelists told a mind-blowing story about a company he’s working with that is literally creating working brain-jacks. He described the installation process in vivid detail. These folks drilled a hole into each human recipient’s brain, and inserted a spherical piece of glass, hollowed and filled with fetal stem cells. He said that the wiring was affixed to the stem cell glass, and when it was all sealed up, they allowed the connections to organically grow to the installed jack.

This is something that’s happening now, and while it sounds highly illegal (another panelist even said as much), it’s apparently true. The reality of innovation, though, is far less grotesque and needs very little invasive surgery.

Repeatedly, the efforts of Johnny Lee were brought up.

If you haven’t seen his work, you should.  He’s Minority Report style interfaces by simply hacking the Nintendo Wii.

I see a lot of these things come through my radar as I write about advancements in robotics at my blog. Sure, there are lots of interesting bots and developments that come from the big guys like Honda and Sony, but for each news story concerning the Aibo or the Asimo there are ten homebrewed projects that create near-military grade robots using home-grown parts.

The panel was very interesting, and there were more than a few riveting videos of filmmaker perceptions of the future using currently feasible technology, but the bottom line seemed to be that if you want to see the future, you need to look to the hackers of today.

Mark Rizzn Hopkins writes for Silicon Angle and his own blog Rizzn.com.

If You Want the Future, Look to the Hackers is a post from: The Inquisitr

Ah the life of a true geek – never having to dirty your hands making those sandwiches that keep you going through coding runs or blog post writing. Yes folks in the true spirit of geekdom everywhere and the helping hand of an XKCD comic we present you with the Sudo Make Me A Sandwich Robot. Of course a big thanks has to go out to the robot’s inventors – Bre Pettis and Adam Cecchetti – for being willing to include us in this momentous moment in the history of geekdom.

Robot sandwich maker – well almost is a post from: The Inquisitr

Puppy vs Robot – Battle of the Holidays is a post from: The Inquisitr

[hat tip to Random Good Stuff]

R2-D2 disco dancing [Video] is a post from: The Inquisitr

Okay so maybe the cute looking little green robot isn’t the Terminator but according to Eric Talmadge; an Associated Press writer, when the little robot isn’t tasting wine it’s deciding what humans taste like. The robot developed by researchers at NEC Systems Technologies to be able to taste and identify dozens of different wines, cheeses and hors d’oeuvres.

As popular as this little wine steward might be on the jetsetting circle the interesting result of this bot’s tasting was when it came to humans. Like when a reporters hand was placed in front of the very expensive left arm which contains the sniffing infrared spectrometer

When a reporter’s hand was placed against the robot’s taste sensor, it was identified as prosciutto. A cameraman was mistaken for bacon.

Lucky for us humans there are no real plans to market the little guy, so we’re safe from being served up for some robot banquet breakfast for a while to come.

[hat tip to Billy and Collision Detection]

The Terminator thinks we taste like bacon is a post from: The Inquisitr

Remember Skynet?  For the uninitiated, the concept is very simple:  a giant surveillance computer system achieved sentience, and then decided that the best way to protect the Earth, and itself, was to kill all of mankind.  And there’s a bunch of people who think this is a bad idea, who try to stop it from happening in by manipulating the past, present, and future, all while trying to stay away (and, somehow related, alive) from the super-strong intelligent death machines known as robots.

Oh, I think I forgot to mention that this all happened in the fictional world of the Terminator, previously in the four movies, and, more recently, in the awesomely badass tv show on the surprising network of FOX.

Weekend Update

It’s all been good fun though, since it was all just a bunch of SciFi designed to scare, enlighten, and entertain.  It could never happen in the real world, and that’s what’s so fun about it!  Right?

Twenty points for “Wrong Answer”, Dr. Beerpants.

The reality is that Skynet is quickly becoming a reality, whether we like it or not.  And since I haven’t heard of Sarah Connor blowing up buildings, killing people, or traveling through time to avoid robots… I’m not sure there’s anything we can do about it.

Before you start complaining that I’m making stuff up, or jumping to conclusions, let’s look at the facts.

Good Morning, Dave

Point 1:  The Air Force is developing a digital warfare division.

Category:  Artificial Intelligence

No matter how watered down they want to say it is, do you really think the military is going to invest it’s time and money on a herculean scale just to develop some sort of DDoS engine?  Or a super-rootkit that will work on only certain versions of Windows, as long as they have the right hardware?

Come on.  This, I believe, is how the Skynet actually got started in the movies:  the military decided to connect it’s different pieces under one electronic, and intelligent, system.

Go figure.

Read My Lips

Point 2:  Satellites now exist in the realm of unimaginable resolution.

Category:  Satellite Surveillance

The recently launched Google satellite has been praised for it’s certifiably awesome resolution, but here’s the kicker:  this is a resolution that the public has access to.  And it’s common knowledge that the government has access to even higher resolutions… both for this satellite, and any ones that may or may not exist.

If I can get on Google Maps and count the trees in your 10-square-foot backyard… what do you think they can do?

I Work For Miniluv

Point 3:  England is becoming the always-watched country that George Orwell envisioned.

Category:  Video Surveillance

England has CCTV cameras all over the place.  I’m not talking the level of surveillance that the average American is used to seeing at malls, supermarkets, or even the airport.  We’re talking constant surveillance.  Everywhere.  Which now includes actually filming the every move of the police, through the simple method of putting cameras on their uniforms.

I think the porn industry may have beat them to the punch on the POV angle, actually.

‘Goose’ Is Now Known As ‘AF-666.Apocalypse’

Point 4:  Autonomous air support.  Completely autonomous.

Category:  Humanity-free Warfare

Most people are, by now, familiar with the concept of UAVs being used in places like Iraq to help spot targets, track people, or other obvious uses… but they don’t have the ability (as far as the public knows) to actually shoot anybody, or even fly by themselves.  Well, now they do.

Match that firing capability with computer-controlled flights completely devoid of human thought or interaction.

You’ve got yourself a free-thinking fighting machine.

Resistance Is Futile

Point 5:  Cyborg exoskeletons by a company named ‘Cyberdyne’.

Category:  Robots

A Japanese company is developing an exoskeleton that people can wear to enhance things like brute strength and leverage capabilities.  At first glance, this seems innocent enough, but think about it for a second…

• A machine that has massive strength and endurance?  Check
• The ability to plug any humanoid form into the machine?  Check
• Throw in a few motors, a can of oil, and some computer chips…

You’ve got yourself a robot.  Or, worst case scenario, a heavily modified human being.

We like to call those “borgs”.

The All-Together Now

Take the average of the five points, and multiply by four.  What do you get?  The hands and feet of a system that will eventually become what we hope for.  Or fear, depending on who you are and how evil a computer thinks you are.

The mythical Skynet doesn’t appear as an entire package in real life, things just don’t work that way.  I wish I could have been born old enough to legally buy alcohol, but I still have another month to go for that… Why do people assume that our self-contained future overlords will be any different than the rest of what humanity creates?

Things take time, and take incremental steps.  Sometimes those steps, while individual, appear as a great leap… but it all starts somewhere.

In this case, our demise begins as part military might and part civilian obsequiousness.

Sprinkled with a dash of Japanese awkward-but-not-so-untrue humor.

Kyle Brady is a contributing columnist for the Inquisitr, an entrepreneur, and has a future in science fiction.  He can be found at his blog, via email, or on Twitter.

The Rise of Skynet is a post from: The Inquisitr