Detailed Descriptions The NASA Space Telerobotics Program

Cool Robots Of The Week From 1997

This archive lists the sites selected during 1997 to win the honor of being listed as "Cool Robot Of The Week" - thanks to them all for being sources of inspiration and innovation for the robotics community!

Previous Cool From 1997

  Dec 29    AESOP- medical robot, a NASA SBIR program success story, gains FDA approval for market sales - see the press release here
  Dec 22    Santa the Robot- we just couldn't resist this one for Christmas week...
  Dec 15    Athena- the next in a series of robotic explorers to be sent to the red planet, this site describes the Mars 2001 rover and science package
  Dec 08    KhepOnTheWeb- access a miniature mobile robot, Khepera, and view the maze it runs through via on-board or off-board cameras
  Dec 01    Robotic Room- an automated hospital suite, where the entire room is the robot! You can also find out more here
  Nov 24    AERcam/Sprint- free-flying robotic camera for remote visualization of on-orbit spacecraft, being flown this week aboard Space Shuttle mission STS-87, which took lots of photos from the deployment of the flight experiment
  Nov 17    JACOB- a prototype autonomous sylviculture robot, with a nice discussion of robotic vision in a regenerating forest environment
  Nov 10    Serpentine Truss Manipulator- another serpentine manipulator for remote inspection, this one from the Automation and Robotics Development Lab at the NASA Kennedy Space Center , with a nice proximity sensor skin for collision avoidance
  Nov 03    PAKY- robotic surgical device developed by the Johns Hopkins University Robotics Research Laboratory
  Oct 27    Multi-Agent Robotic Systems- descriptions of the various multi-agent systems under development by the Georgia Tech Mobile Robotics Laboratory
  Oct 20    Serpentine- flexible manipulator for remote inspection from JPL
  Oct 13    TURAC- Texas Universities Robotics and Automation Consortium - check out their current projects
  Oct 06    Robotics Engineering Consortium- a cooperative effort to move government-developed robotics technology into commercial applications
  Sep 29    Gort- research robot from Brown University - it doesn't quite look like the original from The Day The Earth Stood Still
  Sep 22    Spring Flamingo- bipedal walking robot from the MIT Leg Lab
  Sep 15    Eyebot Project- a nice implementation of a low-cost solution for putting a robot on the web
  Sep 08    RoboToy- Australian on-line robot web site, which allows you to control either the real robot, or a JAVA simulator of the manipulator
  Sep 01    6.270- the one, the only, the original LEGO robotics competition from MIT - the grandfather of all the autonomous robotics design competitions
  Aug 25    RoboCup- First Robot World Cup robotic soccer competition, being held this week at IJCAI
  Aug 18    Biped Robot- Walking biped robot developed by Honda (the current version is in Japanese - you can also view the English version of the original page or an English summary)
  Aug 11    JEM Small Fine Arm - Currently flying aboard the Space Shuttle on Flight STS-85, this Japanese manipulator will be used as a payload servicing aid aboard the International Space Station)
  Aug 04    RoboMiner - Robotic and teleoperated underground mining equipment (and you thought they made big robots in Texas!)
  Jul 28    Polypod - A Stanford bi-unit modular robot built of two types of modules repeated many times
  Jul 21    Xavier - CMU robot, commanded over the web, that navigates corridors and tells bad jokes. This is research?
  Jul 14    Walking Machine Catalog - guide to the state of the art in ambulatory walking robots
  Jul 07    Sojourner - the first robotic rover ever placed on another planet, part of the Mars Pathfinder project!!!
  Jun 30    Rhino - get a live robot-guided tour of Deutsches Museum Bonn - online July 1 and 2
  Jun 23    Nomad - live observations of a 200 Km robotic trek across the Atacama desert in Chile
  Jun 16    Wave To The Cats - it does what it says... (with a nice explanation of how to interface robots to the Web)
  Jun 09    RobotZoo - cool travelling robotic animal exhibit from SGI - see when it is coming to your city!
  Jun 02    Hydraulic Extender - the first step towards a wearable exoskeleton system to amplify human force (a take-off of the old "Hardyman" concept developed by the Army and Navy in 1965)
  May 26    Tesselator - a semi-autonomous robot for inspecting Space Shuttle thermal tiles - see more here
  May 19    STIC - pneumatic four-legged walking machine for unstructured surfaces
  May 12    Team Hammond - winners of the 1997 FIRST robotics competition
  May 05    Art of Motion Control - robotics help create art (and check out the egg plotter!)
  Apr 28    AMARC - robotics in meat production - we particularly like the fish handling robots!
  Apr 21    MCAMWV - an autonomous walking machine built by undergrads from the University of Waterloo
  Apr 14    TROV - robotic exploration under the Antarctic ice
  Apr 06    SAMM - a nice mobile manipulation test bed - check out the videos!
  Mar 31    ODIN - an "intelligent" underwater 6-DOF development platform
  Mar 24    MACS - a novel multifunction automated crawling system for aircraft inspection (and other tasks)
  Mar 17    ROMPS - although slightly dated, a real materials-handling robot that flew in space! More can be found here!
  Mar 10    Sushi Robot - finally! a really useful robotic application!
  Mar 03    nanoManipulator - coupling a probe microscope and VR to create telepresence manipulator with a scaling of 1,000,000,000:1
  Feb 24    RAMS - robotic assistant for micro-surgery
  Feb 17    Tele-garden - the original telerobotically-tended garden from USC, now moved to Austria
  Feb 10    Hummingbird - Stanford University's autonomous helicopter
  Feb 03    Butterfly-Based Flying Robot - working toward a real insect-bot!
  Jan 27    Tele-museum - Use a 6-DOF manipulator to look around a museum
  Jan 20    Robot Assistant for Brain Surgery - precise 3-D localization during brain surgery
  Jan 13    Reconfigurable Modular Manipulator System - manipulator building blocks
  Jan 06    The Ants - MIT community of microrobots (soon to be nanorobots?)
Note: indicates the organization is developing technologies for space applications of robotics

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Maintained by: Dave Lavery
Last updated: November 11, 1997