Tag Archives: automation

Best Paper

IEEE recognizes doctoral student’s robotics work with ‘Best Paper’ award

Ying Mao, a doctoral student studying mechanical engineering at the University of Delaware, earned the “Best Student Paper” award at the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

IEEE is the “world’s largest professional association for the advancement of technology.”

The paper, titled “Transition from Mechanical Arm to Human Arm with CAREX: a Cable Driven ARm EXoskeleton (CAREX) for Neural Rehabilitation,” was selected from among nearly 800 papers accepted to the conference. (more…)

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Training Your Robot the PaR-PaR Way

Berkeley Lab and JBEI Researchers Develop a Biology-Friendly Robot Programming Language

Teaching a robot a new trick is a challenge. You can’t reward it with treats and it doesn’t respond to approval or disappointment in your voice. For researchers in the biological sciences, however, the future training of robots has been made much easier thanks to a new program called “PaR-PaR.”

Nathan Hillson, a biochemist at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), led the development of PaR-PaR, which stands for Programming a Robot. PaR-PaR is a simple high-level, biology-friendly, robot-programming language that allows researchers to make better use of liquid-handling robots and thereby make possible experiments that otherwise might not have been considered. (more…)

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The Rise of Google’s iCar

With the recent advancements in robotics, automation, navigation, and self-driving vehicles, all spurred on by the DARPA Challenge and the research at Georgia Tech among other programs, it’s no surprise to hear that Google has been working very hard on these same kinds of technology.

Sebastian Thrun, Distinguished Software Engineer at Google, recently announced on their blog that so far Google’s efforts to create a self-driving car have been largely successful, though he made it a point to say that the program was still very much in the experimental stages. (more…)

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