Category: Blog Post
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Robowars at Vivid
Robowars competitors show off their jumping talents.
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Google’s robot challenge
Google recently acquired eight high profile start-up robotics companies, providing strong evidence of a strategy to create breakthrough applications for robotics over the next decade. This strategy is most likely to concentrate on manufacturing and logistics.
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Robotronica
An event such as Robotronica, in Brisbane on the 18th of August 2013, reveals how popular robots are with the general public. QUT’s new Science and Engineering Centre was packed with curious families, shuffling from exhibition to demonstration.
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Conveying copper ore at Northparkes Open Day
The search for robots does not always end with finding discrete autonomous actors. The picture is more complex. In March, I travelled 7 hours West to visit the Open Day at Rio Tinto’s copper mine at Northparkes NSW (near Parkes) on March 2 2013. This visit was an opportunity to experience and understand some of…
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Mining automation, displaced labour and materialities of communication (Cultural Studies 2012)
Information systems, remote operation and robotics are currently being introduced into mines around the world. As miners reconfigure communication, control and labour, mining practices that have barely changed in a century are being transformed.
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Research on the air: mine automation near Karratha
Mine sites are changing, as robotic technologies are taking on communication and control roles previously held by people. These changes have been coming for some time, but there has recently been a shift from trialling autonomous systems towards using them in production.
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Robot Stories at Platform Politics Conference in Cambridge
Recently I presented a paper called ‘Materialising robot platforms’ on the affordances, environments and networks of three Korean service robots. The topic of my paper was something of an outlier in a conference called ‘Platform Politics’ at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, organised by Jussi Parrika and Joss Hands. Most other papers identified either with political…
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Acting the part
Any robot that moves, performs. But those robots that are built or programmed explicitly to perform can accentuate a repertoire of multiply articulated gestures with naturalistic movements and interaction.
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Exoskeleton gait
In the tradition of bionics, wearers strap a motorised assemblage to their body, and the device senses nerve signals running through the limbs, and amplifies these into movements. It is designed for people with poor mobility (broken leg, aged etc) and rehabilitation.