Scientist have created the world's first radio-controlled animal by wiring a computer chip directly into the brain of a living rat. The rats, each wired with three hair-fine electrical probes to their brains, can be directed by remote control by an operator typing commands on a computer up to 500 meters (1,640 feet) away. Developed by Sanjiv Talwar at the State University of New York and...

Gabriel Hugh Elkaim, an Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of California at Santa Cruz has posted this blog called Robotica Exotica. This fun webpage contains "musings about robots, autonomous vehicles, and technology." Entries are posted frequently and previous months are kept in an online archive. Recent entries include a bit titled "Educational Robot comes packed with...

Recent news coverage on the Mars Rover has sparked a renewed interest in robotics. Projects like the Personal Exploration Rover (see under Education in this report) are bringing this technology to K-12 classrooms, while others are exploring the ways scientists can match the technology to the needs of people. This Topic in Depth offers a closer look into research on robotics and the many uses of...

The Alpha Lab at the University of California at Berkeley researches and develops robotics systems for high-precision manufacturing. Specifically, it combines mathematical algorithms and industrial automation to build low-cost, reliable tools for "feeding, fixturing and grasping." The projects section of the lab's Web site describes a number of experiments and model implementations for robotics...

Science Robotics is a peer-reviewed journal from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that is dedicated to technological advances and the critical social, ethical, and policy issues surrounding robotics. Articles discuss nanorobotics, the use of robotics in medicine, robotics for human augmentation, and other topics. On this website, visitors will find helpful overviews...

The School of Computer and Communication Sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology is "one of the major European centers of teaching and research in information technology.� This website describes the research of the Biologically Inspired Robotics Group. Its research focuses on the intersection between computational neuroscience, robotics, nonlinear dynamical systems, and adaptive...

On September 7, doctors in the United States performed the first long distance operation, with surgeons in New York performing a laparoscopic cholecystectomy on a patient in France. The surgery was successful, and the patient was discharged from the hospital with no complications 48 hours later. Needless to say, the potential uses of such remote, robotic technology are boundless, not only in...

Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute (RI) is a leading robotics research facility with broad interests in "basic robotics technologies, automation and computer-integrated manufacturing, robotics for hazardous environments, and autonomous mobile robots." Along with information and descriptions of projects, labs and groups, and centers, another highlight of this site is its extensive...

Chuck's Robotics Notebook "serves as a journal and knowledge repository for the aspiring roboticist" and includes sections on circuits, projects, and controllers. A section on Complete Robots describes some of the robots he has built and includes some photos. A "bibliography of sorts" provides his favorite books and articles "so that you can build a 'Mechatronic' library of your own." The second...

The Robotics and State Estimation Lab at the University of Washington is "interested in the development of embedded computing systems that interact autonomously with their environment in an intelligent way." The lab investigates probabilistic methods and their application to mobile robotics in order to "develop rich yet efficient methods for representing uncertainty and for reasoning under...