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
|   |   | AESOP- medical robot, a NASA SBIR program success story, gains FDA approval for market sales - see the press release here | |
|   |   | 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 |
|   |   | KhepOnTheWeb- access a miniature mobile robot, Khepera, and view the maze it runs through via on-board or off-board cameras | |
|   |   | 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 |
|   |   | 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 |
|   |   | PAKY- robotic surgical device developed by the Johns Hopkins University Robotics Research Laboratory | |
|   |   | 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 |
|   |   | TURAC- Texas Universities Robotics and Automation Consortium - check out their current projects | |
|   |   | Robotics Engineering Consortium- a cooperative effort to move government-developed robotics technology into commercial applications | |
|   |   | Gort- research robot from Brown University - it doesn't quite look like the original from The Day The Earth Stood Still | |
|   |   | Spring Flamingo- bipedal walking robot from the MIT Leg Lab | |
|   |   | Eyebot Project- a nice implementation of a low-cost solution for putting a robot on the web | |
|   |   | RoboToy- Australian on-line robot web site, which allows you to control either the real robot, or a JAVA simulator of the manipulator | |
|   |   | 6.270- the one, the only, the original LEGO robotics competition from MIT - the grandfather of all the autonomous robotics design competitions | |
|   |   | RoboCup- First Robot World Cup robotic soccer competition, being held this week at IJCAI | |
|   |   | 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) |
|   |   | RoboMiner - Robotic and teleoperated underground mining equipment (and you thought they made big robots in Texas!) | |
|   |   | Polypod - A Stanford bi-unit modular robot built of two types of modules repeated many times | |
|   |   | Xavier - CMU robot, commanded over the web, that navigates corridors and tells bad jokes. This is research? | |
|   |   | 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!!! |
|   |   | 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 |
|   |   | Wave To The Cats - it does what it says... (with a nice explanation of how to interface robots to the Web) | |
|   |   | RobotZoo - cool travelling robotic animal exhibit from SGI - see when it is coming to your city! | |
|   |   | 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 |
|   |   | STIC - pneumatic four-legged walking machine for unstructured surfaces | |
|   |   | Team Hammond - winners of the 1997 FIRST robotics competition | |
|   |   | Art of Motion Control - robotics help create art (and check out the egg plotter!) | |
|   |   | AMARC - robotics in meat production - we particularly like the fish handling robots! | |
|   |   | MCAMWV - an autonomous walking machine built by undergrads from the University of Waterloo | |
|   | Apr 14 |   | TROV - robotic exploration under the Antarctic ice |
|   |   | SAMM - a nice mobile manipulation test bed - check out the videos! | |
|   |   | ODIN - an "intelligent" underwater 6-DOF development platform | |
|   |   | 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! |
|   |   | Sushi Robot - finally! a really useful robotic application! | |
|   |   | nanoManipulator - coupling a probe microscope and VR to create telepresence manipulator with a scaling of 1,000,000,000:1 | |
|   |   | RAMS - robotic assistant for micro-surgery | |
|   |   | Tele-garden - the original telerobotically-tended garden from USC, now moved to Austria | |
|   |   | Hummingbird - Stanford University's autonomous helicopter | |
|   |   | Butterfly-Based Flying Robot - working toward a real insect-bot! | |
|   |   | Tele-museum - Use a 6-DOF manipulator to look around a museum | |
|   |   | Robot Assistant for Brain Surgery - precise 3-D localization during brain surgery | |
|   |   | Reconfigurable Modular Manipulator System - manipulator building blocks | |
|   |   | The Ants - MIT community of microrobots (soon to be nanorobots?) |
indicates the organization is developing technologies for space applications of robotics
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Maintained by: Dave Lavery
Last updated: November 11, 1997