[Tyler]

Robot Evolution Through Intelligent Design
     


That's the motto of RoMeLa, the Robotics and
Mechanisms
Laboratory at Virginia Tech. At RoMeLa, Dennis W. Hong,
PhD and his students have been creating a lot of really interesting
new robots. In the video above from the TEDxNASA conference, Hong
offers a short overview of their research. Of particular
interest to hobbyists should be the DARwIn humanoid robot. According to
an Industrial Embedded Systems article, a low-cost open hardware
version of is planned. Oh, and if you're wondering about that motto,
Hong tells us:
Though it has both "evolution" and "intelligent design" in
the  
sentence, it has nothing to do with either - "we" push the boundaries  
and come up with the next generation robotics (robot evolution)  
through us doing rigorous research and designing them intelligently  
(intelligent design). I think it is a clever tag line for our lab.

If you're interested, you can find out more about several of the
robots and their unusual modes of locomotion at the RoMeLa website
including STriDER, CLIMBeR, IMPASS, and
HyDRAS-Arm.
There is also a website for TEAM DARwIn and
their efforts to win the RoboCup Humanoid League soccer competition.
Hong and his robots were recently highlighted by Popular Science in the
article Ten Young Geniuses
Shaking up Science Today.

   

http://robots.net/article/2982.html