Robots Living Among Us

By Charlotte Kedzlie

Packbot

Created by iRobot, PackBot is one of the most successful battle-tested robots in the world. It performs bomb disposal and other dangerous missions for troops and first responders. Over 4500 units are currently on station in Iraq and Afghanistan and it was one of the first robots to enter the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant after the 2011 tsunami

Big Dog

This dynamically stable quadruped robot created in 2005 by Boston Dynamics is capable of traversing difficult terrain, running at 4mph, carrying 340lbs, and can climb a 35 degree incline. It was funded to research a robotic pack mule to accompany soldiers in terrain too tough for conventional vehicles.

Robonaut

Robonaut is a dexterous humanoid robot built and designed at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. It was built to work alongside people to expand our ability for construction and discovery. Central to the robot is what is called dexterous manipulation that allows the robot dexterity that exceeds that of a suited astronaut

PR2

PR2 by Willow Garage is a robotics research and development platform that lets researchers innovate right out of the box. It uses an open platform so investigators can easily share work with colleagues in the research community. More powerful than a video or publication, others can easily reproduce results enabling true scientific validation

Kiva

The autonomous mobile robot is part of the Kiva Mobile-robotic Fulfillment System which enables extremely fast cycle times with reduced labor requirements, from receiving to picking to shipping in a warehouse setting. Today Kiva is widely recognized as THE solution for eCommerce fulfillment and item picking applications of all type

Jason

Jason is a remotely operated vehicle designed and built by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institutes Deep Submergence Lab and allows scientists access to the seafloor without leaving the ship. Since 1988 the system has made hundreds of dives to hydrothermal vents, 1,600 year old shipwrecks, the German Battleship Bismarck, and military uses. Its prototype was used to explore the Titanic upon its discovery in 1986

Robovie-II

A robot named Robovie-II moves around a grocery store during an assisted shopping experiment. This happy little robot greets shoppers at the entrance of a grocery store and then follows them while holding a grocery basket. It can also remind people of items on a shopping list.

English Teaching Robot

An English-teaching robot teaches a group of South Korean children at an elementary school. A South Korean government report said students like the robots because they never get angry or make sarcastic remarks — unlike their human counterparts.

Hanako

A human dentist demonstrates a training procedure on a humanoid robot named Hanako, which was developed to simulate real dental work for student dentists. The robot is equipped with a set of teeth made of hard plastic and has a lifelike mouth cavity that can bleed and secrete saliva.

Okonmiyaki

The Okonomiyaki robot demonstrates its ability to cook Japanese traditional food. In this image, the robot makes a pancake. The robot which has 15 joints, can take verbal orders from customers and use standard kitchen utensils.

Car Making Robots

Robots work on the construction of new Audi A4 and A5 cars at the production line of the German car manufacturer’s plant in the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt

Pollen Counting Robots

An employee of the Japanese weather forecasting company Weathernews with 700 pod-shaped, pollen-counting robots, which monitor and observe pollen levels ahead of the coming hay fever season. The Pollen-robot has two LED eyes and glows in a range of five different colors to indicate pollen levels.

AutoSub

Even as we get set to swing into the second decade of the 21st century, fully autonomous (self-governing) robots – beyond the assembly line type – remain a rarity. Some robots look like they know what they’re doing, but the vast majority merely behave as their human operators tell them to behave. One notable exception to the rule is the UK National Oceanography Centre’s Autosub 3, a seven-foot-long torpedo-shaped submersible that’s currently pulling duty in the Antarctic, mapping the seabed and charting the undersides of ice floes in a venture to potentially help determine the cause of melting ice

Worlds Strongest 6 Axis Robot

Robotic arms and cranes aren’t exactly new to the industrial world. But one that can lift more than a ton of dead weight is. In its M-2000iA/1200, Michigan-based FANUC Robotics has created what it claims is the “world’s largest and strongest six-axis robot” with the “longest reach and strongest wrist” yet developed. Designed for such tasks as accurately positioning automotive vehicle bodies and assembling heavy machine tool components, the unit is intended to replace manually controlled cranes. And, of course, it will be the muscle in the upcoming robot uprising, where crazed machines will wreak untold havoc on the human population of earth

MSL Rover

Technically, the Mars Science Laboratory rover shouldn’t make this list because it isn’t yet in use. But hey, when you cost upwards of $2.3 billion and can’t really be put into use until you get to a planet millions of miles away, you deserve special treatment. At nine feet in length and weighing almost a ton, the MSL rover is by far the largest rover to date, and will carry far more scientific tools, scanners, cameras, detectors, and various instrumentation than any prior ‘bots. It’ll zip along at ninety-eight feet per hour, bound over obstacles of up to thirty inches in height, and continue to function for nearly two years as it digs deep into the nature and makeup of the planet and sets the stage for possible future human exploration