Another open-source platform is currently on the rise. The Corpora, is opening up its doors to robot enthusiasts and developers alike to make enhancements to their Qbo robot.

Qbo, is an artificial intelligent robot purposely built for home use. Initially, the creator (name not revealed yet) plans to develop a robot that functions like a pet. Something that's a source of inspiration. But what would inspire most a creator? Of course his creation.

Because of the flexibility of the algorithm, the creator, decided to add some more features.. (which are becoming endless).

(below is an excerpt from Qbo’s concept and design, The Corpora blog)

Some of Qbo’s “current” skills:

Stereoscopic vision: webcam calibration (2), depth, face, objects and colours recognition, face and object tracking, map generating (under development)

Speech Recognition System Speech Synthesis System: it offers a general framework for building speech synthesis systems. Only available in English at the moment.

The Corpora’s API: Developed to interact with the hardware components of the robot and third parties’ software.

WEB control panel: the robot is accessible through web explorer.

Internet connection through a WIFI controller placed in the head. Real-time software and firmware update.

Obstacles: the robot avoids crashes and falls thanks to ultrasound sensors.

Autocharging: auto-charge battery (testing and developing phase)

You could just imagine, how Qbo will evolve into a more intelligent and specialized robot when it's finally opened to the public for more tweaking.

Click here to read more about Qbo, Artificial Intelligent Robot

New York-based artist and programmer Rob Seward's 'Four Letter Words' electronic sculpture will spell out nice and/or dirty words at you. A series of small fluorescent tubes move about to form an angular typeface of shifting verbiage, displaying English language words of up to four characters long. Seward explains the origins of the words in his artist statement:

“The piece displays an algorithmically generated word sequence derived from a word association database developed by the University of South Florida between 1976 and 1998. The algorithms take into account word meaning, rhyme, letter sequencing, and association.”

Four Letter Words from Rob Seward on Vimeo.

But the algorithm tends to display rough or crude words more often than nice ones, which is "influenced by a variety of language and perception studies, especially Elliot McGinnies's 1949 study 'Emotionality and Perceptual Defense,'" he writes.

Click here to read more about Four Letter Words Robot.

The robocar Shelley is a 2010 TTS and can run without a human behind the wheels or inside the car. The team chose it because it features a fly-by-wire throttle, adaptive cruise control, a semiautomatic DSG gearbox and other gadgetry. That made it relatively easy to make the car fully autonomous using electronics developed at the Electronics Research Lab.

The car is named Shelley in honor of Michèle Mouton, an Audi rally driver and the first woman to win at Pikes Peak. Shelley uses differential GPS to track its location to within 2 centimeters, though Gerdes says the margin will be closer to 1 meter on the mountain. Wheel-speed sensors and an accelerometer measure its velocity and a gyroscope controls equilibrium and direction. The algorithms that make it all work run on hardware developed by Sun Microsystems.

“The components we added that actually interface with the car would fit in a shoebox,” said Marcial Hernandez, a senior research engineer at the Electronics Research Lab. “The largest component by far is the gyroscope, and it’s an 8-inch cube.”

Click here to read more about Shelley, Robocar.

Thinking out of the box, some researchers or more-like called "hackers" just can't get enough of their Nokia N900 cell phones.

But this is something that I would also perhaps do with my spare time, tweaking my own cell phone to make it useful for some other controls.

Just like this technology here. A LEGO NXT Robot is being controlled by a hacked Nokia N900 cell phone. How cool is that?!

What you will do is:

First, create or login to your Twitter account;

Send a command to the robot via this tweet message preceded by “@N900Niko”: move forward, move backward, turn right, turn left, turn around, photo;

Your tweet will be received and translated by your "hacked" N900 cellphone as a command for your LEGO NXT Robot to perform;

The robot will then interpret the message to do movements;

Watch how the NXT robot move with your succeeding tweet commands.

Click here to read more about Hacked Nokia N900, LEGO NXT Robot moves via Twitter

“Through the accumulation of experimental research in our office as well as at a Science Museum, we are beginning to understand the communication features that are necessary for a robot to easily participate in our society. So, in the near future, we will be able to create a robot that can support us in our daily life,” that is the future plan of Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, the makers of Robovie-IV.

Robovie-IV is a platform for research which has various communication functionalities such as voice dialog and skin sensing. It has a Human Position Recognition by RF Tag and Laser Range Sensor and can change wheeled inverted pendulum mode to normal wheeled mode.

Here are some of its specifications:

Freedom: 3 on head （2 for each eye), 4 for each chest, 2 for wheel up and down, 4 for assist wheel

Sensor: 4 for amnidirection, 2 for Color CCD camera, 1 for Microphone, 56 for skin sensor(whole body), 2 for posture sensor

Movement: wheeled inverted pendulum mechanism and PWS with four casters

Built-in PC : CPU:Pentium-M 2GHz OS:Linux

Power Supply : DC 24V (Ni-Cd)

Click here to read more about Robovie-IV, Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories.

Last January, the annual IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems was filled with new innovations and intelligent systems that promises to deliver pleasure to the makers and clients alike.

Among the video presentations, one that caught the eyes of the media researchers was a robot wall. At first, no one really had the idea that it will become something that is not typical of a wall.

This robot wall was named AWE which means Animated Work Environment, developed at the Clemson University School of Architecture and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

When the robot was presented by Keith Evan Green, the school director of the Intelligent Materials and Systems for Architecture program, for a demonstration of its capabilities, everybody in the room was literally put in "awe".

The robot wall segments itself into 6 different configurations such as collaborating, composing, conference, gaming or playing, lounging, presenting or viewing. The main purpose of these robot wall segmentation is for business people to convene in one place.

The robot wall AWE functions with an 8-degree of freedom, multiple electric motors, and multiple touch-screen monitors and mobile desk units.

Click here to read more about Robot Wall, AWE

The newest development of Readybot Challenge is a robot that is capable of cleaning your kitchen. This robot has two human-sized arms. It can do many routines such as dumping leftovers in the trash can and loading dishwashers.

The developers of the robot said that the robot can perform up to 40% of daily household chores. The robot can do twice as many tasks. This is very good in cleaning your kitchen.

Readybot has antenna-like cameras, enamel box with wheels and two human-sized arms. You may see robot intact but, this can extend up to human height if this will be activated so can reach kitchen closets and surfaces. This robot has a number of custom tools that can be used for cleaning purposes. This robot cannot harm to anyone because this moves slowly.

There are still many improvements that needed to be done with this kitchen cleaning robot before this can fully help us in our household chores. But, there is no doubt that this robot is of a great help in the near future.

Click here to read more about Readybot, Kitchen Cleaning Robot

Researchers at the Biologically Inspired Robotics Lab or the Biomimetics Lab, developed the Whegs series.

Case Western Reserve University used both wheels and legs to create Whegs robots, mini-Whegs, and climbing mini-Whegs. The robots move freely at a relatively high speed and climb over obstacles. And it has the maximum power available on-board utilizing each legs, by using one motor.

Inspired by a six-legged robot with six drive motors called PROLERO (Prototype of Legged Rover), designed in 1996 by A. Martin Alvarez at the European Space Agency, the Mini-Whegs robot is only 8-9 cm long and is capable of 'running' at sustained speeds of over 10 body lengths per second while navigating through rough terrain.

The Climbing Mini-Whegs is a four-wheel-legged robot with compliant, adhesive feet and one drive motor, which can climb vertical glass surfaces using its long tail.

While Whegs robots are 20-inches long that utilizes three-spoke wheel-legs powered by one drive motor. With speeds of up to a 3 body lengths to move and it has second (5.5km/hr) and can climb over obstacles up to 1.5 times higher than its wheel-leg radius. It’s an improved model with built-in body joint for additional capability The result of small, versatile, robot.

Click here to read more about Whegs Robots, Biomimetics, PROLERO

There are already many flying robots that exist but this robotic fly is the first at such a small scale.

Enthused by a true fly, Prof. Wood and his team from Harvard University developed a 60 milligram robot with a three-centimeter wingspan that is able to achieve the flight performance of a real fly.

This robot-fly can be used for intelligence applications and for military. And for this reason, U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is supporting this project. And also, this robot-fly can be use in detecting for chemical and radiological substances that are hazardous to the environment.

Even though the making of this micro robotic flying insect is such a great achievement, there are still many difficulties needed to be resolve before producing a fully autonomous robot-fly.

This robotic-fly can only move up and down. So, the developers are making way for this to move in any direction. They plan to apply a flight controller to the robot for it to move in different directions. And also a sensor and a power source is to be added to create a fully functioning type of robot-fly.

Click here to read more about Robotic Fly, Micro-robotic Flying Insects

Iowa State University’s Developmental Robotics Lab is trying to find it out how the robot works in the same way like a 2 year old does by attempting to break the stuff. They used an unnamed humanoid (“uh”) to do this experiment.

The unnamed humanoid maneuvers objects in many different ways to try to find their physical characteristics. It builds a mental picture of what kind of object it is playing with by dropping, pushing and shaking these objects.

This kind of experimentation is a unique biological method of learning and this has the advantage of not relying to any type of sensor. This unnamed humanoid is very good at identifying objects that are introduced to them. They can figure this objects with 99% accuracy.

The next step for this robot is experimentation with the goal in mind. For instance if the robot is given a thing, it can identify that thing and can be able to figure out to use that thing. Researchers are on the process of developing this UH robot.

Click here to read more about Unnamed Humanoid "UH", Robot from Iowa State Learns