Balancing robot may help care for elderly
Ballbot, a narrow, 5-foot-tall robot, balances deftly on what looks like a bowling ball. Swaying on a lab floor, the aluminum-framed droid seems ready to fall at any moment.
But much like a circus animal balancing on a beach ball, Ballbot stays stable, its motors whirring to keep it upright.
Some experts say robots such as Ballbot might one day help provide care and companion- ship to the disabled and the nation’s aging population.
“We’re very good at making machines that can compute and play chess really well,” said Louis Whitcomb, a professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University. “We’re very poor at developing machines with which we can interact physically, assistants that can do our bidding.”
Robots could help fill the gap, for example, by calling for help for a patient who has fallen down and can’t get up, said Roderic Grupen, director of the Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. A robot could also monitor a patient’s vital signs.
$100 laptops to debut with Thai kids
The ambitious project to provide low-cost laptop computers to poor children around the world is about to take a small step forward. More than 500 children in Thailand are expected to receive the machines later this year for testing and debugging.
The One Laptop Per Child program, which began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab and now is a separate nonprofit organization, hopes to deploy 5 million to 7 million machines in Thailand, Nigeria, Brazil and Argentina in 2007.
Thailand’s government is expected to buy 1 million in the first year.
Zoo hopes to match orangutans online
Single male, red hair, really long arms, with interests in hanging in trees and grooming himself, seeks female for long-distance relationship.
Possibility of meeting up in future to help save species.
Zookeepers in the Netherlands are planning to hook up Dutch and Indonesian orangutans in what could become an online dating service where apes could get to know one another and keepers could work out whether they would be compatible mates.