5,000 Students to Welcome the Future to Chicago at WIRED NextFest(TM)
If you're in Chicago, and you're not going to WIRED's NextFest, I'm very sorry, you need to leave the gene pool now. Looks like a stunning lineup of technology, including a couple of things of major interest to robots and robotics...
HUBO, a humanoid robot from Korea that is equipped with state- of-the-art voice recognition and vision-tracking software... Brainball, a game that lets you control a ball with your mind... PEBBLES, a tool to connect seriously ill children to the classroom. For those who are unable to attend school, the system uses a telepresence robot to virtually place them in their class. The robot is designed to mimic the movement and interaction of an actual student in a classroom.... Northrop Grumman's Killer Bee, a small unmanned airborne system; iRobot innovations, such as R-Gator, that are the latest in military robotics technology, many protecting soldiers in Iraq today.... a Mars rover and space suit from NASA; "Stinky," the robot created by the students from Carl Hayden High School, which went on to beat the heavily favored MIT team's robot at an underwater robot competition; a lobster robot that navigates underwater autonomously....Dang it, where's my frequent flyer miles... I know they're around here somewhere...