Robo-study

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Researchers at the University of Portsmouth have received £230 000 in funding from the EU's Esprit programme to further develop walking robots. Called Walking Intelligent Robots using Embedded control Demonstrator (Wired), the project will target industrial applications such as inspection of buildings and reactor pressure vessels, as well as humanitarian tasks such as the clearance of landmines.

The project will he based on the Robug IV (above), which has eight pneumatically powered legs, each consisting of two physical links, an abductor joint and an actuated ankle. Robug IV's motions are controlled by 32 Siemens C167 microcontrollers running in parallel, and it uses fuzzy logic, neural networks and genetic algorithms to enable it to adapt to its environment and learn tasks.

Robo-Challenge

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Robo-challenge: Five teams battled it out recently at the University of Reading to win the volleyball challenge of the year - robot volleyball.

Trinity College Dublin won the competition, which involved designing two robots using lego's Mindstorm construction kits and sonar sensors supplied by researchers of the cybernetics department at Reading.