From your robotic greeter at the front door to your automated waiter, your visit to this restaurant in Kunshan City will feature all the cybernetic staff you hoped to have serve you in the future.

Fifteen robots in total roll around the eatery, cooking food, taking orders, serving meals and greeting customers as they enter. A few humans are on hand just in case, but basically the robots run the place.

The spacious 3,200-square-foot facility is navigated by bots following black-taped lines using optical sensors, making their way between patrons to pick up dishes and drop off eats.

A touch-screen ordering system lets patrons pick their food. When the robo-waiter drops it off, customers are told to tap the bot to send it on its way.

The post Welcome, Human, to China’s Largest Robot-Run Restaurant first appeared on Gajitz.

Interplanetary spelunking sounds like a luxury sport, but for scientists it can open up whole new worlds of discovery if robots can be programmed and designed to go cave diving on other planets.

One particular“robot called LEMUR, short for Limbed Excursion Mechanical Utility Robot, is designed to climb the porous walls of a cave 150 million miles away, on Mars.” This agile robot is intended to creep into crevices on extraterrestrial surfaces, including asteroids and the moon.

“Why explore extraterrestrial caves? Partly for the same reasons scientists venture into caves on Earth. They’re protected from weather and (on other worlds) from meteoric bombardment, so their geological formations serve as frozen records of the planet’s past. Then there’s the life question. Liquid water on Mars is likely to exist underground, at depths where ice is melted by warmth from the planet’s interior.”

A robot equipped to handle caves can also navigate complex surfaces, obviating the need for wheels and overcoming difficult terrain. More about the bot: “LEMUR climbs walls in much the same way cockroaches do, gripping the surface with hundreds of tiny microspines in the pads of its paw-like feet (early designs were inspired by conversations with entomologists). For the time being, its pace is more like that of a sloth, as it makes sure every grip is a secure one. “

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A slim cousin to larger bots from Boston Dynamics, the Spot Mini can steer around obstacles, walk up stairs and even gently unload wine glasses from your dishwasher, an incredible feat of precision and delicacy (not to mention neat at parties).

We always see gifs of clumsy robots breaking things, not knowing their own strength, but this little guy is a big step forward in safety and capability. This is incredibly important if machines of this type are designed to become part of our daily lives.

Spot’s backers ask you to “think of how delicate a robot will have to be in the future. For example, to give an older person who is very frail a shower. How do you carefully lift them, position them, make sure they’re safe in order to give them a shower and then dry them off, help them with their clothes? That’s a pretty sophisticated machine and it requires a bit of machine learning to get to that point.”

Boston Dynamics is currently owned by Google, but Toyota has its eye on the company. Whether the search giant or car company will get these into ordinary homes anytime soon remains to be seen, but if they do make consumer models, buyers can be sure at least this is one dog that can walk itself.

The post Spot Mini: Dog-Sized Robot Runs, Climbs, Does Chores & More first appeared on Gajitz.

Featuring a lightweight carbon-fiber skeleton and folding into a book-shaped companion, this drone from Zero Zero Robotics can follow the user around like a tethered tripod, filming steadily during mobile first-person shoots.

The Hover Camera uses a mobile app that lets the user set height, distance and direction as needed, but the tracking software also automates the process when desired.

Four propellers and compensating technology help the device stay aloft and precisely positioned even outdoors in windy conditions.

Its incredibly light weight (less than 250 grams) lets the device skirt FDA regulations pertaining to larger drone use as well.

“We want to combine radical AI technology and small flying robotics to create products that empower people to enhance their livelihood, and Hover Camera is a very exciting first step towards accomplishing our larger mission,” said the company’s CEO Meng Qiu Wang, a former Twitter software engineer who co-founded the company in 2014.

The post Hover Camera Drone Floats & Follows with Facial Recognition first appeared on Gajitz.

Some drones fly in the air, others zoom across or through the water, but this rare hybrid does both with graceful ease, diving underwater then returning to the skies on demand.

Created by Oakland University’s Embedded Systems Research, the Loon Copter works much like a regular flying drone, and can also land and float easily on the water thanks to a bouyancy chamber filled with air.

However, it can also fill that chamber up, allowing it to sink, then flip its rotors to propel it through the water. To fly, it ejects the ballast and goes airborne again. Faster than a submarine, it can scout in the water, then return to and hover above the surface for rescure or recovery operations.

Its creators are working on extending its wireless range to allow it to go even further below the waves. More from its makers: “Loon Copter is a novel multi-rotor platform capable of traditional aerial flight, on-water surface operation, and sub aquatic diving. The Loon Copter is a proof-of-concept vehicle that demonstrated successful operation in early 2015. The 3rd prototype of our Loon Copter won the 2016 UAE Drones for Good competition in Dubai, which received 1017 entries from 165 countries.”

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