Robotics

For the record, I'm pretty darn amazed at how speedily and accurately the embedded vision demo co-developed by Analog Devices and BDTI accomplishes its dice-counting task: much faster and more precise than me. With that said, I'm really amazed at a robot named Janken, the Japanese word for the rock-paper-scissors game also known as roshambo.

In early August of last year, I pointed out that Microsoft had released the first public beta of its Kinect SDK for Windows in mid-June, followed by a Kinect-cognizant services suite for Robotics Developer Studio R3 in mid-July. And, at the end of September, I mentioned that Microsoft had unveiled a beta for the follow-on

As anyone who's followed the U.S. military's engagements in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan already knows, this country's armed forces are increasingly relying on robotic alternatives to human warriors; tread-equipped Roomba and Scooba siblings to disarm bombs, for example, or propeller- and wing-equipped drone alternatives to fighter jets for both surveillance and bomb-delivering