In science fiction, mecha or mechs are giant robots or machines typically depicted as piloted and as humanoid walking vehicles. The term was first used in Japanese after shortening the English loanword 'mechanism' or 'mechanical', but the meaning in Japanese is more inclusive, and 'robot' or 'giant robot' is the narrower term.
An autonomous robot is a robot that acts without recourse to human control. Historic examples include space probes. Modern examples include self-driving vacuums and cars.
BattleBots is an American robot combat television series and company. The show is an adaptation of the American Robot Wars competitions hosted in the mid–late 1990s by Marc Thorpe, in which competitors design and operate remote-controlled armed and armored machines designed to fight in an arena combat elimination tournament. The same competitions inspired the British TV program Robot Wars, which acquired the name in 1995.
GuRoo is a humanoid robot developed at the Mobile Robotics Laboratory in the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at the University of Queensland. The design of the GuRoo is based on the human form and it is kept as anthropomorphic as possible. GuRoo is completely autonomous. It is used for research in different areas including dynamic stability, human-robot interaction and machine learning. GuRoo competes in the annual RoboCup. The goal of this competition is to foster the development of robotics through an annual soccer competition. It is the dream of the RoboCup federation to develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots, to play against and beat the human team that wins the World Cup in the year 2050.
Aliens Versus Predator 2 is a science fiction first-person shooter video game developed by Monolith Productions and co-published by Fox Interactive and Sierra On-Line for Microsoft Windows in October 2001, and for Mac OS X in July 2003. The game is a sequel to Aliens Versus Predator (1999); both games are based on the characters of the Alien and Predator media franchises as well as the Alien vs. Predator crossover series. It is set on the fictional planet LV-1201, which houses a vast series of ruins infested with Aliens that is routinely visited by a clan of Predators who hunt the creatures for sport.
Mirai Sentai Timeranger is a Japanese tokusatsu television series and the 24th series in Toei's Super Sentai metaseries. Footage from this series was used in the American production Power Rangers Time Force. It aired from February 13, 2000, to February 11, 2001, replacing Kyuukyuu Sentai GoGoFive, and was replaced by Hyakujuu Sentai Gaoranger. The opening narration of the series announces, "People from the future in the year 3000 AD and one man have met by chance, for the sake of marking a new passage of time…!". Timeranger was released on DVD by Shout! Factory in North America on July 31, 2018. This is the 9th Super Sentai Series to be released on Region 1 DVD in North America. The series debuted on February 13, 2000, when it replaced Kyuukyuu Sentai GoGoFive in TV Asahi's 7:30 JST time-slot, joining the recently-debuted Kamen Rider Kuuga in what would 3 years later become the Super Hero Time programming block.
Robot combat is a type of robot competition in which custom-built machines fight using various methods to incapacitate each other. The machines have generally been remote-controlled vehicles rather than autonomous robots.
Razer is a combat robot that competes on the British television series Robot Wars. It was constructed by Simon Scott and Ian Lewis from Bournemouth; the team later expanded to include webmaster Vincent Blood. Razer was designed and constructed in 1998 to participate in the second series of Robot Wars, but subsequent modifications and improvements enabled it to remain competitive until its retirement after the second series of Robot Wars Extreme. Despite gaining a reputation for being unreliable, it was champion of the fifth series of Robot Wars, runner-up in the sixth, and won the first two Robot Wars World Championships.
A sentry gun is a weapon that is automatically aimed and fired at targets that are detected by sensors. The earliest functioning military sentry guns were the close-in weapon systems point-defense weapons, such as the Phalanx CIWS, used for detecting and destroying short range incoming missiles and enemy aircraft, first used exclusively on naval assets, and now also as land-based defenses.
BigDog is a dynamically stable quadruped military robot that was created in 2005 by Boston Dynamics with Foster-Miller, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Harvard University Concord Field Station. It was funded by DARPA, but the project was shelved after the BigDog was deemed too loud for combat.
Officer Alex JamesMurphy, commonly known as RoboCop, is a fictional cybernetically enhanced officer of the Detroit Police Department from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and is the main protagonist in the Robocop franchise. Murphy is killed in the line of duty, and is resurrected and transformed into the cyborg law enforcement unit RoboCop by the megacorporation Omni Consumer Products (OCP). In the original screenplay, he is referred to as Robo by creators Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner.
Robo Force was a toy line created by the Ideal Toy Company in the year 1984. The line was revived in 2013 by new rights holder Toyfinity. The line was sold from Toyfinity to The Nacelle Company in 2021.
Giant Robo is a Japanese manga series by Mitsuteru Yokoyama. The manga, which was first published in 1967, spawned a live-action tokusatsu television series of the same name, as well as a series of original video animations called Giant Robo: The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Boston Dynamics, Inc., is an American engineering and robotics design company founded in 1992 as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, Boston Dynamics has been owned by the Hyundai Motor Group since December 2020, but having only completed the acquisition in June 2021.
TOSY Robotics specializes in designing and manufacturing robots and smart toys. The most famous products from TOSY Robotics are TOPIO Robot, DiscoRobo, TOOP and AFO.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to robotics:
The RoboCup 3D Simulated Soccer League allows software agents to control humanoid robots to compete against one another in a realistic simulation of the rules and physics of a game of soccer. The platform strives to reproduce the software programming challenges faced when building real physical robots for this purpose. In doing so, it helps research towards the RoboCup Federation's goal of developing a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champion team in 2050.
A powered exoskeleton is a mobile machine that is wearable over all or part of the human body, providing ergonomic structural support and powered by a system of electric motors, pneumatics, levers, hydraulics or a combination of cybernetic technologies, while allowing for sufficient limb movement with increased strength and endurance. The exoskeleton is designed to provide better mechanical load tolerance, and its control system aims to sense and synchronize with the user's intended motion and relay the signal to motors which manage the gears. The exoskeleton also protects the user's shoulder, waist, back and thigh against overload, and stabilizes movements when lifting and holding heavy items.
Soft robotics is a subfield of robotics that concerns the design, control, and fabrication of robots composed of compliant materials, instead of rigid links. In contrast to rigid-bodied robots built from metals, ceramics and hard plastics, the compliance of soft robots can improve their safety when working in close contact with humans.
RoboMaster is an annual intercollegiate robot competition held in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. First started in 2015, it is the brainchild of DJI's founder and CEO Frank Wang, and jointly sponsored by the Communist Youth League Central Committee, the All-China Students' Federation (ACSF) and the Shenzhen City Government. It is the first shooting sport-style robotics competition in China.
