"Plant Neurobiology" : Smart vegetables

I've recently watched prof. Stefano Mancuso, from LINV, on TED.
He studies plant neurobiology, not sure if it's cosidered a "field",formaly speaking, but it sure deserves to be. He shows evidence of a collective intelligence in plants by analyzing electric signals an plant reactions, actions, networks etc.

Social Behavior on bacteria

A nice TED talk about bacterial communication by Bonnie Bassler. She studies how bacteria can communicate with one another, through chemical signals, to act as a unit. Her work could pave the way for new, more potent medicine.

Modular robotics now for sale

A very cool project from Cornell with modular articulated joints self-organizing robot now have a commercial similar version!
Check the video:


The commercial version is called Cubelets!

Complexity

Sorry for the long delay on posting, I'm kinda busy right now with several parallel projects and demands reaching deadlines (I hate those)...
Well, I'm really into complexity lately, found a nice book about complex systems (complex in a "standard" way, not the "mathematical" way with complex variables) talks about complexity on various kinds of dynamical systems: from thermal to demographics and economics, going through statistical physics!
My interest on complex systems is how the simple elements are organized (or self-organize) to give birth to their complex behavior, or how to develop agents with simple behaviors capable of control (or simple interact on a controlled way) with those systems.

Also, found a nice animation about our future and trillions of computers that has a proto-idea of "layered complexity", not very deep on this subject but I liked it:

Trillions from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

Long Delay

Sorry for the long delay in posting! Those last weeks (including this one) had been tough...

But just to break the silence. A nice TED talk about one of my favorite themes: Biological inspired robotics. In this case locomotion:

The Wild World of Robots

A nice image found at online schools :

Funny yet informative (on an useless way, but still...)

Off Topic: Robot Motion

This is a little off topic, but motion control on industrial manipulators is an awesome area too so it deserve some space =).

It's quite hard to achieve precision and speed simultaneously, most because of inaccurate position sensors (the most common technique to remove the dependency of speed is a dynamic linearization, or better, a linearization of the robot dynamics by feedback from sensors)

This is a demo by ABB robotics posted originally at Hack a day some months ago...

Behold awesomeness: