Bench Talk

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• Robo-Pop: How Robots Came to Dominate Popular Culture

  Robots have captured our imagination since Leonardo da Vinci’s medieval sketches, but humanity’s mania with humanoid mechanical beings—friend or foe—has only intensified. The last century saw robots becoming a cornerstone of pop culture, showing up everywhere from books to films, TV shows, and songs, continuing the takeover of human entertainment.

• Collaborative Robots: Combining Machine Muscle with Human Dexterity

  While industrial robots dominate—as the best option for low-volume, high-mix assembly in mass-manufacturing—in comparison to human dexterity, a new generation of lightweight robots promises to marry the best of man and machine.

• Creating Faster, Safer, Cost-Effective Robots Using LIDAR

  The gift of sight via light detection and ranging (LIDAR) has enabled engineers to move beyond the development of robots that complete simple tasks to robots that can take on increasingly complicated workloads in safer, faster, and more cost-effective ways than ever before.

• The Expanding World of Shrinking Robots

  The Microrobotics Lab at Harvard University is working on microbots that might be able to help, if not totally reshape, fields including agriculture, medicine and police work. These innovative microbots are being developed with the overall goal of making tasks more efficient and less expensive.

• Robots Everywhere!

  Robots are nothing new to the sci-fi genre. From servants like Robby the Robot in Forbidden Planet and The Jetson’s sassy maid Rosie, to noble, innocent machines like Johnny 5 and Data, robots seem to be everywhere in entertainment. But back in the day, actually interacting with one of these creations in real life seemed like, well, science fiction. But today, many of us interact with robots on a daily basis without giving it a second thought.

• See the History of RF Engineering in this Large Old Magazine Archive

  On Oct. 31, 2013, Broadcast Engineering, a publication I’ve been reading for 20 years, closed its doors. The company chose to throw in the towel rather than retreating to “digital only”, typically the last gasp before the grave. I learned this not from the company itself but from my colleague Lynnette Reese who sent me a link to back issues (of which there are 340) on a site her Ham dad found: americanradiohistory.com. She blogged about it too, but I had to take a description of this site a step further, as it is absolutely every bit the “gem” she described. It’s also hardly a secret as Alexa ranks it 147,429 in the U.S., placing it above most trade journal sites, but it was a revelation to me.