Toshiba releases a teaser page for its new Android 3.0 tablet

Toshiba’s new Android 3.0 tablet has been spotted on the Toshiba site . The tablet sports a 16:10 Widescreen display with HD quality and offers the standard quick-key buttons at the base of the device; home, menu, back and search. The teaser page shows it has adaptive display with an ambient light sensor that optimizes when you’re outdoors.

It appears that it will have both a (2.0 MP) front-facing and back-facing (5.0 MP) cameras.  Additionally, it uses a NVIDIA Tegra 2 video processor and runs on Android Honeycomb. At first glance, it looks pretty cool and it has an anti-resistant grip material on the back of the device that comes in various colours.

Have a look for yourself at the teaser page .

Nvidia’s next-generation Tegra 2 3D processor gets pre-MWC airing

Nvidia seems on to a winner with its Tegra line of processors, it’s being used to power the world’s first dual-core smartphones and will be included in a lot of Android smartphone and tablet devices we expect to see this year.

Over the weekend, TechEye was sent Nvidia’s presentation slides that were going to be used on-stage at February’s Mobile World Congress. One of the slides highlighted a new release from the company – its new Tegra 2 3D processor, a chip we can expect to see powering many 3D-capable devices in 2011.

The Tegra 2 3D is slightly more powerful than its predecessor, it will be based on a Dual Cortex A9 clocked to 1.2GHz, will offer 5520 MIPS and is expected to go into production with the next two months.

Expect more information and a list of manufacturers who are signing on to include this processor to become available within the next month or so, Mobile World Congress is only but a month away. We will be there, bringing you all the mobile-related devices we can get our hands on.

New evolving robots crawl before learning to walk

Roboticists are applying the way we learn to walk as humans to robots, hoping to improve their movement and behaviours by enabling them to change their form as they learn to move.

Just as babies learn to crawl before they walk, a new line of robots at the University of Vermont are able to walk by learning from successful movements. This happens because their unique design makes it possible for them to change form as they learn to walk. In the study, the robots wear a brace that gradually tilts their body and bends the legs, while the robot’s controller searches for successful movements. The robots begin in a crawl-like state and squirm around like a lizard on floor until they can figure out how to properly walk.

Josh Bongard, leading the study on these evolving robots, is a roboticist at the University of Vermont. He released his discoveries earlier this month to the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Bongard’s work, funded by the National Science Foundation is aiming to produce robots that will perform simple tasks with the ability to be adaptable in unstructured or outdoor environments. And instead of programming the robots the traditional way, the team at UVM are creating computer programs to help them develop the desired behaviours, while equipping them with tools to change their body. Bondgard says the reason this hasn’t been done before is because “it is really hard to change a robot’s body… it’s much easier to change the programming inside its head”.

Bongard thinks there are two main issues that prevent us from having robots in our homes (your iRobot doesn’t count) or assisting us outdoors in environments such as a construction sites. The first reason is limited battery power and the other is intellectual. As Bongard points out, we can build machines that do the same things over an over but what happens when you take them outside? The real world is unpredictable.

If we could design intelligent robots to sense what is going on around them coupled with the ability to move and adapt to environments, we’d be able to build things cheaper and on a larger scale, Bongard mentioned on a recent science podcast .

This study first tested the concept out with computer simulations. Using 3D environments the virtual robots were put through numerous experiments using a genetic algorithm. The algorithm tested out various motions until the reptile-like robots began to slide and slither across the surface.

The working ‘physical’ robots are simple prototypes that were used to prove that the 5000 simulations that the team ran in 3D, could also work in the real world. These evolving robots were created using LEGO Mindstorm kits and are helping us move one step closer to having intelligent robot servants.