Welcome to my new blog on Robotics Trends. True to the website’s name, the blog will look deeper into the field to discover where robotics is headed. Robotics, as everyone involved with it knows, is a vast space, encompassing everything from holiday season toys to the latest autonomous submarine. But what unites the researchers, developers, and marketers in all of robotics’ many areas is a common curiosity and — yes — a real love for the field.

It’s my bet that you and others in the industry are eager to learn what your colleagues are up to, if only to ponder how ground-breaking work taking place elsewhere can be applied to the work you yourself are doing. I hope you will use this space to share your ideas with others. Email me, and we’ll keep the conversation going.

Meanwhile, here are some short takes to ponder:

Mobile manipulator. The IEEE Spectrum reports on a mobile industrial robot under development at Aalborg University in Denmark, which consists of an arm mounted on top of a chest-like wheeled platform. This enables the device to retrieve parts at one location and place them where they’re needed in an assembly facility.

Never idles at the water cooler. BusinessWeek reports on a $350,000 humanoid robot created for office environments by Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Sciences and Technology in collaboration with Tokyo-based Kawada Industries. The device can recognize the faces of human cube dwellers, while handling chores such as delivering mail and pouring coffee.

Might make house calls. IBM’s Watson computer, which recently prevailed against star Jeopardy contestants, could be a prototype doctor of the future, thinks Kevin Maney, a blogger on the AOL financial Web site Daily Finance. To win at Jeopardy, the Watson computer devoured reams of information from history books to articles on popular culture. When asked a question, the machine’s AI algorithms decoded the meaning of the query and then sifted through its library of information at lightning speed to beat opponents to the buzzer. Doctors employ similar high-speed reasoning skills. But armed with an advanced vision system and maybe a lab on a chip, a Watson-like doc could also more accurately recognize a patient’s physical symptoms.

3G controls. A robot avatar is a term we may hear a lot more about. Drawing on things like telepresence and the avatars within virtual environments, robot avatars are intended to act as actual metallic representations of ourselves in the real world. To make their mobile avatars controllable from any location, French robotics firm Gostai recently debuted models incorporating both Wi-Fi and 3G, according to CNET

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