
Want to know how much website downtime costs, and the impact it can have on your business?
Find out everything you need to know in our new uptime monitoring whitepaper 2021



A hamster exercise balls has proved the inspiration for a team of researchers at The Robotics and Cybernetic Research group at the University of Madrid.
The team, whose area of interest is developing robots which are able to navigate rough and uneven terrain, realised that in such landscapes a conventional robot – with legs, wheels or tracks, would frequently get stuck when coming up against ruts, shifting surfaces (such as sand dunes) or debris.
The four strong team realised that using a sphere, very much like a hamster’s exercise ball, which houses the motor and robotics, would prove far more stable and better at navigating this terrain.
Inside the Rosphere robot a weight and control systems hang from a spindle. As the weight swings on the spindle this propels the Rosphere backwards or forwards, with a drive wheel to help steer the sphere.
The trick used by hamsters to get an exercise ball rolling is helping to power a spherical robot.
In time the Rosphere robots will be fitted with camera and monitoring sensors. An early use of the robots, with research funding having come from the European Union, is to use the robots to help farmers detect changes to crop conditions.
The Rosphere robots, with sensors to detect temperature, soil moisture levels and so on, could be used on farms to wander up and down crop fields checking for when crops need watering and for instance assisting agronomists in making decisions when to provide nutrients to crops.
James Barnes, StatusCake.com
Share this

3 min read The allure of OpenClaw is undeniable. You deploy a highly autonomous, self-hosted AI agent, give it access to your repositories and inboxes, and watch it reason through complex workflows while you sleep. It is the dream of the ultimate 10x developer tool realized. But as any veteran DevOps engineer will tell you: running an LLM-backed
7 min read There are cloud outages, and then there are us-east-1 outages. That distinction matters because failures in AWS’s Northern Virginia region rarely feel like ordinary regional incidents. They tend instead to expose something larger and more uncomfortable: too much of the modern internet still behaves as though one place is an acceptable concentration point for infrastructure,
7 min read Artificial intelligence is making software easier to produce. That much is already obvious. Code that once took hours to scaffold can now be drafted in minutes. Boilerplate, integration logic, tests, refactors and small internal tools can be generated with startling speed. In some cases, even substantial pieces of implementation can be assembled quickly enough to
10 min read Whilst AI has compressed the visible stages of software delivery; requirements, validation, review and release discipline have not disappeared. They have been pushed into automation, runtime and governance. The real risk is not that the lifecycle is dead, but that organisations start acting as if accountability died with it. There is a now-familiar story about
4 min read How AI Is Shifting Software Engineering’s Primary Constraint For most of the history of software engineering, the primary constraint was production. Code was expensive, skilled engineers were scarce, and shipping features required concentrated human effort. Velocity was limited by how fast people could reason, implement, test, and deploy. That constraint shaped everything from team size,
5 min read Autonomous Code, Trust Boundaries, and Why Governance Now Matters More Than Ever In Part 1, we looked at how AI has reduced the cost of building monitoring tools. Then in Part 2, we explored the operational and economic burden of owning them. Now we need to talk about something deeper. Because the real shift isn’t
Find out everything you need to know in our new uptime monitoring whitepaper 2021