This little legged robot from Johns Hopkins (pictured above) is quicker. Much quicker. It can travel at over 30 body lengths every second, which works out to over two meters per second, or four and a half miles an hour. If you were travelling at 30 body lengths every second, you’d be going 122 miles an hour. Whoa.
Taking blood is a fine art. Even the most experienced practioner may require more than one stab to find a vein—seems only natural to wonder, might a robot do the job better? Mountain View’s Veebot thinks so. Veebot wants to take the art out of needlework with their robotic venipuncture machine.
A team of Japanese scientists has built a tiny robot that is driven by a male silkworm moth to find a female moth’s seductive pheromone smell. The idea is to somehow engineer the same kind of natural mechanism the moth uses and translate that into a device or sensor that could help autonomous robots track hazardous smells or environmental poisons, for example.
“Robot Suit HAL” is a cyborg-type robot that can supplement, expand or improve physical capability.
When a person attempts to move, nerve signals are sent from the brain to the muscles via motoneurons, moving the musculoskeletal system as a consequence. At this moment, very weak biosignals can be detected on the surface of the skin. “HAL” catches these signals through a sensor attached on the skin of the wearer. Based on the signals obtained, the power unit is controlled to move the joint in unison with the wearer’s muscle movement, enabling HAL to support the wearer’s daily activities. This is what we call a ‘voluntary control system’ that provides movement interpreting the wearer’s intention from the biosignals in advance of the actual movement. Not only a ‘voluntary control system’ “HAL” has, but also a ‘robotic autonomous control system’ that provides human-like movement based on a robotic system which integrally work together with the ‘autonomous control system’. “HAL” is the world’s first cyborg-type robot controlled by this unique Hybrid System.
For the first time, scientists have made a 3-D map of sea ice in eastern Antarctica.
A typical five-month-old infant has hardly figured out how to sit up yet — even crawling may be months away — but there are a few babies who already know how to drive. They’re steering their very own mobile robots.
Flying Robot That Can Crash and Keep Flying
HyQ - IIT’s Hydraulic Quadruped Robot - Balancing and First Outdoor Tests
If a robot in combat accidentally kills a civilian, who is to blame?
This isn’t as straightforward of a question as it sounds. A team of scientists presented a study at the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction and found that although robots don’t have free will, people sometimes treat them as if they do.
Robotic manipulators that can provide high gripping force in hazardous environments still need delicate control - and what better way to provide that control than directly from a human hand? That’s the thinking behind ExoHand, a prosthetic developed by Festo of Germany - a veteran maker of robots - and modelled by turns on the herring gull, penguin or even the elephant’s trunk. (via One Per Cent: Robotic glove lets you control a robot hand)
Robot Barber
The Multi-Arm UGV (Unmanned Ground Vehicle) demonstrates its dexterity by shaving a volunteer’s head to raise money for the St. Baldrick’s Foundation, a charity committed in funding research for finding a cure for childhood cancer.
A “learning” computer system that sorts potatoes has been built using off-the-shelf technology by researchers at the University of Lincoln’s Robotics Lab.
The robot blemish spotter can reliably identify diseases such as silver scurf and common scab, researchers said.
When Steve Jobs passed away last year, a joke bounced around—not that there was anything particularly funny about it—that the man who had done so much to shape modern technology hadn’t really died at all, but rather had figured out how to upload himself into the Mac OS so he could live on with us, and with his products, forever. The notion was ostensibly so far out as to be ridiculous. But not everyone sees it that way.
At the recent Global Future 2045 International Congress held in Moscow, 31-year-old media mogul Dmitry Itskov told attendees how he plans to create exactly that kind of immortality, first by creating a robot controlled by the human brain, then by actually transplanting a human brain into a humanoid robot, and then by replacing the surgical transplant with a method for simply uploading a person’s consciousness into a surrogate ‘bot. He thinks he can get beyond the first phase—to transplanting a working brain into a robot—in just ten years, putting him on course to achieve his ultimate goal—human consciousness completely disembodied and placed within a holographic host—within 30 years time.
Humanoid development is still in its infancy but the progress in this field is really exciting. Check out this little cute humanoid from robbosavvy. Love!
That squishy dollop of brilliance that is the jamming robot gripper has learned a new trick: Roboticists at Cornell and the University of Chicago have taught it to throw stuff.
A quick refresher: The gripper is simply a latex balloon filled with coffee grounds. The grounds move around each other like grains of sand and can conform to objects and complex surfaces, but when air is pumped out of the balloon, the grounds all “jam” together into a solid mass, yielding a strong hold on whatever the gripper is in contact with. It’s simple, it’s cheap, and you can pick up just about anything without having to calculate optimal grasping points or do anything else in the way of sensing or computation: You really just stuff the gripper against an object, pump the air out, and off you go.
