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Lockheed Martin’s Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC) is an actuated exoskeleton that helps a soldier carry up to 200 pounds of weight on its frame. It senses the direction that the user wants to move, and then moves in it. In the links, you find a video from the company showing the HULC in action.
Link |YouTube Video | Image: Lockheed Martin
We’ve previously posted about a ceiling-walking robot developed by the robotics lab at Ben Gurion University. Here are four more ingenious robot designs developed at that same laboratory, each of which scales walls using different mobility techniques:
First, a magnetic climber that has compliant magnetic wheels and is capable to climb on ferromagnetic surfaces. This robot can be used for inspection of ship hull or bridges. Second, is a Snail inspired wall climbing robot capable of climbing on non metallic surfaces using hot melt glue. The robot secretes the adhesive at the front and peels off the track from the wall at the bottom leaving a trail behind just like the snail does. Third, is a robot that uses sticky wheels in order to attach itself to the wall. It simply has 3Ms sticky tape on the wheels. It can climb on smooth surfaces like glass. Fourth, is a four legged wall climbing robot for climbing on rough surfaces. It has 12 claws made of fishing hooks mounted on each footpad, and it climbs like cat or other rodents.
via Gizmodo
Roombas and similar commercially-available robots can plug themselves into docking stations when they need to recharge. But that requires having a designated recharging station. Marvin, a robot by Intel Labs, can search for an electrical outlet and plug itself in. This approach is superior to the alternative solution.
The OmniTread robot was built by engineering students at the University of Michigan. Its body consists of seven segments connected by pneumatic bellows. Treads on all four sides of the segments give it traction against surfaces, and the connecting bellows can inflate or deflate to provide stiffness or flexibility as needed. The robot can squeeze through a four-inch hole or ascend a vertical tube.
Link via CrunchGear
Christmas is all about awkward moments at family gatherings. Le Trung, inventor of the robotic woman substitute Aiko, took that principle to a whole new level when he decided that he should celebrate Christmas with both his parents and his fembot:
The science genius enjoyed a festive dinner with his mum, dad and his £30,000 fembot which he designed and built by hand.
Le, 34, from Brampton, Ontario, Canada, even bought gifts for his dream girl, who is so lifelike she speaks fluent English and Japanese, helped cook the turkey and hang up decorations.
‘Aiko is like any woman, she enjoys getting new clothes,’ he said.
‘I loved buying them for her too.’
Link via Nerdcore | Photo: Bancroft Media | Previously on Neatorama: Man Weds Virtual Girlfriend
Engineer Carl Morgan’s son complained that a certain hill was too hard to climb on his bicycle. Could his dad invent a machine to help him power over these inclines? The answer came in “Joules”, an electrically-powered robot that rides in the back seat of a tandem bicycle:
Morgan spent months modeling how to transform a motor’s spin into pedal-pushing legs. The motor inside Joules’s torso turns a series of linked belts and chains that transfer power from one area of the robot to the next. Each upper leg pivots at the hip, raising and lowering its knee and forcing the lower legs to turn the pedals. He also added “bones” (rods on the outside) for needed stiffness.
Morgan was nervous when he climbed in front for the final test, but Joules easily cruised to the top of the hill. The bike could probably do more, even hit 30 mph, but Morgan says he doesn’t plan to find out: “Abject cowardice on my part means we’ll never know for sure.”
The Bristol Robotics Laboratory at the University of Bristol, UK has built a robot that senses obstacles not with cameras, but sensitive whiskers at the front end:
Researchers at the University of Bristol in England hope to deploy the poodle-size ‘bot in search-and-rescue missions where vision is impaired, like in mines or smoky rooms. Its 18 whiskers move back and forth five times per second. When a whisker bends, a sensor on its shaft signals software to orient the ’bot toward the object. Whiskers close to an object move less, while those farther away make wide, sweeping motions to establish the object’s exact edges.
Link | Bristol Robotics Laboratory
Creating a robot capable of grasping a variety of door nobs but is light enough to fit onto a wheelchair is quite an engineering challenge. But Erin Rapacki of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell was up to the task, and built one from only $2,000:
A door-opening robot must be able to grasp a variety of designs of door knobs and handles. It also needs to calculate “how much force is needed to open the door, the twisting angles to unlatch the door, and how much force is needed to unlatch it”, says Erin Rapacki, now at Anybots in Mountain View, California [...]
To keep her device simple, Rapacki used a single motor and avoided the expense of cameras and elaborate sensors. Instead, a motor-driven set of gears extends the gripper towards the handle with its three fingers spread apart (see diagram).
Rapacki first tried flexible neoprene fingers, thinking that they could bend to grasp the knob, but these proved too thick and soft. Stiff plastic fingers with plates to constrain their sideways motion proved much more effective.
She also added a slip clutch to the drive system, to allow the device to hold and turn the knob at the same time as pushing or pulling.
Link via Popular Science
A couple of weeks ago I posted about the robot that plays volleyball. Add this to the growing list of sporting droids: a robot that can pitch a fastball to another machine that can hit (although that looks like an easy play by the short stop… I bet the mad scientists are working on that one now). Will the Singularity take place in a sports arena?
Vadim Ryazanov built a robot that rolls away from you as you reach for it. He calls it “Mr. Wake.” As soon as the alarm goes off, an IR sensor on the robot turns on. The robot is programmed to move in the opposite direction of any object moving toward it:
Now, to give you idea how Wake works: Alarm clock mechanism I used has 3 contacts, Plus, Ground, and Alarm, which goes high when alarm goes off. This was really fortune for me, as I had only to connect the grounds and use this Alarm pin as analog input (Could not use it as digital as clock runs on 1.5V) and it workes just fine. So, whenever Alarm pin goes high, my code picks this up and switches Mr. Wake from “standby” to “alarm” mode, which makes him switch on IR leds and red LED in Magic Button on, read ambient reading from IR transistors and wait till the reading inceased above ambiant one, which means something is aproaching from above (I have the detection only from above, where clock and Magic Button are.
Stanford University’s robotics lab has built autonomous cars for several years. Recently, it established a land speed record for a robot car — 140 mph in an Audi TT-S nicknamed “Shelly”. But their next goal is even more ambitious: to have Shelly race the twisted dirt road that leads up to Pike’s Peak. Chris Dannen writes in Fast Company about the changes that allow the car to safely navigate sharper turns at higher speeds:
The new autonomous TT-S is markedly different from Junior, however. Junior was environmentally-aware; it had cameras that could see objects and road features, and it paired that data with GPS data. All that processing required two on-board Linux computers running quad-core Pentium chips and programmed in C and C++.
The new TT-S, unofficially dubbed “Shelly,” uses a different system. It has no cameras, only GPS, and a smaller, less powerful computing box running Sun’s Java Real Time System running on Solaris. Why? Despite Junior’s speedy processors, it still takes the car between 20-50 milliseconds to react to inputs from its sensory equipment. Because the TT-S “Shelly” is traveling at much higher speeds–the team has pushed it over 140 mph–even 20 milliseconds is too much of a delay.
You can view more videos of the project at the link.
Researchers at at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been working since the 1990s on helicopters that can navigate indoor spaces autonomously. This one won the 2009 AUVSI Aerial Robotics Competition. Laser scanners and cameras allow it to move through a building on its own. Potential applications include industrial inspection and disaster rescue in hazardous locations.
Contest Page via Popular Science
Artist Brian Kappel creates art from an alternate universe where robot aesthetic needs are respected. Beyond obvious propaganda posters like the one above, you can find advertisements catering to the robot market as well as more heroic depictions. Wynter Holden writes in the Pheonix New Times:
Take Bastard Rat, for example. Modeled after a vintage advertisement, this mock billboard for Tin Man Pest Control depicts an ominous black robot sporting a metal funnel cap, à la The Wizard of Oz, above a rat with Xs for eyes. The slogan reads “no heart, no problem.” I laughed so hard that my eyes watered. But underneath the humor, there’s an insidious message. Kappel has created a robot-dominated world in which the human attribute of compassion is non-existent. Sound familiar? Lefty Lucy, in which a sexy girl-bot poses for the naughty “All Chrome Revue,” and Loose Lips, Kappel’s robot-era take on the Nazi posters (which encouraged silence through intimidation), are two other sardonic standouts.
Link via io9 (where there’s a gallery)
Bojan Nemec of the Jožef Stefan Institute in Slovenia developed an AI-enabled robot that can maneuver on skis without falling over:
The laptop control center plans the robot’s trajectory, using a camera to measure its distance from the race gates. Gyros and force sensors help the bot stay stabilized on the slopes.
The robot carries a GPS unit, but it’s used to help measure speed, not for trajectory planning. That makes sense, if you’re trying to build a robot that works more like a human, relying on vision.
At the link, you can find the blooper reel from the video shoot.
Link via Popular Science
iRobot, the company that invented the Roomba household vacuuming robot, is developing a robot that locomotes by inflating and deflating sections of its outer skin, moving contents inside toward its destination. Kristina Grifantini writes at MIT’s Technology Review:
This week at IROS 09 (Intelligent Robots and Systems), iRobot and the University of Chicago unveiled a soft, blobby robot that looks something like an inflating marshmallow.
The new robot, called chembot, changes the shape of its stretchy polymer skin using a technique called “jamming skin enabled locomotion”. This means that different sections of the robot inflate or deflate separately; controlling this inflation and deflation enables the robot to move. DARPA, which is funding the project, hopes to use the robot to squeeze into small holes or under doors, which I’m guessing would be used for sophisticated surveillance.
Link via Geekologie | Company Website
You might or might not consider this to be good news. Enrico Grasso of the University Hospital Tor Vergata in Rome, Italy, has developed a pill-sized robot that can crawl around inside a patient, searching for signs of cancer. Alastair Jamieson writes in The Daily Telegraph:
Pills containing cameras already exist, but this is believed to be the first that can be controlled after it has been swallowed.
Once the examination has finished, the spider pill exits the body naturally.
It has been successfully tested on pigs but further trials will be needed before it can be cleared for use by doctors.
Elisa Buselli, one of the scientists working on the project that created the spider pill, said: “This should improve the situation not just for the patient but also the doctor.”
Link via Popular Science | Image: BBC News
This video by ABB Robotics demonstrates a sorting robot used in a pancake factory. The action starts at about 1:15, when the robot begins sorting 400 pancakes per minute, switching off so that specific sizes are in a specific order. Just imagine how we could benefit if this machine was applied to soylent green production.
Via Make | Company Website
Panasonic subsidiary Activelink is developing the “Dual Arm Amplification Robot” — an exoskeleton that allows the user to lift heavy weights. It hopes to have to have a working model by 2015, which can then be used for disaster relief or industrial assembly. It is equipped with direct force feedback, which allows the user to feel the impact of its movements, and thus better control the machine.
Link via Popular Science
The Mainichi Daily News (Japan) reports that a college student has developed a robot that can be partially controlled through a neural interface. Taku Ichikawa of the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo hooks up electrodes to his head and then concentrates on certain images that serve as command prompts:
The control of the robot through reading neural signals — technology Ichikawa helped to develop for a hands-free wheelchair project — requires the operator to imagine a set of movements many times a day. During research into the wheelchair, the developers tied particular movements with particularly clear mental images, allowing users to command the chair without any previous training. For example, if a user could imagine badminton very clearly, that could become the command for forward.
Link via Popular Science | Image: Mainichi Daily News
The Bloodbot is a robot that drains you of your blood, thus replacing nursing assistants who previously did that task. It’s a project by the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College, UK. It’s been around for years now, but as people are waking up the a potential Robopocalypse, the Bloodbot only recently been getting attention in the blogosphere:
The Bloodbot has three powered (linear motion) axes and one unpowered (rotational) axis. All the motors are inexpensive stepper types.
The first axis moves a carriage up and down, so that it goes towards and away from the arm that is strapped in under it. This carriage is used to hold either a blunt probe (for finding a vein) or a syringe and needle. A piezo-resistive force sensor is mounted on the carriage to measure the force on the probe or needle.
The second axis moves the carriage across the width of the arm. This enables the probe to press in a series of places along the width of the arm.
The third axis, which is unpowered, enables a human operator to tilt the robot. This is so that, once a vein has been found, the needle can be inserted into the arm at the correct angle.
The fourth axis moves the whole robot along the length of the arm. This was designed to compensate for the slight difference between where the probe has identified a vein, and where the needle enters the skin, once the robot has been tilted.
Don’t worry about safety — it’s accurate 78% of the time.
Image: Imperial College
Deep Green is pool-playing robot created by students at the robotics laboratory of Queen’s University in Canada. Students have worked on it for the past three years, gradually improving its abilities against human opponents:
The system is currently playing at a better-than-amateur level. One current weakness, however, is with the break. The special purpose end effector is powered by a linear electric actuator, which can reach speeds of up to 3 m/s. For a strong break, however, a cue speed of ~ 15 m/s is required. The objective of this project is therefore to design an auxiliary subsystem for the end-effector to be used exclusively for breaks. The subsystem could make use of the current cue, or it could append an additional cue to the end-effector. It is likely that the subsystem will be actuated pneumatically, although other options may be considered. The subsystem must also be compact enough so as not to interfere with the other elements of the end-effector.
Link via CrunchGear
The magazine Popular Mechanics has issued its Backyard Geniuses Award. It’s like a Nobel Prize, but for people who complete amazing technical projects of questionable utility. Pictured above is a giant car-crushing mechanical hand by Christian Ristow, a former employee of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop:
In 2007 Christian Ristow, an artist and former animatronics designer for the movie industry, demonstrated his first working incarnation of the Hand of Man at a robotics festival in Amsterdam. Much of his time since then has been spent re-engineering and refining the design of the 27-foot-long hydraulically actuated appendage, exhibiting more and more capable crushers at a series of public venues. Ristow’s latest mechanical steel limb has 90-degree wrist rotation and improved mobility in the finger joints. It is powered by a 90-hp Perkins 1104C-44T four-cylinder diesel engine and is controlled through a glove worn by the operator. At demonstrations, that operator is usually a random member of the audience. “I’ve built other large-scale radio-control robots for shows over the years, but I always felt like I was the one having the most fun,” Ristow says. “This democratizes the crushing power.”
Gil Weinberg and Scott Driscoll of Georgia Tech developed a robot that can improvise rhythms as it hears music:
Haile is a robotic percussionist that can listen to live players, analyze their music in real-time, and use the product of this analysis to play back in an improvisational manner. It is designed to combine the benefits of computational power and algorithmic music with the richness, visual interactivity, and expression of acoustic playing. We believe that when collaborating with live players, Haile can facilitate a musical experience that is not possible by any other means, inspiring players to interact with it in novel expressive manners, which leads to novel musical outcome.
Link via The Presurfer
The robotics lab at Ben Gurion University in Israel has created a robot that walks on the ceiling. SpiderBot has suction cups tethered to the ends of its four legs. It aims a leg at a spot on the ceiling, then shoots the cup at it. Then it reels itself toward the spot, releases a rear leg’s suction cup, and slowly repeats the process. Video at the link.
Healthcare Robotics is hard at work developing a robot that will interact with the world at the click of a laser pointer. Simply point at an object, and the robot will go and pick it up.
In our object fetching application there are initially virtual buttons surrounding objects within the environment. If the user illuminates an object (“clicks it”) the robot moves to the object, grasps it, and lifts it up. Once the robot has an object in its hand, a separate set of virtual buttons get mapped onto the world. At this point, clicking near a person tells the robot to deliver the object to the person. Clicking on a tabletop tells the robot to place the object on the table. While clicking on the floor tells the robot to move to the selected location.
One obvious application would be to assist people with limited mobility. Click the link for a video of the robot in action.
Festo, has been shown here on Neatorama several times in the past and each time their robotics and bizarre creations blew our collective minds…our Neatorama Hivemind to be exact…but that’s a story for another time.
In this video you’ll get to see creepy blue LED robotic penguins swimming about in a large pool. Also, you’ll see it’s more lighter cousin who probably is the envy of every penguin in being able to fly/float and much more in terms of various robotic creations. Really fascinating stuff!
More info here – Link
For older Neatorama Festo links:
Festo’s Upside-Down Hot Air Balloon
AquaJelly and AirJelly
Air Ray: The Blimp With Wings
Meet Aqua Ray
Festo Airic’s Robotic Arm
Floating Fish Blimp
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