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CLASH Robot Can Climb Vertically Like an Insect
“UC Berkeley has a long history of developing innovative legged robots: There was ROACH, there was BOLT, there was DASH. DASH, a cockroach-Inspired design, was a very simple, very fast hexapedal robot that could scuttle along the ground at 15 body lengths per second.
Now meet the latest addition to this family of robot bugs: CLASH, pictured above, is a vertically-enabled successor to DASH, and it’s designed to zip up vertical or near-vertical cloth surfaces with the aid of tiny little spiny toes. It’s sort of like what you’d get if you put DASH and SpinyBot together in a dark room along with a 3D printer and some Barry Manilow (or whatever it is robots are listening to these days).
For a vertical climbing robot, CLASH is surprisingly quick. It may actually be one of the quickest climbing robots in existence, able to move upwards at 24 centimeters per second, which is really quite a lot faster than it sounds.
Part of the reason that CLASH can scramble around so fast is that it’s small and lightweight with a simple, but clever, design. CLASH is 10 centimeters long and weighs only 15 grams. The back-and-forth climbing motion of four legs (the back two are passive) is entirely driven by one single motor that gives CLASH a gait frequency of a brisk 34 strides per second.”
Paraswift: A Robot That Can Climb Vertically And Paraglide Down
“Adrenalin junkies, step aside: a new base-jumping robot can climb up buildings before deploying a paraglider to fly back down to earth.
It is also equipped with an on-board video camera to film the jump.
The robot – named Paraswift – is a collaboration between Disney Research and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, and was initially built for entertainment purposes.
But as the first compact robot that can both climb and fly, it has practical uses too, such as gathering aerial footage for 3D modelling systems.”
Teagueduino: Arduino For Dummies
“Teagueduino is an open source electronic board and interface that allows you to realize creative ideas without soldering or knowing how to code, while teaching you the ropes of programming and embedded development (like arduino).
Teagueduino is designed to help you discover your inner techno-geek and embrace the awesomeness of making things in realtime — even if you’ve only ever programmed your VCR…
Just plug in a sensor to one of the input ports (for example, a knob), hook up an output device (a speaker, perhaps?), and use the awesomely simple Teagueduino user interface to make it work (a single line of code can map the knob’s rotation to a musical tone on the speaker)!
And since everything changes in realtime, there’s no waiting for things to compile or the device to reset.”
Bugbot. Half-Insect, Half-Machine.
A piezoelectric beam attached to a Green June Beetle reveals the optimum location to scavenge energy and shows that up to 115 µW total power can be generated from the insect’s body movements. Image credit: Aktakka, et al.
“For many years, researchers have been working on designing and fabricating micro-air-vehicles (MAVs), flying robots the size of small insects.
But after realizing how difficult it is to create a tiny, lightweight flying vehicle capable of carrying a payload and being powered by a long-life onboard power source, some researchers have recently stopped trying to copy real-life insects and started using the insects themselves, with a few small tweaks.
For instance, using tiny stimulators near their antennae, electrodes implanted in their central nervous systems, or neuromuscular interfaces, researchers have found that it’s easier to control insect’s brains – and therefore, flight – than to build robotic insects from scratch.”
First Robotic Astronaut’s First Day on Job
“While one chapter of the space program has come to an end with the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet, another has begun as a next-generation astronaut just began his tour on board the International Space Station (ISS).
The only thing is, he’s a robot.
Named Robonaut 2, the robot first arrived at the ISS back in February aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery during the STS-133 mission. However it was only this week that the crew had the first chance to ‘wake up’ their new colleague.”
GelSight – The Gel That Can “See” A Cell
“If you’ve ever looked at the odd images formed inside Jell-O when you thrust in your spoon, you’ll understand GelSight. The idea was to design for robots working with complex objects an unusual and very powerful fingertip sensor similar to our own. But the MIT team has since realized that their creation has equally exciting applications elsewhere.
GelSight is essentially a piece of soft optically transparent gel with one shiny face as a sensor–when it’s pressed onto a 3-D object, the sensor surface distorts to match the object’s shape and some cameras peeping at the reflections of the twisted surface can “see” what the gel is touching. The cameras are tighly focused on the reflective surface, and their image feed is processed by a computer to generate a 3-D image of the thing being touched.
It’s actually powerful enough to detect precisely the raised ink printed on a $20 bill–and actually far more detailed information than this, right down to objects that are a micrometer in depth and two across. A typical red blood cell is seven micrometers across.”
A Bird? No, it’s a Robot!
“There are some developments that are too beautiful to miss, even if you are not interested in the hardware and so it is with Festo’s collection of biologically inspired robots. To a programmer a robot is “just another platform”, but to take control of a machine that literally flies like a bird is inspiring.
It makes you think of new things that you could do. First watch the video and just be impressed that at long last we can mimic the flight of birds. Then watch it again more carefully and try to compare it to everyone’s favourite flying robot platform – the quadrarotor or the hexarotor. They are noisy and suck power but they can lift loads and they can hover and position.
Now look at the way the robot SmartBird flies. It has a gentle mastery of the air that allows it to semi-hover and to almost stall in mid turn. This is a type of flight that might not be able to lift heavy loads but its silence and maneuverability suggests many other applications. With the right software it could be made to be much more controllable and sophisticated.”
Build Your Own Robot with Cubelets
“Robotics can be a tricky subject to teach children, and it’s hard to know where to start. Cubelets is a system of modular cubes that each have one use, interaction, or behavior, and by linking them together you can create easy to understand robots with impressive behavior.
It’s a great concept: you start with very basic ideas, and then by linking them together you can create something that can work in a variety of ways.
“Cubelets was originally called roBlocks and was a project I worked on while in grad school for architecture at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh,” Eric Schweikhardt, the creator of Cubelets, told Ars.
He wanted a way to let people interact with digital models, and thought blocks was a good beginning. “I started to add more functionality into the different cubes and Cubelets evolved out of that.
I never intended to make and sell a product, but after the 20th lab visitor asked when they could buy them, I started to warm to the idea.” Smart move: the first batch of 100 beta kits has already sold out.”
Is Motorola Taking Cover Behind Asimov?
“Motorola Mobility said on Monday that it has bought 3LM, a company that develops enterprise security and device management products for Android devices.
Motorola said that 3LM’s technology addresses ease-of-use, cost-of-management and security concerns for IT managers, and its products allow for the development of enterprise security features.
Motorola Mobility, which was recently formed when Motorola split into two separate companies, completed the deal in late 2010. It didn’t disclose terms of the deal.
The security company says 3LM stands for “three laws of mobility” that devices should follow: protect the user from malicious code or content, protect the device itself by securing data and communications, and obey the user unless this would cause a security problem.”
Swarms of solar microbots to gather data
“Researchers are developing ways to mass-produce tiny robots the size of a fly that operate like swarms of insects to collect data to aid in surveillance, micromanufacturing, medicine, and more.
Measuring in at under 4 mm square, the microbots have all the equipment necessary to move, communicate, and collect data, plus they generate all of their own power via solar panels.”
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