Handroid is a low-cost, flexible robot hand | Crave ITK, a Japanese start-up that makes eclectic products such as walking sticks and gardening tools, is developing a low-cost, flexible robot hand that could be used in hazardous environments. The Handroid is a remotely-operated hand with five movable fingers. It weighs roughly 1.6 pounds. As seen in the promo vid below, users can operate it with a master-slave glove system so that their hand movements are reproduced by Handroid. That could come in handy in places like the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, where workers have struggled to manipulate doors with iRobot PackBots. ITK, a spinoff of a machining company near Nagoya, wants to develop the Handroid into a prosthetic that can pick up electrical impulses from a user's muscles, just like Touch Bionics' i-Limb Pulse . But as a robot appendage, it could cost only a fraction of the price of the i-Limb Pulse. ITK's got moxie for a small company in the Japanese hinterland, and I wouldn't be surprised if it turns this into a real product.
Ant executions serve a higher purpose, research shows Natural selection can be an agonizingly long process. Some organisms have a way of taking matters into their own hands, or—in the case of the ant species Cerapachys biroi—mandibles. Researchers at The Rockefeller University and Paris University have found that when a C. biroi ant steps out of line and attempts to lay eggs when it shouldn't, the other ants will drag it out of the nest and bite and sting it until it dies. And in a new study published this month in Current Biology, they believe they've discovered why. Daniel Kronauer, head of the Laboratory of Insect Social Evolution at Rockefeller, and his colleagues in Paris chose to study C. biroi because of the special characteristics it has. Error loading player: No playable sources found The researchers monitored 11 C. biroi colonies for 13 months. Kronauer's lab is interested in illuminating the processes that allow simple biological units to cooperate and form more complex higher-level units. More information: Teseo, S. et al.
Robot bees designed to take over for declining bee populations in 2015. Photo by JOEL SAGET/AFP/GettyImages. Autonomous robot bugs sound like creatures from a sci-fi flick, but they could be a reality very soon. Scientists at the Universities of Sheffield and Sussex in England are designing the first electronic bees in hopes that they can "supplement or replace the shrinking population of honey bees that pollinate essential plant life," according to the tech blog io9. The Green Brain Project, as the effort is called, will upload real bees' senses of sight and smell into the tiny robots. Scientists hope these basic cognitive abilities will allow e-bees to detect odors and gases from flowers, just as bees do. The project plans to release the bees in 2015. Along with making the world safe for pollination, these bees don't sting.
One Per Cent: Cardboard cockroach ranks among world's fastest robots Sara Reardon, reporter Don't stomp on this little robot - not yet, anyway. VELOCIRoACH, a small cardboard hexapod modelled on a cockroach, can run at 2.7 metres per second, placing it among the fastest robots in the world. Boston Dynamics' LS3, which can trot at up to 3.2 m/s, still holds the speed record for a self-powered robot. Duncan Haldane at the University of California, Berkeley, presented VELOCIRoACH this week at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting in San Francisco. The secret to VELOCIRoACH's speed is its thin, C-shaped legs. Elsewhere at the meeting, Nick Kohut, who works with Haldane, presented a similar robot with an added tail. Haldane says he's now working to improve VELOCIRoACH's body plan so it can withstand an indoor insect's most deadly nemesis: the human foot.
A fish that pushes in the wrong direction solves a mystery of animal locomotion 7-Nov-2013 [ Print | E-mail ] Share [ Close Window ] Contact: Tanya Klein 973-596-3433New Jersey Institute of Technology For nearly 20 years, Professor Eric Fortune has studied glass knifefish, a species of three-inch long electric fish that lives in the Amazon Basin. But in the Nov. 4-8 online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Fortune and a multi-disciplinary team of researchers report that these opposing forces are anything but wasteful. "I read a Navy flight training manual that had a full page dedicated to the inherent tradeoff between stability and maneuverability, says Fortune, an associate professor of biology at NJIT. When an animal or vehicle is stable, it resists changes in direction. "Animals are a lot more clever with their mechanics than we often realize," said Noah Cowan, a professor of mechanical engineering at The Johns Hopkins University and the senior author of the multi-disciplinary research team. [ Print | E-mail Share ] [ Close Window ]
Robot able to swim, crawl and walk Salamandra robotica II is a last generation amphibious robot developed by the Biorobotics Laboratory at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne). It is the guest of honor at the booth of Syrobo, the founder of Innorobo, which is the largest European exhibition of service robotics, and takes place in Lyon from 19 to 21 March 2013. Among the many robots inspired by natural designs, the Salamandra robotica II is the only one able to swim, crawl and walk—all by combining robotics, evolution and neurobiology. Share Video undefined A salamander's locomotion is controlled by neural circuits distributed along its spinal cord. This amphibious robot was developed by Professor Auke Ijspeert's team at EPFL in collaboration with Jean-Marie Cabelguen from the University of Bordeaux /INSERM. It is a valuable tool for better understanding of locomotion systems and their associated pathologies.
Scientists study some fishy behavior to solve an animal locomotion mystery Video: Stability, maneuverability in knifefish Related Articles Noah Cowan is taking an innovative approach to improving robotics We can't talk with the animals. But by observing their most awe-inspiring traits, we can learn enough from them to create new medicines and robots. / Johns Hopkins Magazine A quirk of nature has long baffled biologists: Why do animals push in directions that don't point toward their goal, like the side-to-side sashaying of a running lizard or cockroach? A multi-institutional research team, led by Johns Hopkins engineers, says it has solved this puzzle. "One of the things they teach you in engineering is that you can't have both stability and maneuverability at the same time," said Noah Cowan, a Johns Hopkins associate professor of mechanical engineering, who supervised the research. When an animal or vehicle is stable, it resists changes in direction. "We are far from duplicating the agility of animals with our most advanced robots," MacIver said.
Robo-pets may contribute to quality of life for those with dementia Robotic animals can help to improve the quality of life for people with dementia, according to research. Companionable robots are enjoyable, interesting and can be used as an intervention to promote social interaction. Northumbria University’s Professor Glenda Cook has carried out ethnographic work in care homes in North East England introducing PARO – a robotic harp seal – to residents. PARO is fitted with artificial intelligence software and tactile sensors that allow it to respond to touch and sound. It can show emotions such as surprise, happiness and anger, can learn its own name and learns to respond to words that its owner uses frequently. Professor Cook said: “When PARO is introduced to residents of care homes it is met with great interest with residents wanting to hold and interact with the robot. “Staff members indicate that introducing PARO into the care environment promoted social interaction between residents, and between residents and staff.
Flying Spherical Robot Gimball Collides With Objects, But Keeps On Flying As sensors and microchips get smaller, cheaper, and more powerful—it’s tempting to use them for everything. But sometimes simpler is better. Instead of stereoscopic cameras, radar, and complicated algorithms, an EPFL team equipped their latest flying robot, GimBall, with the equivalent of a seeing-eye cane to help it navigate tight, cluttered spaces. GimBall is attached to a light spherical cage that rotates with collisions while the inner robot remains stable (like a gimbal, its namesake). GimBall’s cage makes it mostly collision-proof and even informs its flight pattern. To test GimBall, the team set it loose in a forest, where programming a traditional robot through the trees would pose a thorny problem, and colliding with a tree might mark the end of the experiment. Instead of programming a complicated flight pattern or series of autonomous interactions—Gimball can be instructed to take a straight path through the forest. Image Credit: A.