Meet the Amazing Robots That Will Compete in the DARPA Robotics Challenge Wow. I mean, seriously, wow. We've been incredibly excited to see the progress that Boston Dynamics has been making on ATLAS in preparation for the DARPA Robotics Challenge, but we had no idea what to expect from the challenge's Track A teams, each of whom will be designing and building their own robot with capabilities comparable to what we've seen ATLAS do. Today, October 24, is opening day for the DARPA Robotics Challenge, or DRC.
s First Scientific Discovery Today we are excited to share that EyeWire’s first scientific discovery has been published in Nature! Why does it matter? This discovery would not have been possible without you! Together, citizen scientists and gamers have made a significant contribution to neuroscience: we’ve uncovered one of the mechanisms that underlies a mammal’s ability to tell that something it sees is moving in a specific direction. Neuroscientists call this direction selectivity. Although this property sounds simple, its mechanism has been unclear since direction selectivity was first discovered more than 50 years ago. Buy Jetson TK1 Development Kit The NVIDIA Jetson TK1 development kit is a full-featured platform for Tegra K1 embedded applications. It allows you to unleash the power of 192 CUDA cores to develop solutions in computer vision, robotics, medicine, security, and automotive. Buy the Jetson TK1 DevKit below and make sure to check out the Jetson TK1 post from our Parallel Forall blog. NVIDIA provides the BSP and software stack which includes the CUDA Toolkit, OpenGL 4.4 drivers, and the NVIDIA VisionWorks Toolkit. Get downloads on the Jetson Support Page DevKit Includes
Self-organizing Systems Research Group A Low Cost Scalable Robot System for Demonstrating Collective Behaviors Purchase some from K-Team: K-Team Corp is making Kilobots available for purchase, starting now! See the K-Team Flier and K-Team homepage. K-team sells groups of robots, controllers, and charging stations - picture on the right is courtesy of Sabine Hauert, MIT. Several groups are starting to use kilobots, to test different distributed algorithms.
A Prosthetic Hand That Sends Feelings to Its Wearer There have been remarkable mechanical advances in prosthetic limbs in recent years, including rewiring nerve fibers to control sophisticated mechanical arms (see “A Lifelike Prosthetic Arm”), and brain interfaces that allow for complicated thought control (see “Brain Helps Quadriplegics Move Robotic Arms with Their Thoughts”). But for all this progress, prosthetic limbs cannot send back sensory information to the wearer, making it harder for them to do tasks like pick up objects without crushing them or losing their grip. Now researchers at the Cleveland Veterans Affairs Medical Center and Case Western Reserve University have developed a new kind of interface that can convey a sense of touch from 20 spots on a prosthetic hand. It does this by directly stimulating nerve bundles—known as peripheral nerves—in the arms of patients; two people have so far been fitted with the interface. At the heart of the technology is a custom version of an interface known as a cuff electrode.
New stretchable solar cells will power artificial electronic 'super skin' Photos by L.A. Cicero The foundation for the artificial skin is a flexible organic transistor, made with flexible polymers and carbon-based materials. "Super skin" is what Stanford researcher Zhenan Bao wants to create. She's already developed a flexible sensor that is so sensitive to pressure it can feel a fly touch down. Now she's working to add the ability to detect chemicals and sense various kinds of biological molecules. robot drummer has plenty of rhythm on [technabob] March 22nd, 2008 by Paul Strauss This little yellow robot does one thing really well. He likes to play drums. What’s funny about the little guy is that he likes to play music on just about any surface other than an actual drum. The Yellow Drum Machine drives around the room looking for things that might make an interesting sound when tapped on.
New Artificial Hands Restore a Sense of Touch A Dutch man who lost his left hand in a fireworks accident nine years ago is now able to feel different kinds of pressure on three fingers of a prosthetic, robotic hand. The work involved a new kind of implanted device that delivers feedback directly to the remaining nerves in the man’s arm. The implant was left in place for 31 days, allowing the man to feel gradations of touch pressure, depending on the amount of electrical stimulus delivered. The work, carried out by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, adds to remarkable recent advances in prosthetics that can convey sensation. In another project, researchers at Case Western Reserve University are testing a different type of implant that delivers varying kinds of sensations and has been attached to an Ohio man’s arm for 19 months. To achieve their result, the Swiss researchers inserted electrodes into two of the patient’s three major arm nerves: the ulnar and median.