Modular Robot Fits

 Modular Robot Fits Together to Form Larger Modular Robots

iMobot UC-Davis

Meet iMobot, a new reconfigurable robot that can be linked together like a chain to form larger versions of itself. With four degrees of freedom, it can stand itself up and turn into a tiny camera stand, roll end-over-end like a mini tank tread, or hunch along like an inchworm.

Researchers at the University of California-Davis have applied for a patent on the robot, which they say could be used for search and rescue operations as well as robotics research.

Its two modules have two joints at the center, which can rotate 180 degrees, and two rotating faceplates at each end, as the researchers explain. The faceplates turn continuously, allowing the robot to roll along as though it were driving. Future research will explore clusters of iMobots working together in even larger modular platforms.

Creators Graham Ryland and Harry Cheng received a $150,000 National Science Foundation grant to start Barobo Inc., a business aimed at commercializing the iMobot. You can find out how to get one here.

Modular robots could be a more cost-effective way to build robot helpers for a variety of tasks, like search-and-rescue snakebots or tree-climbing spy cams. The inventors hope it will be for sale by the end of the year.

Simon Robot

New robot can tell when it's being ignored, and it politely and subtly gets a person's attention. Researchers say the new computer vision system could help robots and humans interact more effectively, by allowing robots to use the same social cues as people.

developed in Georgia Tech's Socially Intelligent Machines lab, uses a camera to figure out when a person is interested in interacting with it.

It watches their behavior and uses some form of gesture, like waving its hand, to get noticed.

It has to figure out whether it captured the person’s attention using only the camera as a guide Simon achieved about  80% accuracy in determining when he had gotten someone’s attention according to Aaron Bobick, professor and chair of the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech's ( College of Computing).

Simon’s timid wave interrupts his concentration, and he waves back.

The goal is to help robots understand when to sit and be quiet and when it’s appropriate for them to get a human’s attention wow do you believe ?

 People can figure this out pretty easily with simple body language, but it’s not as obvious for a robot. Remember Furby and its insistent, insipid desire to play, even when you didn’t feel like it? Simon is apparently a little more polite.

order for these robots to work with us effectively, they have to obey these same social conventions, which means they have to be able to perceive the same things humans perceive in determining how to abide by those conventions

Other robots at Georgia Tech are helping robots learn whether they want to deceive other robots or humans, and then carry out a deceptive strategy to that effect. No word on whether these technologies would ever be combined, so robots could figure out when we humans aren’t paying attention and then carry out their devious world dominating plans.

Robot like Elephant Trunk Arm

The Bionic Handling Assistant Festo

Germany’s Festo is no stranger to robots that mimic animal biology, but its new elephant trunk-inspired robot arm is more concerned with the fragility of human physiolog

The strength of the elephant the arm  calld the Bionic Handling Assistant is certainly strong and flexible like the appendage it’s modeled after but it’s also safe for humans to work with employing a battery of resistance sensors that make human safety .

Festo set out to create an arm that is both strong and dexterous as well as safe for humans working alongside it.

Using 3-D printing technology the engineers and their partners at the Fraunhofer Institute  created lightweight and soft trunk segments that are powered by pneumatic artificial muscles that drive some serious force underneath.

The trunk segments are littered with resistance sensors that help it to be aware of contact with people and objects around it.

A three-fingered gripper at the end is also designed to need little force to grasp a range of objects.

The result is a multifunctional gripper ‘bot that could be applied to a range of industrial applications, as an extra set of hands on the lab bench, or even as an assistant in the operating room and since it can interact with other Bionic Handling Assistants to pass objects back and forth, multiple robo-trunks could be deployed in arrays that help both humans and each other. 

via   

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2010/11/robotic-trunk-makes-for-a-flex.html

Robotic Jellyfish

swim like the real thing

Made in Germany, engineers apparent a automatic afraid advised to swim but not sting like the absolute thing.

AquaJelly runs on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, has a almost all-around anatomy and uses eight tentacles to get about in the water.

The tentacles agitate like the appendage of a absolute fish, and baby fins at the ends accord the apparatus a little added advance on the water.

To steer, the apprentice accouterment its weight, and it drives about its catchbasin autonomously.

Pressure sensors acquaint the AquaJelly how abysmal it is in the baptize aural a few millimeters, and ablaze sensors accord it an abstraction of the area of abeyant obstacles including added robo-jellies.

Via Robots.net

Smart Brid Robot + video

Smart Bird Festo

New lifelike seagull ‘bot is one of the best astute bio-inspired flight machines we’ve seen. SmartBird takes off, flies and acreage on its own, aerial its wings and axis its arch and appendage to steer. It is modeled on the herring dupe and its actualization and movements are uncannily agnate to the absolute thing.

SmartBird is Festo’s newest access in its Bionic Learning Network program, which involves several universities in the U.S. and Europe and aims to use attributes as a archetypal for mechatronic systems.

The bird has a 6.5-foot wingspan, so it’s abundant beyond than a absolute gull, but it looks appealing abundant like the absolute thing, as you can see in the video below.

SmartBird flies like a aviate acknowledgment to an alive bewilderment arrangement accumulated with a circuitous ascendancy system. Its wings anniversary abide of a two-part arm addition batten with an arbor address on the torso. The wings and appendage are the alone mechanisms creating lift, and Festo engineers had to amount out bird flight in adjustment to do it.

The aggregation explains: “First, the wings exhausted up and down, whereby a batten apparatus causes the amount of bend to access from the anatomy to the addition tip. Second, the addition twists in such a way that its arch bend is directed upwards during the advancement stroke, so that the addition adopts a absolute bend of attack.

ROBOT LIKE HUMANs + VIDEO

What’s creepier than three of the world’s best conscientious Geminoid robots sitting about a table accepting a conversation? If you answered three of the world’s best conscientious Geminoid robots sitting about a table accepting a chat with the flesh and blood bodies they were advised to emulate, we allure you to analysis your antecedent via the video below.

Meeting at ATR in Nara aftermost month, the three robots didn’t accept too awfully abundant to say to one another. But built-in abutting to their affable real life counterparts this Geminoid acme compounds the aberrant awareness usually triggered by seeing a apprentice that is difficult to

ROBOT LIKE HUMANs

FRIDA Robot It`s Do Your Job

Frida the two-armed robot would like to assignment with you. She wants you to apperceive she would accomplish a abundant assistant, with her able accoutrements and headless torso, butterfingers of inane baby talk. She will not aching you, she promises. But she ability accomplish you obsolete.A new breed of friendly workerbots like Frida is assertive to booty over assiduous small-scale accumulation work, analogous animal ability and accurate movement. Frida stands for “Friendly Robot for Industrial Dual-Arm Assembly,” and is advised to be installed anywhere aural an accumulation line.

Frida is advised for the accurate purpose of alive with people, either side by side or face to face, and as such it calmly obeys the aboriginal law of robotics and keeps bodies safe. It stops its awe-inspiring hand-clasping motion if any animal limbs appear to get in the way, for instance. Check it out in the video below.

It can accomplish in bound spaces and can alike ability apparatus beneath its base. The accoutrements accept seven joints and the controls are anchored in the torso, simplifying architecture for accessible cleanup. It can be agitated about with a handle area its arch would be, and is calmly army to a board or wall.

Frida was apparent at the Hannover Fair, but it’s aloof a prototype, so companies can't get one yet. Remaining branch workers can breathe a blow of relief.

Happy Workerbot

New cheerful factory robot aims to keep European industry competitive by working alongside humans, smiling when it accomplishes a task or when its bosses ensure it stays busy. The pi4_workerbot, developed at Fraunhofer labs, has fingertip sensitivity  it`s completes the perennially difficult robot task of grasping an egg  and a variety of facial expressions.

It`s have three cameras and two arms and stands as tall as an average human.  It`s seamlessly integrated into assembly lines, according to Fraunhofer’s Research News.

Happy Workerbot  can pick up two pieces gear wheel and a housing  and carefully fiddle with them until the two pieces engage.

The robot smiles, and places the correctly assembled part on the conveyor belt, a Fraunhofer news release explains. The robot’s shoulders swivel, affording it several degrees of freedom, and it also has an rotating wrist, which allows precise hand movements.

It has a 3-D camera to see its surroundings, and two other cameras allow it to inspect factory items with greater precision than a human eye. In an automotive factory, for instance, it could examine a chrome-plated object by studying how light reflects off the material. The robot is a product of the European Union-funded PISA project, which aims for greater industrial efficiency using robots.

If a company needs to produce something fast but has no worker resources, the idea would be to rent the workerbot and integrate it into human working spaces,” Fraunhofer researcher Dragoljub Surdilovic told The Engineer.

The better can work for  24 hours and it would prefer to stay busy because If its work is going smoothly, it will smile happily.  If it looks bored, it’s waiting for work, and the production manager knows the production process can be speeded up,

 By  Fraunhofer Research News.