Snake Like Robot can climb up trees

11/16/2011 06:09:00 PM gadgets, nature, robot, snake 1 Comment

Snake Like Robot can climb up trees


Scientists have always been trying to create robots that can mimic the movements of animals. The research in this field is now gone vast enough that scientists have been able to create a robot that moves just like a snake and is even able to climb up the trees.

The creators(Carnegie Mellon) of this Snake robots have named it as "Uncle Sam". Uncle Sam has the ability to crawl, roll and it can move sideways. But the best thing thing that it does to impress you is that it can wrap it self around any pole or a tree and can climb up too.

The robot is composed of segments, and each segment has the ability to move on its own and creates its own movement intelligent enoughly to move forward on ground and upwards on poles and trees.

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Exoskeleton system ready for soldier tests

7/22/2010 02:22:00 PM gadgets, robot No Comments

Exoskeleton system ready for soldier tests:

A robotic exoskeleton that makes it easier for soldiers to run and carry heavy weights is to go through final testing in the US.

The HULC (Human Universal Load Carrier) allows soldiers to carry weights of up to 200lbs (91kg) with little effort and is designed to reduce the strain of carrying heavy equipment.

It works by transferring the load to the ground through the exoskeleton's titanium legs and uses an onboard computer to sense and mimic the user's movements.

The battery powered device, which can fit different body sizes, also allow for jumps, squats, crawling and slow-speed running.

"It does not impede your range of motion whatsoever," says HULC project manager Jim Ni.

"Just imagine you're a soldier operating at 6,000ft in the Afghan mountains and being asked to take 120lbs up there in the thin air.

The HULC allows soldiers to carry weight of up to 91kg with little effort

"An exoskeleton allows you to carry that weight the same distance and have energy left to execute the mission when you get there."

Although the HULC weighs 53lbs (24kg), its makers say it also transfers its own weight to the ground, making it virtually unnoticeable.

Lockheed Martin, which makes the device, has reworked an earlier prototype and produced a new "ruggedized design" that will begin an eight week lab test at the end of 2010.

The testing will look at how quickly people learn to operate the system and measure the energy a soldier uses when using the HULC.

"The tests will help us assess the current state of the technology," said David Audet, from the US Army's Natick Soldier Research Center.

"Exoskeletons have the potential to reduce stress on the body from heavy loads."

After the lab tests, the HULC is likely to go through more field tests in 'real-life' military scenarios during 2011

(via bbc)

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Samarai UAV Gets Shrinkage

5/16/2010 09:22:00 PM gadgets, robot No Comments

Samarai UAV Gets Shrinkage:


We heard some rumors back in 2009 that Lockheed Martin’s SAMARAI UAV project had been killed off. In fact, Lockheed Martin themselves apparently confirmed that they had stopped developing the UAV since AeroVironment won DARPA’s nano air vehicle development contract to put some polish on their robot hummingbird. So, I’m not entirely sure what the background to this video is, but it shows a much more recent (and smaller, with a wingspan of only 12 inches) version of the SAMARAI.

The SAMARAI is certainly simple (at least, compared to AeroVironment’s UAV), and as the video shows, you can just chuck it into the air, and it can land on the ground and then take off again without needing much in the way of space or infrastructure. On the other hand, I’m not sure exactly how you’d go about mounting something like a camera on a spinning airframe (maybe sync the shutter speed with the rotation speed?), and in order to operate effectively indoors, the SAMARAI would benefit from some level of resilience to impacts. At this point, it seems as though a collision with a wall or doorframe would probably knock the SAMARAI a tad askew, causing it to spin out of control and decapitate everyone in the room.

Or maybe that’s a feature.

In any case (and we’ve pinged Lockheed Martin about the status of this project), I’m happy to see that they seem to have kept working on the SAMARAI. It was a good idea when trees came up with it, and it’s a good idea for flying robots, too. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing the 10 gram, 6cm, jet powered 6000 rpm final product.

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Robotic Ant

11/29/2009 12:46:00 AM robot 7 Comments

Robotic Ant:

A-Pod is an ant inspired hexapod robot with a 2 DOF abdomen (tail), a 3 DOF head with large mandibles. 6 legs with 3 DOF each. Total 25 servos.

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Online servo database with user reviews

11/08/2009 10:08:00 PM robot No Comments

Online servo database with user reviews



A reader just sent me a link to servodatabase.com, which lists RC servo specifications and provides user reviews, a comparison engine, and various forms of sorting. Looks like a very good resource.

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Robots Powered Remotely By Lasers Will One Day Climb To Space

11/08/2009 09:44:00 PM robot, Space No Comments

Robots Powered Remotely By Lasers Will Climb To Space:

Gravity sucks. Gravity especially sucks when you’re trying to get into orbit. It sucks because vehicles like the space shuttle expend most of their energy just hauling along the fuel they need to make it into orbit, instead of something useful like more payload or myself. Like, I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that the space shuttle could lift off with no trouble using just its main engines; the boosters are needed primarily to lift the external fuel tank. This is why Virgin Galactic launched SpaceShipOne from an airplane, why NASA is investigating launching satellites directly from high altitude balloons, and why an elevator to space that’s powered from the ground would be the best thing for spaceflight since Ham.

Freely admitting that they’re not up to the task of designing such an elevator (either the car or the tether, which has to be about 62,000 miles long), NASA has opened it up to everybody as part of their Centennial Challenges. This week, a bunch of different robots competed to climb a kilometer into the sky using only power transmitted from the ground by lasers so powerful that they have to turn them off when satellites fly overhead. The winner zipped up the tether at nearly 4 meters per second netting a prize of almost $1 million, which is pretty good, even though at that speed, it would take just under a year to make it into geosynchronous orbit. The point is, these robots don’t have to lift any fuel: with the engine on the ground, it’s all payload.

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Military Robotics

11/04/2009 01:54:00 AM robot No Comments

 Military Robotics

How are robots changing war? Peter Singer talks about how robots are changing how we fight wars and how robots will change the way we fight war in the future. How does using robots in war change public perception of war? With thousands of robots already in the air and on ground of warzones, what part do they currently play in war and how will they change how we think and fight wars in the future?

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Mini Hover Drone

11/04/2009 01:06:00 AM robot 1 Comment

Mini Hover Drone:

ThinkGeek is billing this as the smallest hovering device they've ever sold, so there's that too. Requires a handful of AA's and the controller has the ability to control two drones at once.

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ChemBot: The Shape Shifting Robot

11/03/2009 11:17:00 PM robot No Comments

ChemBot: The Shape Shifting Robot 

iRobot, the makers of the Roomba, have released footage of their bizarre new robot prototype, Chembot. It’s a is a small mobile device being developed for  DARPA and the United States Army which looks like a gelatinous blob, and can change shape to navigate through tight spaces. The Chembot will eventually be used in intelligence gathering and search and rescue missions.

CNET explains how it works:

It gets around by way of a process called “jamming,” in which material can transition between semiliquid and solid states with only a slight change in volume.
In ChemBot’s case, a flexible silicone skin encapsulates a series of pockets containing a mix of air and loosely packed particles. When air is removed from the compartments, the skin attempts to equalize the pressure differential by constricting the particles, which shift slightly to fill the void left by the evacuated air.

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Your DashBoard Driving Robot - AIDA

11/03/2009 10:59:00 PM robot No Comments

Your DashBoard Driving Robot - AIDA:-

As if you don’t have enough distractions while driving, the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab and MIT’s SENSEable City Lab have teamed up to create AIDA, a robot that lives in your dashboard, is way smarter than you, and has no compunctions about letting you know it:


IDA is actually watching you while you drive, paying attention to your expressions and even measuring your galvanic skin response through the steering wheel. Based on your driving habits, AIDA will suggest how you can be safer or more efficient. The robot is designed to use expressions to intuitively convey information.

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PETMAN - G.I. Joe here i come

10/27/2009 09:20:00 PM robot 3 Comments

PETMAN:


PETMAN is an anthropomorphic robot for testing chemical protection clothing used by the US Army. Unlike previous suit testers, which had to be supported mechanically and had a limited repertoire of motion, PETMAN will balance itself and move freely; walking, crawling and doing a variety of suit-stressing calisthenics during exposure to chemical warfare agents. PETMAN will also simulate human physiology within the protective suit by controlling temperature, humidity and sweating when necessary, all to provide realistic test conditions.

Natural, agile movement is essential for PETMAN to simulate how a soldier stresses protective clothing under realistic conditions. The robot will have the shape and size of a standard human, making it the first anthropomorphic robot that moves dynamically like a real person.

The development program has a 13 month design phase followed by a 17 month build, installation and validation phase, with delivery of the robot taking place in 2011. Boston Dynamics' partners for the program are Midwest Research Institute (MRI), Measurement Technology Northwest, Smith Carter CUH2A (SCC) and HHI Corporation who will construct the chamber.

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Maple seed UAV--- yes you read it right :)

10/26/2009 11:22:00 PM robot 1 Comment

Maple seed UAV :-

University of Maryland UAV:
Over the course of about a year, the U of M students constructed a maple-seed-mimicking UAV, camera and all, from $500 worth of parts. The UAV can take off and land safely by itself, but the camera still needs a little work. It uses a battery to power a little propeller and a camera, and is piloted with a radio controller.

Lockheed Martin SAMARAI:

This is SAMARAI, a UAV that Lockheed Martin has been working on based on a monocopter platform. A monocopter is like a helicopter, except that the entire vehicle consists of a single rotating airfoil, making them somewhat impractical for manned flight. And, from the looks of things, more than a little dangerous, although the project was named SAMARAI not after its efficiency at decapitations but after samara, which are those monocopter seed pod things that fly down off of trees.

 

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Robotic helicopter with intelligent navigation

10/17/2009 04:08:00 PM robot No Comments

Robotic helicopter with intelligent navigation 

 

Advances in autonomous helicopters have been many over the years, but as far as we can tell, there's essentially no limit to how awesome they can get. MIT's recently developed an autonomous, robotic helicopter which is also able to navigate itself intelligently through a changing environment. The helicopter, which is equipped with a dual-camera array and a laser scanner, maps its terrain in real time, identifying changes along the way. An integrated autonomous exploration module allows the heli to interact with the changing, unknown environment it is mapping. The helicopter was shown off at the AUVSI 2009 International Aerial Robotics Competition, completing five missions -- a feat not before seen in the 19-year history of the show.

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Robots can now live by eating Insects and leaves

10/16/2009 04:11:00 PM Research, robot 1 Comment

 Robots can survive by eating Insects and herbs.

A new cohort of ’bots that make energy by gobbling organic matter could be the beginning of truly autonomous machines.
This first wave of biomass-munching robots has been designed with safe, slow, long-term vocations in mind, such as surveillance, clearing land mines, or monitoring sewer pipes and other locales too dark for solar cells. Take EcoBot II, the tambourine-size fly-eating machine built by Bristol Robotics Laboratory in England. Engineers hand-feed this robot insects, which it digests in a microbial fuel cell—essentially a tank of sludgy bacteria and oxygen—that converts the insects into electricity. An eight-fly meal can drive it up to seven feet.

he Darpa-funded concept vehicle from Robert Finkelstein of Robotic Technology in Washington, D.C., will use cameras and radar-like sensors to spot twigs and leaves. It will then chop up food and toss it into a combustion chamber built by engineer Harry Schoell (a 2008 PopSci Invention Award winner). Schoell’s steam engine runs on anything that burns and will get EATR around 100 miles per 150 pounds of vegetation. Both the EcoBot and EATR teams are working on software to help the robots conserve energy during lean times, and a full EATR prototype should be scavenging by 2011. 

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"Spider Pill" You swollow and doc will follow

10/15/2009 01:09:00 AM robot, Science No Comments

"Spider Pill"

A tiny camera will be swallowed by patients and inspect their intestines

People who dislike having medical cameras snake through their body on the ends of long tubing now have a fun alternative. A new remote-controlled spider bot can scuttle around inside the colon or intestine and perform a medical inspection instead.

Rest assured that the experience sounds much more pleasant than Neo's icky encounter with an electronic bug in The Matrix. Italian scientists have tested the device inside pigs, controlling the spider bot wirelessly to diagnose serious conditions such as cancer.Pill cameras have come up before, and a German device allowed physicians to steer a pill by moving a magnetic remote control over a patient's body. But the spider bot concept seems to kick the camera pill up a notch. Fantastic voyage ahoy!

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