Hasta La Gadget!

After creating a robot bird and dragonfly, automation company Festo shows off with another impressive animal replica. Like real kangaroos, Festo’s BionicKangaroo is not only great at jumping and keeping its balance, it can also store the energy generated from landing and use it for the next jump.

BionicKangaroo uses a combination of pneumatic actuators and electric servos to move and keep its balance.

According to Festo, the robot has an rubber elastic spring element that acts like an Achilles tendon: “It is fastened at the back of the foot and parallel to the pneumatic cylinder on the knee joint. The artificial tendon cushions the jump, simultaneously absorbs the kinetic energy and releases it for the next jump.”

To make the robot even fancier, Festo also made it so it can be controlled with gestures. The company uses the Myo armband to make BionicKangaroo move, stay or rotate in place. Watch BionicKangaroo hip hip hop and not stop:

It would’ve been way cooler if they made a BionicTigger instead. Check out Festo’s report (pdf) if you want to learn more about BionicKangaroo.

[via Ubergizmo]

No, the Robo-roo is not a bionic version of Manchester United’s best paid player in history, Wayne Rooney, but rather, is an affectionate name for this bizarre looking bionic kangaroo which boasts of self-recharging legs, virtually allowing it to hop forever. Known as the Bionic Kangaroo from Festo, this particular robot is controlled using hand gestures.

(more…)

Robo-roo Can Hop Around Forever Theoretically original content from Ubergizmo.

There have been many proposed alternatives to the spinning propeller blades used on wind turbines installed all over the county, but none as unorthodox as Festo’s new DualWingGenerator. Inspired by the company’s work on winged flying robots , the design keeps working when winds are as slow as nine miles per hour.

Read more…

You wouldn’t think there’s much room for improvement when it comes to a conveyor belt, or much demand for it. They just move things along, right?. Well Festo’s new WaveHandling conveyor system can actually move objects in any direction, and even individually sort them allowing it to replace multiple components in an assembly line. More »

Festo isn’t quite the household name that Boston Dynamics is. (And, really, we’re not entirely sure Big Dog is a regular topic of conversation at dinner tables yet.) But, it certainly deserves just as much attention for the work they’re doing with robotics. After crafting a machine last year that soared around like a herring gull, now the company has created BionicOpter. The 17.3-inch long dragonfly drone can flutter through the air in any direction, and even hover, just like its biological inspiration. Its four carbon fiber and foil wings beat up to 20 times per-second, propelling it through the air as if it were swimming rather than flying. Actually piloting the robo-bug is achieved through a smartphone app, but an on-board ARM-based microcontroller makes small adjustments to ensure stability during flight. There are a few important pieces of information we don’t have just yet. For one, it’s not clear how long the two-cell lithium ion battery will last, and pricing or availability are missing from the brochure (at the source link). Chances are though, you’ll never be able to afford one any way. Thankfully you can at least see this marvel of engineering in action after the break.

Filed under: Robots

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Via: Design Engineering, The Verge

Source: Festo 1 (PDF), 2