Hasta La Gadget!

NASA (and the ESA) have long been working on a multi-planet internet that can link up spaceships, probes and rovers, but they’ve at last brought the experimentation from the broad scale to smaller dimensions. Lego bricks, to be exact. International Space Station expedition lead Sunita Williams recently steered a Lego Mindstorms robot at an ESA facility in Darmstadt while she orbited overhead, proving that future space explorers could directly control a vehicle on a planetary surface while staying out of harm’s way. As in the past, the key to the latest dry run was a Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN) system; the focus was more on reliably getting packets through to the brick-based vehicle than on pure speed. As tame as that Earth-bound test drive might sound relative to an in-the-field use on a less familiar world, it demonstrates that the DTN approach can work when it really counts. We just wouldn’t hold our breath for any Martian RC car races.

Filed under: Robots, Science, Internet, Alt

ESA, NASA test interplanetary internet by remote controlling a Lego robot from the ISS originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 09 Nov 2012 11:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I know that many of us have dreamed about the day when a robot that could cook a meal for us, despite the fact that it requires a robot to handle a knife or other deadly kitchen implements. Your salad days aren’t over – but salad is made painfully slow – and potentially dangerous – when a robot prepares it.

The Korean Institute of Science and Technology recently unveiled CIROS, a robot that will do a bunch of your housework and even fix you a salad – using a knife. That part cannot be overstated. If you live through its knife-wielding, you will have a salad. On the other hand, if it chooses to, it could just kill you dead and sprinkle the salad, along with some nice dressing, on your corpse… or sprinkle your blood on the salad.

When it’s not threatening you with a knife, CIROS can grab items from the refrigerator, serve tea, scrub dishes and slice vegetables. The stereoscopic cameras and 3D IR sensor help it recognize objects like microwaves, sinks, refrigerators and dishwashers so that it can do the jobs that you don’t want. Again, sometimes with a knife.

[via Botropolis]

Have you ever wondered whether we will be able to reach the level of medical advancement such as found in I, Robot and the Star Wars universe? Body parts that are replaced with bionic segments which not only offer the ability to function in an even more efficient manner compared to the original, and yet is far longer lasting. Perhaps mankind has just taken another step closer to such an age, where research engineers over at Vrije Universiteit Brussel have managed to develop a new powered transtibial prosthesis that is capable of mimicking natural ankle movement, while ensuring that it uses energy in an efficient manner. Rather they relying on powerful motors which start and stop with every step, this particular new system will run a small electrical motor non-stop, ensuring that it keeps stretching a rubber band, which will result in energy that the bionic foot can use as a source of motive power.

Through the act of lowering the overall energy requirement of prostheses, this means that you need not use more batteries, and smaller batteries are always a good thing as it ensures that the overall weight of the device remains lowered. Not only that, being smaller would mean it is more quiet, while more efficient motors also help simplify design as well as implementation purposes.

Called the AMP-Foot 2.0, it relies on a spring that is called the plantar flexion (PF) spring, helping accumulate energy from the dorsiflexion phase of stance while the actuator is actually injecting energy into another spring, where the latter is known as the push-off (PO) spring – and that happens during the complete stance phase. A locking system will see energy stashed in the PO spring, before heel off (HO) occurs, which remains within the system for a release so that a push-off can happen. We do wonder just how much something like this is going to cost when it becomes publicly available.

Press Release
[ Robotic ankle makes a splash copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

This isn’t the only robot that can kick your butt at ping pong. But unlike other ping pong playing ‘botsot, this one wasn’t programmed with its abilities. It has learned through experience. Robotics experts at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany created this robot arm that learns to adapt its game as it plays.

Much like the Borg, it assimilates knowledge and adapts. But there is no cube ship or sexy Seven of Nine model. This is just an arm. The team attached the robot arm to the ceiling and attached a camera to watch and analyze the game. They taught the arm to play ping pong by feeding it more and more difficult shots. The arm was soon generating its own shots thanks to it’s amassed knowledge.

That’s right. It learned. It wasn’t trained in advance… and it is armed with ping pong balls. We are all so dead. I can already see the little plastic bits sticking out of open wounds in human foreheads.

[via Geekosystem]

Some of us do wish that there are more hours in a day, while others wish we had more limbs so that we are able to get more things done throughout the day. Federico Parietti and Harry Asada of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have come up with this pair of semi-autonomous intelligent arms that ought to aid just about anyone in their jobs. All right, you will not quite reach the levels of Doctor Octopus of Spiderman lore just yet, but at least these semi-autonomous arms will extend in front of your body from the hips, where they are strapped to a backpack-like harness which carries the control circuitry. The prototype could be used to assist factory workers in performing tricky DIY tasks.

Dave Barrett, a roboticist and mechanical engineer at Olin College in Needham, Massachusetts, said, “It’s the first time I’ve seen robot arms designed to augment human abilities. It’s bold and out of keeping with anything I’ve ever seen to attach two arms to a human.”

These semi-autonomous limbs were specially designed to learn and hopefully, it can anticipate what their wearer wants in the future. Algorithms in charge of the limbs will be trained first to perform specific tasks. I just hope that there is some form of safety features built into this thing, as the robot arms that are capable of helping us humans are also equally capable of lending a destructive hand, pardon me for the lack of a better word.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Panasonic dry head spa robot prototype , CHARLI-2 robot does Gangnam Style dance,