Jun 24
If you thought the prospect of being chased down by one of DARPA’s terminator-wannabes
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Jun 23
Harvard Comes Up With Robotic Bugs
Posted in: Today's Chili
Jun 23
Remember Jason Casteel’s cool Transfomers-meets-Doctor Who T-shirt? Thingiverse member Andrew Lindsey not only remembers it, he was inspired by it to make a 3D printed toy. Behold, TARDIS Prime in 3D! Vworp Vworp!
Andrew had to deviate from Jason’s drawing in order to make the toy transformable from a phone booth to a robot and vice-versa. At least he still has the red bow tie.
Andrew says he’s not fully satisfied with the toy. For one thing, the toy needs a lot of plastic to be printed, and it’s made of more than 70 parts. Also, it can’t stand on its own because it’s too top-heavy. I guess you could say that it’s… wibbly wobbly. YEEEEAA– Sorry. Andrew is thinking of designing a smaller version of the toy, but you can already print G1 TARDIS Prime if you want. Just download the files from Andrew’s Thingiverse page.
Jun 22
Jurassic Park III may not be your favorite movie in the series. But that doesn’t mean its effects weren’t fantastic. In fact, the somewhat random third entry in the series boasted the biggest animatronic ‘saur yet: the Spinosaurus. Stan Winston Studios recalls the details of that behemoth’s construction, and it’s wild to watch.
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Jun 21
Jun 21
We’ve seen how robotic quadcopters can be programmed to act and complete tasks together. These single propeller vehicles called Distributed Flight Array take that concept to the extreme. On its own, a single one of its aircrafts can barely take off and its flight is unstable. But when multiple modules connect, they become stable, can retain their formation on their own and even resist external forces.
The Distributed Flight Array was conceived by Raffaello D’Andrea and Raymong Oung of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology’s Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control. Each vehicle has its own power source, motor, computer and sensors. They also have tiny wheels that let them scurry on the ground. They attach to each other using magnets, which are apparently stable enough to keep them together in normal flight.
Will these drones replace the collegiate bands that play at football halftime shows? Will they lead to the creation of super robots? Will they lead to the creation of real-life platforming games? Only time will tell.
[ETH Zurich via Damn Geeky]
Jun 21
We’re still a ways away from electric sheep roaming the fields pretending to bleat but robotics researchers continue to look to nature for four-legged inspiration. Meet Cheetah-Cub, a European Commission-funded research project, out of Swiss University the École Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne‘s biorobotics lab, that’s about the size of a house cat.
As its name suggests, Cheetah-Cub takes its cues from feline morphology with strings replacing tendons and actuators sited in the legs to do the work of muscles. The result is a robot that runs like a cat and is, according to its inventor Alex Sproewitz, the fastest robot for its size (under 30kg). To look at it’s like a miniature and less scary version of Boston Dynamic’s terrifying Big Dog bot. The latter is likely faster, being much taller, but for a bot with a mere 0.15m leg-length Cheetah-Cub can really go some — hitting a max of 1.42m/s or almost seven body lengths per second.
The Cheetah-Cub researchers have been aiming for fast gait first, with the bot’s design, but do also plan to work on improving its rough terrain traversing capabilities — including Big Dog-style “stand-up capabilities” – as the work progresses, says Sproewitz. Building legged robots capable of dynamic locomotion in rough terrain is a big challenge on both “the mechatronic level, but also for control”, he adds. So as scary as these bots inevitably look as they scuttle about on their test walkabouts there’s no fear of us humans having to outrun any of them yet.
There’s also no danger of Cheetah-Cub heading for any kind of commercial implementation any time soon, of course. It’s pure research. The road to a future infested with mechanical animals requires a lot more robotics researchers to put their heads together in the interdisciplinary areas of biomechanics and computational neurocontrol.
On the question of the role biology plays when designing legged robots, Sproewitz said he distinguishes between bio-inspired robotics, which is what the Cheetah-Cub project is aiming for, and the more faithful copying of bio-mimicking robotics. Cheetah-Cub’s tri-segmented leg design is therefore a bio-inspired “blueprint”, rather than a direct mimicking of a cat. ”We tested a leg design with the proposed pantograph [three-segment] structure, and a second (even more successful) leg design where several additional features were merged into,” he says.
This same blueprint approach is how the researchers are approaching the bot’s locomotion controls. “Our implementation of a mathematical model of a central pattern generator (CPG) is a simplified version of what was identified in vertebrate and invertebrate animals. A full copy of e.g. a spinal cord would not be feasible: complex networks of neurons with very different functionality exist in the spinal cord of larger animals,” he says. “Many researchers dedicate their entire career in identifying fragments of those networks.
“Again, currently we apply relatively simple models of CPGs. We assume that CPG networks responsible for locomotion have evolved, but have been partially maintained from simpler vertebrates (like lampreys and salamanders) up to humans. Therefore: Cheetah-cub robot is a natural continuation of Biorob’s research with its Lamprey/Salamander robot, and the implemented CPG control.”
[Image: Biorobotics Laboratory, EPFL]
Jun 20
We’ve already brought you a few clips of Kenji Ishida’s
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Jun 20
Jun 20
Sci-fi movies and TV shows have given us a glimpse of the future where robots will eventually set their sights on eradicating humans. It’s just one possible outcome, though, and as this robot developed by Lands Work demonstrates, our inevitable artificial companions might actually be far gentler than we fear.
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