Hasta La Gadget!

Back in 2011 we featured a couple of humanoid robots designed to play table tennis. Industrial mechanic Ulf Hoffman recently unveiled a similar robot that he and his friends have been working on for the past couple of years. He calls it the Ulf Hoffman Tischtennis Roboter (Ulf Hoffman Table Tennis Robot) or UHTTR-1 for short.

As you can see the robot’s arm is on a rail mounted at one of the ends of a ping pong table. It’s made of aluminum, making it light enough for its servos to rapidly ferry it across the length of the table. It may only have one arm, but the robot has two things we don’t have: a second pair of eyes. Four cameras mounted at the top corners of the room track the ball’s position and send that data to the UHTTR-1′s software.

Ulf hasn’t said much about the robot’s program, but as you can see it has a variety of settings that help define its play style, including speed and spin. It even seems to have difficulty levels. I’m a bit worried about that “Evolve” setting.

We didn’t see it put to the test in the video, but I think you can beat the robot with a well-placed drop shot. Then again when you’re dealing with a robot that can evolve, all bets are off. Grip your browser and head to Ulf’s blog for more on his robot.

[via Laughing Squid]

What would you do if you were to grow an extra limb? Embrace the oddity as well as advantage of it all, of course! Jason Barnes from Atlanta who had his right arm amputated from below the elbow two years back was on the receiving end of a robotic prosthetic arm, thanks to a certain Profession Weinberg, where this particular robotic arm is capable of manipulating a pair of drumsticks. The first stick will be controlled with electrical signals emitted from his upper arm muscles, while the other stick can tune in to the music being played, where it will then have an algorithm that helps it improvise on its very own beat. Not quite General Grievous in the Star Wars universe, but we’re on our way there.

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Robotic Prosthesis Turns Man Into Extra Skilled Drummer original content from Ubergizmo.

Like Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen who lost his arm in an accident but kept on performing, aspiring drummer Jason Barnes didn’t let losing his right arm two years ago deter him from realizing his dream. He built a crude prosthetic using springs that allowed him to keep on drumming, but after enrolling at the Atlanta Institute of Music and Media, he met a professor who realized he could build Barnes something better.

Read more…

Gil Weinberg, who we met a few months ago at Georgia Tech, has a mission: to make it easy for amputees and the disabled to play beautiful music. His first project is a drumming prosthesis, a system that allows a user who is missing a hand to play improvise as well as the jazz greats. Read More

Technology has changed not only how people do things, but how people perceive and create art as well. Take what researcher and artist Cassinelli Alvaro has done with his Toro-bots.

The Toro-bots are a pair of walking robots that have Japanese lanterns for a head. They were created for beautifying gardens with minimal effort, but they certainly could be used for indoor illumination as well.

People often have to get down on all fours to move lamps and lanterns from one spot on their garden to another. The Toro-bots get rid of the dirty work because they’ll get up and walk to your desired location with a few flicks of the remote control. They’re also equipped with infrared rangefinders that allows them to detect when someone is nearby (they’ll step off to the side if they sense they’re in someone’s way.)

We propose here a garden that takes care of itself, that somehow understands and re-interprets the rules of harmony and equilibrium, and reconfigures itself depending on the season, the presence or absence of a human observers – that develops structure in a generative way, creating a dynamic conversation between the elements in the garden.

Now this is garden decor, just the way I like it. What do you think?

[via Trossen Robotics via Dvice]