Artificial muscle for soft robotics: Low voltage, high hopes
Phys.org: Soft robots do a lot of things well but they're not exactly known for their speed. The artificial muscles that move soft robots, called actuators, tend to rely on hydraulics or pneumatics, which are slow to respond and difficult to store.
Dielectric elastomers, soft materials that have good insulating properties, could offer an alternative to pneumatic actuators but they currently require complex and inefficient circuitry to deliver high voltage as well as rigid components to maintain their form—both of which defeat the purpose of a soft robot.
Now, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a dielectric elastomer with a broad range of motion that requires relatively low voltage and no rigid components. They published their work recently in Advanced Materials. Cont'd...
Robot Vision vs Computer Vision: What's the Difference?
Unlike pure Computer Vision research, Robot Vision must incorporate aspects of robotics into its techniques and algorithms, such as kinematics, reference frame calibration and the robot's ability to physically affect the environment.
GeckoSystems, an AI Mobile Robotics Co., Updates Shareholders
Despite only being an initial sale to this JV partner, the gross revenue garners GeckoSystems a net profit.
Social Robots - programmable by everyone
The business model of LuxAI is developing and constructing so-called social robots. Such robots can be used, for example, in the educational or health system, where they would support trainers and therapists in their work. The robots can be programmed to practice vocabulary with children or to make rehabilitation exercises with stroke patients.
Another Big Shrink: Tiling Chiplets into Next-Generation Microsystems
A novel approach to going small could miniaturize entire circuit boards of chips into single modular chips that combine the best of commercial and DoD circuit designs and technology
Anki To Release Game-changing Cozmo SDK
For developers interested in lower-level control of Cozmo, the SDK provides direct access to low-level controls such as driving the robots treads, moving the head and lift, displaying bitmaps on his screen, reading accelerometer and gyroscope data, processing images from his camera, and communicating with the power cubes (lights, accelerometer, tap detection).
Robotics Gone Wild: 8 Animal-Inspired Machines
Thomas Claburn for InformationWeek: Among programmers, there's a principle called DRY, which stands for "Don't repeat yourself." It's an attempt to avoid writing code that duplicates the function of other code.
DRY embodies the same resistance to needless repetition as the more common idiom, "Don't reinvent the wheel."
Among those making robots, a group that includes software and hardware engineers attempts to adhere to these principles, as can be seen in designs that borrow from nature, from the evolved forms of life on Earth.
Biomimicry and bioinspired design provide a way to avoid reinventing the wheel. The biological systems of living things have been honed through eons of Darwinian user testing.
Borrowing aspects of animal physiology isn't the only option or necessarily the best option for robot designers. For some purposes, something new may be necessary. For others, biomechanically systems can't be easily duplicated. Cont'd...
Cozmo Is an Artificially Intelligent Toy Truck That's Also the Future of Robotics
CADE METZ for WIRED: HANNS TAPPEINER TYPES a few lines of code into his laptop and hits “return.” A tiny robot sits beside the laptop, looking like one of those anthropomorphic automobiles that show up in Pixar’s Cars movies. Almost instantly, it wakes up, rolls down the table, and counts to four. This is Cozmo—an artificially intelligent toy robot unveiled late last month by San Francisco startup Anki—and Tappeiner, one of the company’s founders, is programming the little automaton to do new things.
The programs are simple—he also teaches Cozmo to stack blocks—but they’re supposed to be simple. Tappeiner is using Anki’s newly unveiled software development kit—an SDK, in coder parlance—that he says even the greenest of coders can use to tweak the behavior of the toy robot. And that’s a big deal, at least according to Anki. The company claims the SDK is the first of its kind: a kit that lets anyone program such an intelligent robot, a robot that recognizes faces and navigates new environments and even mimics emotions. With the kit, Tappeiner says, “we’re trying to advance the field of robotics.” He compares the move to Apple letting people build apps for the iPhone. Cont'd...
The New Police Arsenal - Robots
Bomb robots were designed to help detonate and remove Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), not to deliver payloads. But the Dallas police improvised and attached a bomb delivery system to the robot.
New Obi™ Robotic Dining Device a Breakthrough for People Living with Physical Challenges
Spouses, parents and others also enjoy the charming robot
Cogobuy Establishes EZ-ROBOT.CN
To Provide Services for Trillion-level Industrial Robotics Market
Robot Would Assemble Modular Telescope - In Space
A new concept in space telescope design uses a modular structure and an assembly robot to build an extremely large telescope in space, performing tasks in which astronaut fatigue would be a problem. The design is detailed in a paper published this week by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, in the Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems by authors from Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Lab.
Robotics - too good to be true? Just 52% believe that robots can go beyond data entry to understand business processes
New research from Redwood Software and Shared Services Link reveals that limited understanding is hindering the potential of the robotic revolution
Endeavor Robotics Partners with Persistent Systems to Integrate MPU5 Radios onto Battle-Proven Family of Robots
Leading Robotics provider integrating cutting edge radio communications to provide greatly enhanced and battle-proven capabilities to the US Warfighter
JIMU Robot, the World's First Buildable, Programmable and Shareable Robotic Building Block Line Available World-wide Today
New interactive building block system allows users to design, create and program their very own robot, as well as share and like creations through the JIMU Robot app
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Mobile Robots - Featured Product
ElectroCraft's Motion Control for Mobile Robots
ElectroCraft is showcasing its award-winning mobile robot technology including their powerful and compact wheel drives, high-torque-density brushless DC motors, precision linear actuators as well as servo motor drive technology at a variety of conferences and tradeshows including the Boston Robotics Summit. Robotics Summit is the premier symposium for the sharing of ideas, technology, and market developments for robotic technologies across industries. Beyond a showcase and pitch of product, ElectroCraft is eager to participate in the collaborative discussion of challenges and opportunities that will shape the near and long-term robotic marketplace.
