Earth Unplugged. Guy Hoffman: Robots with "soul" Robots #loveat #too #iseefaces #pareidolia. Iseefaces #iseerobots #iseedeadrobots. Iseerobots #iseefaces #robotswillfeel #door. Iseerobots #iseefaces #robotswillfeel. Robotswilleat #bone #iseefaces #pareidolia. Flying Quadrotors with Your Mind. Bin He, a biomedical engineering professor at the University of Minnesota, is developing tools to help people with disabilities.
But part of that research involves some studies that look like pure fun. He and his students have developed a way to control the flight of a quadrotor using your mind. “Our study shows that or the fist time, humans are able to control the flight of flying robots using just their thoughts sensed from a noninvasive skull cap,” says He. Subjects wore a skull cap studded with 64 EEG sensors. Using special algorithms, data from the sensors were translated into commands for the robot. Using just those thoughts He and his subjects could fly the quadrotor through a series of suspended hoops. The key to this was some pioneering work done earlier in He’s lab that allowed them to first show that imagining a movement produced a very similar set of neural responses in the brain to actually performing the movement. Photos: University of Minnesota. Antuhes.tumblr.
Meet the Amazing Robots That Will Compete in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. Wow.
I mean, seriously, wow. We've been incredibly excited to see the progress that Boston Dynamics has been making on ATLAS in preparation for the DARPA Robotics Challenge, but we had no idea what to expect from the challenge's Track A teams, each of whom will be designing and building their own robot with capabilities comparable to what we've seen ATLAS do.
Today, October 24, is opening day for the DARPA Robotics Challenge, or DRC. The press release sums it up nicely: "over the next two years, teams will compete to develop and put to the test hardware and software designed to enable robots to assist humans in emergency response when a disaster strikes. " The first half of this is the hardware: DARPA is promising that an "advanced variation" of ATLAS (which is what the above picture is showing) will be ready to go by June of 2013, and will be provided to the advancing Track B and C teams (see our previous post on the DRC for more details on the tracks). Drexel University Raytheon. MorpHex part III. Dynamic butler trajectories. During his internship at Willow Garage Tobias Kunz, a PhD student from Georgia Tech, worked on a project to enable the PR2 to quickly transport objects on a tray without them falling off.
This effort in conjunction with the sushi challenge aim to give robots the ability to perfrom tasks like efficient transport of every day objects and dynamic place setting. Dynamic trajectories are important for robots to execute delivery or butler tasks at home in a timely manner. The problem also appears in industrial robotics when objects are transported on tray-like end-effectors at high speeds. An identical problem is that of carrying an open container of liquid. Just keeping the tray horizontal is not enough to keep the object from sliding off when moving fast. Instead, the tray needs to be tilted in a way that minimizes lateral force on the object.
Tobias implemented two different methods. You can download and playback these dynamic butler trajectories on your own PR2 robot. Lovotics. MiniSurrogate: A Lovotics Application. Robot Store. Robotic Arms. Lynxmotion. RTBot - Real Time Information.