Festo Corporate - Bionic Learning Network. Highlight of the Bionic Learning Network 2014: the BionicKangaroo Learning from nature: in the Bionic Learning Network, a cooperation between Festo and renowned universities, institutes and development companies, principles from nature provide inspiration for technical applications and industrial practice.
Energy-efficient jumping based on a natural model Like its natural model, the BionicKangaroo can recover the energy exerted on landing, store it and efficiently use it for the next jump. Everything about the BionicKangaroo Collision-free flying of autonomous systems With the eMotionSpheres, Festo shows how several flying objects can move – individually or collectively – in a coordinated manner and within a defined space. All you need to know about the eMotionSpheres Variable gripping based on the human hand It combines parallel and centric gripping – without any conversion.
More about the MultiChoiceGripper Power generation with the wing-beating principle Go to DualWingGenerator. Robots Are the Next Revolution, So Why Isn't Anyone Acting Like It? This robot can fetch you a beer.
But it will cost you $400,000. Back in 2006, when Bill Gates was making his tear-filled transition from the PC industry into a tear-filled career as a philanthropist, he penned an editorial on robotics that became a rallying cry for… no one. Titled "A Robot in Every Home," Bill Gates highlighted the obvious parallels between the pre-Microsoft PC industry and the pre-anybody personal robotics industry. Industrial use, research work, and a fringe garage hobby. That was the state of the computer industry before Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and that’s more or less the state of the robotics industry now, five years after Bill’s editorial. Of course, Bill hasn’t been around to make the dream come true, he’s been busy saving Africa and our public school system and the souls of fellow billionaires. Oddly enough, Microsoft’s largest contribution to robotics as of yet was largely inadvertent. Someone is going to figure this out.
Image: Willow Garage Paul J. News: MLD Test Moves Navy a Step Closer to Lasers for Ship Self-Defense. For Immediate Release: April 8, 2011 By Geoff S.
Fein, Office of Naval Research ARLINGTON, Va. — Marking a milestone for the Navy, the Office of Naval Research and its industry partner on April 6 successfully tested a solid-state, high-energy laser (HEL) from a surface ship, which disabled a small target vessel. The Navy and Northrop Grumman completed at-sea testing of the Maritime Laser Demonstrator (MLD), which validated the potential to provide advanced self-defense for surface ships and personnel by keeping small boat threats at a safe distance. (Watch MLD fire on YouTube.) “The success of this high-energy laser test is a credit to the collaboration, cooperation and teaming of naval labs at Dahlgren, China Lake, Port Hueneme and Point Mugu, Calif.,” said Chief of Naval Research Rear Adm. The latest test occurred near San Nicholas Island, off the coast of Central California in the Pacific Ocean test range.
5 Axis Robot Carves Metal Like Butter (Video. Machines will achieve human-level intelligence in the 2028 to 2150 range: poll. How similar will machine intelligence be to human intelligence?
(credit: A. Sandberg & N. Bostrom/Future of Humanity Institute) Machines will achieve human-level intelligence by 2028 (median estimate: 10% chance), by 2050 (median estimate: 50% chance), or by 2150 (median estimate: 90% chance), according to an informal poll at the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) Winter Intelligence conference on machine intelligence in January. “Human‐level machine intelligence, whether due to a de novo AGI (artificial general intelligence) or biologically inspired/emulated systems, has a macroscopic probability to occurring mid‐century,” the report authors, Dr.
“This development is more likely to occur from a large organization than as a smaller project. Other findings: Probability density of human-level AI by date -- the blue represents skew Gaussian fits, the red represents triangular fits; previous dates are artifacts (credit: Anders Sandberg) Herding Swarms of Microrobots. Imagine a swarm of microrobots—tiny devices a few hair widths across—swimming through your blood vessels and repairing damage, or zipping around in computer chips as a security lock, or quickly knitting together heart tissue.
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, Dartmouth College, and Duke University have shown how to use a single electrical signal to command a group of microrobots to self-assemble into larger structures. The researchers hope to use this method to build biological tissues. But for microrobots to do anything like that, researchers must first figure out a good way to control them. “When things are very small, they tend to stick together,” says Jason Gorman, a robotics researcher in the Intelligent Systems Division at NIST who co-organizes an annual microrobotics competition that draws groups from around the world. “A lot of the locomotion methods that have been developed are focused on overcoming or leveraging this adhesion.”