Technologies
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
Par Rémi Sussan le 08/06/11 | 8 commentaires | 3,454 lectures | Impression Les fondus d’électronique n’ont pas attendu la vogue actuelle du Do it yourself (DIY) pour se pencher sur la robotique, qui a toujours fait leur bonheur. Pourtant, jusqu’à récemment, il existait une nette séparation entre les travaux souvent brillants des amateurs et ceux des roboticiens professionnels. Une des causes étant peut-être l’absence de systèmes open source d’un haut niveau de complexité permettant aux amateurs de s’inspirer de l’expérience de leurs pairs mais aussi des chercheurs.
La robotique open source
New 'soft' motor made from artificial muscles
Feb. 15, 2012 — "Perhaps the earliest public demonstration of an electric motor," writes a team of researchers from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, "involved the automatic rotation of a turkey on a spit over a fire" at a party put on by Benjamin Franklin in 1749. Franklin's electrostatic motor was self-commutating, meaning that it was able to provide a continuous torque while it turned without requiring external electronics to control its progress. Using artificial muscles, hyper-elastic materials that expand when a charge is applied, the New Zealand team has made a prototype for a self-commutating artificial muscle motor that does not require external electronics or hard metal parts.
Oct. 29, 2012 — A new study shows that jumping can be much more complicated than it might seem. In research that could extend the range of future rescue and exploration robots, scientists have found that hopping robots could dramatically reduce the amount of energy they use by adopting a unique two-part "stutter jump." Taking a short hop before a big jump could allow spring-based "pogo-stick" robots to reduce their power consumption as much as ten-fold.
