robotics
Today we introduce you a robot fish that is able to swim and recognize tank edges and obstacles. We’ll find out how we can easily create it with common insulating material and a few servo motor controlled by Arduino . The mechanical part
create your robot fish with Arduino
{*style:<li>*} {*style:<h3 style="margin-bottom:-8px;">*}Rebuilding DUMBO {*style:</h3>*} {*style:<br>*}{*style:<b>*}{*style:<br>*}{*img:m9e423252bbcbbc5d8272042726702726,l=500x375,w=270x203,f=140x105,i=500x375:500:375:http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcvqy3FItM1rnj5jz.jpg*}{*style:<b>*}{*style:<br>*}{*img:m747aa8828e0a01c8b62a00d4243c4ec1,l=500x375,w=270x203,f=140x105,i=500x375:500:375:http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcvqtm11YV1rnj5jz.jpg*}{*style:</b>*}{*style:</b>*}{*style:<br>*}In response to the recent hurricane, artists and entrepreneurs in DUMBO came together to help the community. BioLite brought out their CampStove, which charges phones by burning wood. And we put out our Street Charge, which uses solar energy to charge any USB powered devices. The Pensa team also joined our neighbors to clean and restore the flooded Galapagos Art Space.
unnamed pearl
Heather Knight and Data: A Researcher and a Robot Walk Into a Bar... | Creating
By RACHEL WOLFF Daniel Hurlburt for The Wall Street Journal Heather Knight and her joke-telling social robot Data, in Brooklyn, N.Y. When they appear on stage, Heather Knight, a robotics graduate student, and Data, her stand-up-comedy-performing robot, seem like a futuristic Odd Couple.
Variable-Pitch Quadrotor Helicopter Project Description (top) Variable-Pitch Quadrotor by Mark Cutler This project aims to develop a varible-pitch quadrotor capable of aggressive aerobatic manuvers which stretch beyond the current abilities of typical fixed-pitch quadrotors.
Aerospace Controls Laboratory | Projects | Variable-pitch Quadrotor
Piezo Motors| MICROMO
It all began in France more than 120 years ago. The two Curie brothers Jacques and Pierre discovered that by compressing a crystalline material such as Rochelle salt they could create electric voltage. The interesting thing is that the opposite is also true – if you place an electric field over a piezo crystal it changes shape.
Build Your Own Undersea Robot
Last year at about this time, crews in the Gulf of Mexico were working feverishly to bring BP's blown-out oil well under control. Some of the more spectacular parts of that effort, as you may recall, involved the use of remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs. Perhaps you had the same thought as I did—that it would be cool to build one. To be sure, no garage-workbench hacker is going to build an undersea robot that operates a diamond saw or wrestles with a stuck blowout preventer.FastRunner
FastRunner is a new bipedal platform inspired from the fastest biped animals, and developed at IHMC. A novel leg design is being developed to enable FastRunner to achieve unprecedented efficiency and speed while being self-stabilizing. The FastRunner project is funded by the DARPA agency through the Maximum Mobility and Manipulation (M3) program.
Electropermanent Magnets: Programmable Magnets with Zero Static Power Consumption Enable Smallest Modular Robots Yet
Take a moment and envision an electromagnet: a simple coiled wire driven by a hefty electrical current gives a fully-programmable magnetic field strength (on, off, and everything between). Electromagnets are ubiquitous, but it turns out that there is a little-known device with similar functionality yet zero static power consumption -- they are called electropermanent magnets, and they've been around and in use since the 1960's! A 2010 PhD thesis by MIT Media Lab's Ara Knaian examines the physics, scaling, trade-offs, and several new actuator designs (eg. stepper motors) using these little-known wonders. Recently, electropermanent magnets facilitated an innovation in "programmable matter," where they were instrumental in creating the world's smallest self-contained modular robots to date (12mm/side). Read on for details about this fascinating technology, along with discussions about existing and possible robotic applications. Electropermanent (EP) Magnets for Programmable Matter:I would like to introduce you to a new "elastomeric rolling robot" -- a soft robot made of inflatable, silicone actuators that pressurize in sequence to make the robot move. This new robot hails from MIT's Distributed Robotics Laboratory and has a major distinguishing feature compared to other soft robots: it is entirely self-contained -- no more off-board electronics or pneumatics; everything is on-board. Two technologies facilitated this new robot: (1) A "pneumatic battery" that uses mechanical feedback to self-regulate a chemical (hydrogen peroxide) reaction and maintain a stable pressure inside the robot's on-board pressure vessel. (2) An energy-efficient pneumatic valve design based on electropermanent magnets (one of my favorite topics!). These two new technologies were just presented at recent robotics conferences (ISRR 2011 and IROS 2011). Be sure to check out the video below.
New Soft Robots Use Electropermanent (EP) Magnet Valves and Hydrogen Peroxide "Pneumatic Battery"
New material could offer hope to those with no voice
In 1997, the actress and singer Julie Andrews lost her singing voice following surgery to remove noncancerous lesions from her vocal cords. She came to Steven Zeitels , a professor of laryngeal surgery at Harvard Medical School, for help.Robots: Zoobotics
UNTIL recently, most robots could be thought of as belonging to one of two phyla. The Widgetophora, equipped with claws, grabs and wheels, stuck to the essentials and did not try too hard to look like anything other than machines (think R2-D2). The Anthropoidea, by contrast, did their best to look like their creators—sporting arms with proper hands, legs with real feet, and faces (think C-3PO). The few animal-like robots that fell between these extremes were usually built to resemble pets (Sony's robot dog, AIBO, for example) and were, in truth, not much more than just amusing toys. They are toys no longer, though, for it has belatedly dawned on robot engineers that they are missing a trick. The great natural designer, evolution, has come up with solutions to problems that neither the Widgetophora nor the Anthropoidea can manage.Standard humanoid robots mimic the human form, but the mechanisms used in such robots are very different from those in humans, and the characteristics of the robots reflect this.
Project Description
Ollie is an open source blimp-based autonomous and ambient robot that dwells in human habitats.