Tracing Knowledge ... Στα ίχνη της Γνώσης. Posted August 5, 2012 Atlanta, GA Image of Simulated Micro-SwimmerIllustration shows the rigid propulsive flaps on each side of the micro-swimmer, while the steering flap on the front is being deformed by a light source. The green cones represent velocity vectors through the middle of the micro-swimmer. (Courtesy of Alexander Alexeev) When you’re just a few microns long, swimming can be difficult.
At that size scale, the viscosity of water is more like that of honey, and momentum can’t be relied upon to maintain forward motion. Microorganisms, of course, have evolved ways to swim in spite of these challenges, but tiny robots haven’t quite caught up. When they’re actually built some day, these simple micro-swimmers could rely on volume changes in unique materials known as hydrogels to move tiny flaps that will propel the robots. The trajectory of the micro-swimmer would be controlled by a flexible steering flap on its front. But the micro-swimmers won’t win any Olympic competitions. Biorobotics Lab. Running Hexapod Gets Fancy New Tunable Legs. You may not realize it, but you've got a lot of springiness going on in your legs. You may also not realize that you change that springiness depending on whether you're running or walking, what surface you're on, and whether or not you're carrying stuff.
Our bodies (and most animals) are able to dynamically adapt our legs and gaits to make us more efficient under changing conditions. Dynamic adaptation is something that robots are notoriously bad at, but EduBot, a son or cousin or something of the venerable RHex, has been experiment with six new "tunable" legs that allow it to adjust its gait on the fly.
EduBot's legs are made out of carbon fiber, and by changing the location of a slider along the leg, the overall stiffness of each leg can be adjusted independently. Of course, once the stiffness of the legs changes, EduBot has to adapt its gait to match, which it does all by itself by analyzing its own speed, efficiency, and stability. . [ EduBot ] Hexapod With Tunable Stiffness Limbs Japanese Ministry of Self-Defense Spends $1000 on Flying Robot Soccer Ball. 2010 YouTube - 球形飛行体 HITACHI "EMIEW2" Adaptive suspension. Robô com rodinhas é capaz de andar sobre superfícies irregulares. Humanoid Robots Rise. Watch out, Asimo, there are some new humanoids on your tail! Photo: Honda Japan has long held world dominance when it comes to full-body walking humanoid robots. There's the pioneering Waseda robots, the impressive HRP series, the diminutive but nimble Sony Qrio and Toyota Partner robots, and of course, the country's most famous emissary: the charismatic, child-size, astronaut-like Honda Asimo, which ambles, runs, and climbs stairs with (almost) perfect precision.
Until recently, only South Korea -- with its Hubo and Mahru robots -- had demonstrated humanoids with legs as impressive as those of their Japanese counterparts. Now other countries are trying to catch up. But first, a digression. The answer they give me is two-fold: First, they argue that robots with human-shaped bodies are more apt to navigate human environments.
After hearing their answer, my next question to the humanoid builder is, And why is it so hard to create full-body walking humanoids? REEM-B Pal Robotics, Barcelona. Athlete Robot Learning to Run Like Human. Japanese researcher Ryuma Niiyama wants to build a biped robot that runs. But not like Asimo, whose running gait is a bit, well, mechanical. Niiyama wants a robot with the vigor and agility of a human sprinter. To do that, he's building a legged bot that mimics our musculoskeletal system. He calls his robot Athlete. Each leg has seven sets of artificial muscles. The sets, each with one to six pneumatic actuators, correspond to muscles in the human body -- gluteus maximus, adductor, hamstring, and so forth [see diagram below]. To simplify things a bit, the robot uses prosthetic blades, of the type that double amputees use to run. And to add a human touch, Niiyama makes the robot wear a pair of black shorts.
Human runners with prosthetic feet, like South African paralympic runner Oscar Pistorius, nicknamed the "Blade Runner," "give me great inspiration," Niiyama tells me. The robot has touch sensors on each foot and an inertial measurement unit on the torso for detecting the body's orientation. Toyota's humanoid robot was born to run. Robot running. Watch This Robot Crawl on a High-Voltage Power Line. Inspection of high-voltage power lines is costly, difficult, and a dangerous job even for skilled workers.
Which means it's the perfect job for a robot. We first wrote about Expliner, an incredible inspection robot that balances on power lines like an acrobat, more than a year ago. Since then, HiBot, the Japanese company that developed Expliner, has gone on several inspection jobs, remote operating the robot as it crawls on 500-kilovolt live lines. The company is now gearing up to deliver the robot to customers, first in Japan, and later abroad as well. Expliner is like a wheeled cable car that rolls along the upper pair of bundled cables. HiBot says that Expliner is a semi-autonomous robot. "There is always a human in the control loop, but the basic repetitive tasks are automated," says Michele Guarnieri," a HiBot co-founder.
And if you're wondering, "Expliner doesn't fall," claims Guarnieri. Images and video: HiBot. Expliner - Robot for Very High Power Lines Inspection. The Most Advanced Quadruped Robot on Earth. Robot Locomotion Group. Computing Large Convex Regions of Obstacle-Free Space through Semidefinite Programming by Robin L H Deits and Russ Tedrake Under review. Comments welcome. An Architecture for Online Affordance-based Perception and Whole-body Planning by Maurice Fallon and Scott Kuindersma and Sisir Karumanchi and Matthew Antone and Toby Schneider and Hongkai Dai and Claudia P\'{e}rez D'Arpino and Robin Deits and Matt DiCicco and Dehann Fourie and Twan Koolen and Pat Marion and Michael Posa and Andr\'{e}s Valenzuela and Kuan-Ting Yu and Julie Shah and Karl Iagnemma and Russ Tedrake and Seth Teller The DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials held in December 2013 provided a landmark demonstration of dexterous mobile robots executing a variety of tasks aided by a remote human operator using only data from the robot's sensor suite transmitted over a constrained, field-realistic communications link.
Initial submission, published as a CSAIL Tech Report. Comments welcome. by R. December 21, 2013. October 2, 2013.