Robot Boats Rescue Mission. Robotics. Ralph Mosher. 1978 – ARMS 1 (Atmospheric Roving Manipulator System) As early as 1971, Dr. Norman H. Wood, program engineer for General Electric's Cybernetic Automation & Mechanization Systems Section, described a new underwater manipulator system devised for use on a multi-well submerged platform. GE's activities in manipulators date back to the company's nuclear power development and space projects.
Read More “1978 – ARMS 1 – Oceaneering (American)” Underwater Army Bases and Depot (See Figure 51: Under Sea Mobility) Recent marine biology and ocean engineering work have resulted in some startling underwater activity concepts and systems designs that promise to pave the way to a profitable exploitation of untapped water resources. Read More “1973 – Under Sea Mobility – Ralph Mosher (American)” 1973 – Wheel Walker – Ralph Mosher Wheels Used as Legs It is understood that many ideas have been presented that involve a combination of wheel actions such as rotation and orbiting. Read More “1965 – G.E.
Robots Using ROS: Helicopter Edition. Mechatronics. Plastic Pals - Robots who are fun to be with! Webcasts robotblog seminar. Why training a.i. isn’t like training your pets. When we last looked at a paper from the Singularity Institute, it was an interesting work asking if we actually know what we’re really measuring when trying to evaluate intelligence by Dr. Shane Legg. While I found a few points that seemed a little odd to me, the broader point Dr. Legg was perusing was very much valid and there were some equations to consider.
However, this paper isn’t exactly representative of most of the things you’ll find coming from the Institute’s fellows. Usually, when you first work on a project which tries to train a computer to make decisions about items in vast datasets, or drawing conclusions from a training set, then extending these conclusions to evaluate real world data, you don’t start by worrying about how you’re going to reward it or punish it. Computers aren’t built with a drive to survive or seek anything, and they’re just as content to sit on a desk and gather dust as they are plowing through gigabytes of data. Quantum Microscope for Living Biology. A team of Australian scientists has developed a powerful microscope using the laws of quantum mechanics to probe the inner workings of living cells. The team, a collaboration between The University of Queensland and the Australian National University, believe their microscope could lead to a better understanding of the basic components of life and eventually allow quantum mechanics to be probed at a macroscopic level.
Their world-first discovery has been published online today in Nature Photonics. Team leader Associate Professor Warwick Bowen, of UQ’s ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems, said the study relied on quantum interactions between the photons of light to achieve measurement precision that surpassed conventional measurement. “This ‘quantum microscope’ is a pioneering step towards applications of quantum physics in technology,” Associate Professor Bowen said. “Unfortunately, biological samples are grilled when the power is increased too far,” said Mr Taylor.
My Beebot. Insect drives robot to track down smells. The results have been published today, 6 February, in IOP Publishing’s journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics. The male silkmoth was chosen as the ‘driver’ of the robot due to its characteristic ‘mating dance’ when reacting to the sex pheromone of the female. Once the male is stimulated by the pheromone it exhibits a distinctive walking pattern: straight-line and zigzagged walking consisting of several turns followed by a loop of more than 360°. Lead author of the research, Dr Noriyasu Ando, said: “The simple and robust odour tracking behaviour of the silkmoth allows us to analyse its neural mechanisms from the level of a single neuron to the moth’s overall behaviour. By creating an ‘artificial brain’ based on the knowledge of the silkmoth’s individual neurons and tracking behaviour, we hope to implement it into a mobile robot that will be equal to the insect-controlled robot developed in this study.”
From Wednesday 6 February, this paper can be downloaded here. Tiny Robotic Bee Assembles Itself Like Pop-Up Book | Wired Enterprise. Harvard has built tiny robots using the principles of origami (Photo: Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory) Harvard University engineers have come up with a production technique inspired by pop-up books and origami, that allows clones of tiny robots to be mass-produced in sheets. Pratheev Sreetharan and colleagues at the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory have been working on bio-inspired robots that are about the same size as a bee, can fly and can work autonomously as a robotic colony.
But actually building the little blighters was a painstaking and error-prone process, as the engineers manually folded, aligned and secured each of the minuscule joints. [partner id="wireduk"] “You’d take a very fine tungsten wire and dip it in a little bit of superglue,” says Sreetharan in a press release. With the new method the engineers don’t just fabricate the robot, but also produce a surrounding “assembly scaffold” that’s attached to the bee-bot by tiny hinges. –Mark Brown.