Well well, it appears Honda’s ASIMO has a serious competitor! While ASIMO’s fastest running speed has been 6km/h so far, this new Toyota humanoid is running at 7km/h. Also as seen in this video, this robot can do a nice job re-balancing itself when pushed slightly. This new Toyota robot’s stunningly natural running really amazes me. however, while standing, the legs look all things but natural. 😉 Which is why I still like ASIMO better. =)
This article on IEEE spectrum is pretty awesome… check it out!
“Researchers at the University of Michigan have found a way to control the movement of tiny droplets of fluid in a microelectromechanical (MEMS) device—with sound. The scientists use several musical tones to move droplets along different channels on a chip. By combining tones or applying them at appropriate times, they can move liquids along multiple channels and even mix, split, and sort the liquids.
The advance, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, holds promise for making microfluidic devices compact and simple. Microfluidic devices are glass or plastic chips with etched channels through which you can maneuver nano- or even picoliters of liquids. Thousands of chemical or biological reactions can be performed on the chips simultaneously, promising to speed up medical diagnostics, chemical synthesis, and drug discovery.”
“We have put together a video of our Milestone 2 run, which we completed this past Monday, June 1, 2009. This particular run had our PR2 alpha robot navigate through eight doors, and plug its power cord into nine outlets. In this video, you can see the various challenges our robot faced, such as a crowded office environment and the abrupt appearance of a human obstacle. We nearly sabotaged the run early on. Folks around the office were eager to track the progress of the robot, so many people ran their own monitoring programs on the PR2. This caused an increase in CPU load, starving the navigation software. Nonetheless, the robot was able to continue with the run, albeit more slowly and cautiously.”
“We are currently developing algorithms that will narrow the learning gap between humans and machines, and enable flight systems to ‘learn’ the way humans do: through practice.
Rather than being programmed with detailed instructions, these flight systems will learn from experience. Like baby birds leaving the nest, they will be clumsy at first. Over time, however, they will become capable of sophisticated, coordinated maneuvers……”
Earlier I had posted a few lines in regards to ASIMO’s conduction of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra performing “Impossible Dream”. Today I received an email from a good friend of mine notifying me that the video for the performance has just been released and it’s currently available on blip.tv. So, here it is, and it’s profoundly cute. =D Enjoy!
Well apparently his majesty the royal cuteness Honda’s ASIMO robot is planning on mesmerizing the audience by conducting the Detroit Symphony Orchestra performing “Impossible Dream”. This is going to be the opening for cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s performance. Read the whole story here. Cool ha? =) I have been tracking the improvements and basically the process of “growing up” of this little creature from the start, as he’s pretty much the “Dream Come True” of Robotics enthusiasts such as myself. And I even had him as the topic for the papers for a couple of my engineering design related courses. Now I wonder if the videos for this performance are going to show up on YouTube, cause I have to say, I so badly want to see this! =D
Having used my beloved eReader for close to 5 months now, I think it’s time I wrote a bit about it to share with you how I find it so far. And yes, those are indeed little hearts you see in the article title. That mean I LUVVVV IIITTTTT! =D A while ago out of pure accident I came across one of Sony’s most ingenious little ideas, the Sony eBook Reader. I suppose you could see sparkles in my eyes when I found out what it was and what it did. I could finally be delivered from the pain of having to read all my eBooks on my monitor. I have to add here, I read a lot and I have a truly large number of eBooks. [You can see a part of my library here.] I’m not really a big fan of paper books because of obvious reasons. If I were to store the paper version of all the books that I currently have, I would need to rent the white house. In addition, I once had to leave behind my library of paper books when I was migrating from one country to the other. That was certainly not an enjoyable event. So now, for me it’s all about eBooks. I guess you can imagine what it would mean to me and what kind of freedom I would achieve by being able to load a handful of my eBooks into a tiny gadget and carry it around wherever I want, just like a simple paperback. It would also mean that I won’t have to worry about staring at the monitor for 12 hours strait and tiring the heck out of my eyes. Obviously the first thing that I did was going through the specifications of the eReader. I noticed that there’s a main book format for the reader [BBeB aka .lrf], and it also supports most of the major formats including PDF and TXT. It also has the ability to display JPG images in gray-scale, and play mp3 files among other sound formats. That was all I needed; I was sold. But then I also started looking into the online user reviews for the gadget and that turned out to be somewhat disconcerting. I read a whole lot about how people were unhappy with the fact that the display is in gray-scale. There was also tons of rant about the loading speed for each page, and I even read comments saying that the screen would break by a touch! And that’s to mention just a few… To my good fortune, I was too taken by it not to take the risk. Despite all the sad reviews, I decided to buy one. [Now given that the reader is only available in the USA, how I managed to get my hands on one is another story altogether..] Well, obviously I’m now more than happy I took the risk. The eReader is probably the most useful piece of electronics I paid for in the past heaven knows how many years. As it turns out, it’s indeed a splendid little gadget. The time it takes to load each page is pretty much equal the amount of time it would take the human hand to turn the page of a paper book. You can change the size of the font to your liking, and the display is just fantastic. You can read the font clearly from any given angle. It’s light, easy to carry about and the battery charge lasts for a mighty long while. The sound quality is also very nice and it can easily rid you of your mp3 player. As for the physical strength of the screen… well I have a feeling some people might have tried playing squash with it, in which case it would definitely not last. But if you know how to use an electronic gadget, you won’t have any problems. And not to forget… to my deep delight, the eReader supports both Pro Duo memory sticks and the old fashioned SD cards. The only thing that doesn’t make me very happy right now, is that since the eReader has been released for the USA, at the moment the users outside of the USA are not able to directly connect to the Sony Connect Store to buy the BeBB books for the reader. That however was not a problem for me since I already have tons of eBooks to read with the eReader, and regardless of where you get your eBook, you can read it with the eReader. Even if you want to have BBeB books, there are tons of free applications out there that would take your PDF or RTF or whatever else you have and convert it into an LRF. At the end, it is the fact that this gadget is not for everyone, and I can see clearly where all the negative reviews are coming from. Buying the eReader, would mean that you’re paying almost twice the price of a PSP for something that does not display you colours and you can’t play games with it. This gadget is for true readers, it’s meant to make easy the lives of people like me who spend hours and hours reading books. Don’t expect from it what’s it’s not meant for, and then pour your frustration into a negative review. And yet, don’t miss it if you’re a bookworm as I am. =)
Also, look what I just dugg up! The article just amazes me, check it out! 🙂
“It’s a bird. It’s a plane. Or it might turn out to be a little like both. Researchers are aiming to find ways to enable aircraft to change shape during flight to improve performance or efficiency. The University of Dayton project is funded by a $580,000 defense contract to further the development of “morphing” aircraft…”
Something’s terribly wrong with me today! I’ve been debugging the simplest mere extension circuit for hours now and I still can’t get it to work! All bloody analog…nothing fancy. Now I have a blown up op-amp & 2 burnt finger tips, and after looking around for God knows how long I just realized that I have a reversed zener-d and for some reason I just couldn’t see it. Golly…I’m quite sure there are a few more of “that” type of problems laying around staring at me right now. I should probably leave it for now….at least for a few hours. As for World Cup frenzy….well I’m still pretty ticked off over Iran’s pathetic [for one kind word] performance in the game vs. Mexico. I’ve received all sorts of lectures on why things happened the way they happened and why this was to be expected….not like they make me feel any better. England’s team however has so far done well….& my fave match so far was the Ghana vs. Italy game. One hell of a game that one. And as for my Greek language studies….it’s going fine, thanks for asking! 🙂 I mean it’s going as fine as it can possibly go given the conditions! It’s funny how everything tends to sound 180˚ different than what I would expect according to the alphabet basics. My search for “living resources” is still “on going”…… On the plus side, teaching Persian to my German friend is going pretty smooth. Now only if I could figure how this thing is supposed to sound like……:P
Hey, I'm Aasemoon, and this is my blog which has been around since 1998. Childhood toy project that ended up growing up with me.
You can reach me here:
aasemoon.blue
Zorbas is my kitten. You can see some pictures of him below. =)
