“Many robotic designs take nature as their muse: sticking to walls like geckos, swimming through water like tuna, sprinting across terrain like cheetahs. Such designs borrow properties from nature, using engineered materials and hardware to mimic animals’ behaviour.
Scientists at MIT and the University of Pennsylvania have genetically engineered muscle cells to flex in response to light, and are using the light-sensitive tissue to build highly articulated robots.”
Holy cows! A friend just shared this video on my wall on Facebook. I realize it’s just concept and a lot of things happen in “just concept” these days, but this is sooo bleeding impressive!
Morph is a new concept design by Nokia, that supposedly will revolutionize mobile devices using a whole load of nano-tech. Read more about it here.
“Dennis Hong, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of Virginia Tech’s Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory, or RoMeLa, has created robots with the most unusual shapes and sizes — from strange multi-legged robots to amoeba-like robots with no legs at all. Now he’s unveiling a new robot with a more conventional shape: a full-sized humanoid robot called CHARLI, or Cognitive Humanoid Autonomous Robot with Learning Intelligence. The robot is 5-foot tall (1.52 meter), untethered and autonomous, capable of walking and gesturing. But its biggest innovation is that it does not use rotational joints.”
Here’s another serious competitor for ASIMO. I just came across this article on IEEE Spectrum and was pretty amazed by how natural some of this robot’s moves are. And it actually looks pretty neat too! The wrist + finger movements / control impressed me the most.
This is something that I’m very much looking forwards to getting my hands on. It could very well be a life saver for me.
“On Monday, National Instruments announced one such platform. It’s called LabView Robotics. In addition to LabView, the popular data-acquisition application, the package includes a bunch of tools specific to robotics. It can import codes in various formats (C, C++, Matlab, VHDL), offers a library of drivers for a wide variety of sensors and actuators, and has modules for implementation of real-time and embedded hardware. NI says engineers could use the package to both design and run their robotic systems.”
Well this is just amazing! The possibilities of what can be done with this type of robot are infinite…
Apparently the blob design is about a year old… they have improved designs now that are a bit different, going towards the ability to include sensors… some are palms sized. This blew my mind….
I was just checking the latest ASIMO news when I came across U3-X, Honda’s new personal mobility device. Neat little device that you can comfortably sit on and move around, with adjustable speed and easy navigation through body gestures. Looks pretty kool to me!
I’ll be collecting more information here, as I find it…
I just came across a couple of very interesting videos on this article on BotJunkies. Both videos display pretty amazing navigation capabilities in robots, and the ability to recognize and avoid the obstacles, even moving ones. Most of the processing equipment for the HRP-2 robot are off board though, which is why I find ASIMO still a lot cooler. 😉
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.
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aasemoon.blue
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geckos, swimming through water like tuna, sprinting across terrain like cheetahs. Such designs borrow properties from nature, using engineered materials and hardware to mimic animals’ behaviour. ![1573984[1]](http://lh5.ggpht.com/_Tl7xVSHEwJs/S-H2YPen-aI/AAAAAAAAAV4/CuY4wRAOzL0/s1600-h/1573984%5B1%5D%5B3%5D.jpg "1573984[1]")
![1493928[1]](http://lh6.ggpht.com/_Tl7xVSHEwJs/S28a0iz0PfI/AAAAAAAAARY/8IWM0Ivns5U/s1600-h/1493928%5B1%5D%5B3%5D.png "1493928[1]")
