Wired posted a gallery on Friday of surgical robots, and Bloodbot here caught my eye, largely because it seemed to be the most practical. The robot consists of an arm with a needle and a probe. In order to find an accessible vein, the robot probes around your arm until it finds an area of flesh that is a little bit less squishy than the rest. Then it jabs you with a needle, and when it feels a little pop indicating that it’s punched through into a vein, it knows to stop the jabbage, lest it go right through the other side of your vein, out the back of your arm, and into your femoral artery, causing a massive amount of hemorrhaging that will no doubt kill you in minutes.
So far, the robot is accurate about 78% of the time…
This may not look like the most promising design for a robot, but there’s a lot of potential to be had with robots that can change their shape. These robots, from Ritsumeikan University in Japan, are constructed with spherical shells of spring steel attached to an inner core (which contains the power source and electronics) via shape memory alloy wires. Applying voltage to the wires causes them to contract, deforming the shape of the robot. By doing this, the robot can change its center of gravity to roll in any direction…
While most robot designers shoot for more capable and more complicated robots, the philosophy behind swarm robotics is totally different: make the robots as simple as possible, and let complex capabilities emerge from the cooperative powers of a whole bunch of them. We’re already familiar with macro-scale swarm robots, but researchers in Europe are trying to shrink things down to insect scale.
These tiny (4 millimeters on a side) robots are members of the I-SWARM project…
Last May, we wrote about a 7 gram robot grasshopper that is capable of jumping a distance of 1.4 meters, which is pretty huge for such a small robot. By using reduction gears and legs that act as springs, the robot is a very efficient mover, as well. We commented in that post that “the great thing about jumping is that it combines the advantages of being on the ground with one of the most important advantages of being able to fly: obstacle avoidance.” Of course, the other big advantage of being able to fly is that you can cover large distances quickly and efficiently (albeit mostly due to the aforementioned avoidance of obstacles).
Researchers at EPFL’s Laboratory of Intelligent Systems have made their robot grasshopper into a true flier by…
Earlier this week we covered several different incremental improvements in robot AI, including grasping and object recognition. In the video above, ASIMO is demonstrating another (arguably more) important aspect of robot intelligence: the ability to navigate around a dynamically changing environment. It’s not likely that ASIMO will find itself in a situation where it needs to avoid stepping on whirling pink blades of death, but at some point (soon, please) we’ll have ASIMOs walking around our homes, and…
Robots are now learning how to lie. Here’s how it happened. Researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne setup an experiment with a bunch of autonomous bots. They programmed them to look for food (a light colored ring on the floor) and avoid poison (a dark ring). The bots also had a blue light that could be detected by the other bots. The longer the bots stayed around the food, the more points they got. Since space was limited, bots would jostle around the food while simultaneously creating a cluster of blue lights that could serve as a beacon for other bots that food had been found.
The researchers then introduced “evolution” into the experiment by “by copying and combining the artificial neural networks of the most successful robots. The scientists also added a few random changes to their code to mimic biological mutations.” By the 50th generation the found that robots were flashing their blue lights less and less when they found food. A few hundred generations later and hardly any robots flashed their lights once they had found the food, thereby increasing their chances of getting more points while concealing their find to their neighbors.
The slimy bastards.
Researchers concluded this study may help them better understand the evolution of biological communication systems.
Most of the UAVs we saw at AUVSI last week were expensive. Really expensive. Like, if you have to ask, don’t ask. This sucks, because UAVs aren’t just useful for people with a defense budget… There’s a sizable civilian market as well, for everything from security to aerial photography to flying around and freaking people out with a little round robot.
The HALO micro air vehicle promises to be simple, reliable, and above all, inexpensive. If it makes it into production in volume, by 2011 you (yes, you) could go by one for somewhere around…
Remember back when the Billy Bass was popular back in 2000 or so? Since then there have been a number of similar items on the market that are equally as annoying as the singing fish. However, these robot trophies have to be the coolest ones I have seen.
Since I’m fully expecting a robot uprising within the next decade or so, I would love to put one of these on my wall. That way when a robot breaks into my house to kill me, it knows that I’m someone that’s not to be messed with. There are 11 different robotic animals which have sensors that will make the robots come to life and become aggressive towards anyone who comes near. Unfortunately there’s no word on pricing or availability.
I like robots rather a lot, but I never thought I might actually be capable of building one until I ran across a website about photovore robots. Most photovores are small, solar powered BEAM (biologically inspired) bots with a solar panel, light sensors, and a tiny motor or two. In the same way that herbivores eat herbs and carnivores eat carnies, photovores ‘eat’ photons in that their light sensors tell their motors to chase bright light to ‘feed’ their solar panel. I decided to try to build one myself, and bought a small kit from Solarbotics.com.
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