Butterfly in the sky, researchers wonder how you fly. To this end, Harvard University’s Hiroto Tanaka and the University of Tokyo’s Isao Shimoyama have built a butterfly doppelganger by combining angelic plastic wings, balsa wood, and rubber bands.
Posts Tagged ‘robots’
Niftiest Robots of 2009: They Swim, Fly & Check Your Colon
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Disarmingly Cute: 8 Military Robots That Spy, Fly, and Do Yoga
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Tiny Jumping Robot Can Find Enemies, Scale Fences
A shoebox sized, GPS-guided robot is under development for the U.S. military. Oh, and the robot has mad ups too: It can leap a 25-foot wall without breaking a sweat.
Robotics company Boston Dynamics, the same group that brought you PETMAN and BigDog, built the robot—known as the Precision Urban Hopper—for the purposes of scouting enemy territory.
BBC News reports:
Most of the time, the robot…uses its four wheels to get around. But the Precision Urban Hopper can use a piston-actuated “leg” to launch it over obstacles such as walls or fences. The robot could boost the capabilities of troops and special forces engaged in urban warfare, say researchers.
The work was funded by the US military’s research branch, and the robot is expected to enlist sometime in late 2010.
Here’s a video of the little bugger posterizing a helpless fence:
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Image: Sandia National Laboratories
Video: Sandia National Laboratories via YouTube/kusharax
Building a Better Housefly—Or, At Least, a Better Flying Microrobot
Obama probably wouldn’t have as much success swatting this flying microrobot as he did his now-infamous one. Typically when engineers design flying bots, they assume they should build them with flapping wings, like insects, instead of helicopter airplane designs. But it turns out that flying robots aren’t as efficient when they’re built like flies.
David Lentink at Wageningen University and Michael Dickinson at the California Institute of Caltech pitted a robot made with fly wings and a micro-helicopter made with an attached wing against each other in an oil tank to test how much energy each one used. They found that the two robots produced the same amount of lift, but the one outfitted with the helicopter blade consumed 50 percent less energy, going against what researchers had long assumed:
The extra lift is generated by a stable ‘tornado-like’ vortex that runs parallel to the leading edge of the wing. This vortex lowers the pressure over the wing and sucks it upward, lifting the insect’s weight into the air. It was already known that both spinning and flapping insect wings can generate such a lift boosting vortex.
Still, let’s not discount our insect friends just yet: We still have much to learn from flies, Dickinson contends.
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Image: Wageningen University
Weird Science Roundup: The Robot Revolution Has Begun
• Robots are fighting fires in London, and thereby sparing humans from the dangers of blazes started by explosive industrial gas.
• Meanwhile, researchers are looking to pizza parlors for techniques to help them come up with a way to make robots more dexterous.
• He shoots, he scores! Check out this video of a soccer-playing robot. What’s next—World Cup, Robot Edition?
• Batter up! Make way for the robo-pitcher.
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Robot Model Struts the Catwalk in Japan
Robots may soon be able to travel through your veins and recycle your garbage—and as of this week, they can also model clothes. A robot model named Miim (not the one pictured at left) sported haute couture in designer Yumi Katsura‘s recent bridal fashion show, according to The U.K. Sun.
The humanoid bot, which was designed at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, is five-foot-two-inches tall, which seems pretty short for the fashion world. On the other hand, it’s probably pretty easy for a robot to maintain a runway model’s stick-thin physique…a diet of organic plant material isn’t exactly fattening.
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Image: flickr / Wedding Photography by Jon Day
Update: “Corpse-Eating Robot” Actually a Vegetarian
Remember the robot that was reported to feed on human corpses? Turns out the bot actually wouldn’t be programmed to eat flesh at all. Instead, it would stick to leaves, grass and other non-animal-based organic matter.
The Telegraph reports:
The Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot – known as Eatr for short – does indeed fuel its “biomass engine” by digesting organic material, but it was not intended to munch its way through battlefields of fallen soldiers, Harry Schoell, the chief executive of Cyclone Power Technologies, said.
“We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission,” Mr Schoell said.
“We are focused on demonstrating that our engines can create usable, green power from plentiful, renewable plant matter. The commercial applications alone for this earth-friendly energy solution are enormous.”
Looks like the panic was premature, and based on some misconstrued information. Still, we have to ask: If the robot can be programmed to eat certain things, couldn’t it still potentially be hijacked and re-programmed to consume corpses?
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Image: flickr / Tellumo
New Robot Would Fuel Itself on Grass, Wood, Human Corpses
About a year ago, we calmly speculated about the implications that a slug-eating robot might have for us delicious humans.
Recently, there have been reports of the development of a steam-powered robot that can fuel itself by consuming any organic material in its path, from leaves to twigs to (gulp) humans. Now might be a good time to panic, at least if you value your body with its flesh intact.
According to the developers of the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot, appropriately abbreviated EATR, the bot could live independently for years on old furniture, dead animals and, of course, human corpses, which provide the greatest fuel of all. Fox News reports:
EATR… which uses an “external combustion chamber” burning up fuel to heat up water in a closed loop, generating electricity….
Upon the EATR platform, the Pentagon could build all sorts of things — a transport, an ambulance, a communications center, even a gunship.
In press materials, Robotic Technology presents EATR as an essentially benign artificial creature that fills its belly through “foraging,” despite the obvious military purpose.
Essentially benign? We’re not so sure about that.
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Image: flickr / Tellumo
Monday Weird News Roundup: Ramen Robots, Glucose Games, and Goldman Codes
• Is the world’s most valuable source code currently out in the open? And has anyone told Goldman Sachs?
• A ramen-making robot lets Japanese customers choose the flavoring they want. So where’s the cheesecake robot?
• Who says gaming has no value? BigPharma firm Bayer has created a DS plugin to let diabetic kids turn monitoring their glucose levels into a game.
• An amazing spider builds life-size decoys of itself to distract hungry predators. Sarah Palin is reported to be examining a similar strategy.
• A popular online gamer ran up debt, stole from the virtual bank he ran, and exchanged it for actual cash on the black market. And then got busted. No doubt Paramount is buying the story rights as we speak.
