ScienceDaily (Oct. 31, 2012) — Using cutting-edge virtual reality technology, researchers have ‘beamed’ a person into a rat facility allowing the rat and human to interact with each other on the same scale.
Published October 31 in PLOS ONE, the research enables the rat to interact with a rat-sized robot controlled by a human participant in a different location. At the same time, the human participant (who is in a virtual environment) interacts with a human-sized avatar that is controlled by the movements of the distant rat. The authors hope the new technology will be used to study animal behaviour in a completely new way. . . . Read Complete Report
Photo: Robot Maria from the 1929 silent movie Classic “Metropolis.” SOURCE Google Public Domain
Nothing New under the Sun might be the subtitle of this post. I suddenly realized I have been neglect in research into, and reporting on, the early days of the study of Robotics. After all to understand the future you must study the pass. So let’s go back. … Way back. . . EDITOR
The editors at New Scientist have constructed a replica of what is believed to be the earliest known programmable robot.
“In about 60 AD, a Greek engineer called Hero constructed a three-wheeled cart that could carry a group of automata to the front of a stage where they would perform for an audience. Power came from a falling weight that pulled on string wrapped round the cart’s drive axle, and Sharkey reckons this string-based control mechanism is exactly equivalent to a modern programming language.” SOURCE New Scientist . . . Read Complete Report
The Legacy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Incredible Robot
2 years ago
EXCERPT
Why Did da Vinci Create “the Robot”?
The schema, known today as Leonardo’s robot, was developed around the year 1495, however, rediscovered only in the 1950s. No one knows if there has been any endeavor to build the invention.
Da Vinci fashioned the robot to demonstrate to himself that the frame of a human being could be mimicked. He was also interested in exhibiting for his patron, Lodovico Sforz, the robot’s manner of operation when they attended parties. Da Vinci’s intention was to catapult party members into astonishment with his own competency for melodrama. . . . Read Complete Report w/Photos
Over the summer of 2004, Dr. John D. Enderle was reading The Da Vinci Code when he came across a segment based upon the lost sketches of Leonardo Da Vinci’s robot. The readings sparked his interest and he began researching the history of this “lost” robot. He enlisted a team of students to research the structure and function of the robot. Information was limited due to the fact that the robot was created in 1495 and the estimated 14,000 pages of sketches by Leonardo Da Vinci are lost to the world of science and engineering. . . . Read Complete Report
Animated stills of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Robot from the Drama /Documentary, ‘Leonardo’, starring Mark Rylance as DaVinci, written & Directed by Alan Yentob. Leonardo’s Robot recreated by Mark Rosenheim. BBC 2003. Music: ‘My Head’ by Dias M. No copyright infringement intended. . . . Text posted with video on youtube
POSTED BY: EVAN ACKERMAN / THU, SEPTEMBER 06, 2012
We were pretty impressed with KMel’s quadrotor performance at Cannes back in June, and the idea of using swarms of quadrotors to create light shows seems to be catching on. At the voestalpine Klangwolke Cloud in the Net festival in Austria, a swarm of 50 quadrotors teamed up to put on a giant animated show in the night sky. . . . Read Complete Report
Quadrocopters turn into pixels at the voestalpine Klangwolke and form 3D-Modells in the sky. As a world-premiere, the Ars Electronica Futurelab has managed to fly a formation outdoor with so many quadrocopters, painting some moments of magic into the nightsky of Linz. . . . Text posted with video to youtube
Thanks to gyros, accelerometers and sophisticated control mechanisms, remaining upright on a two-wheeled vehicle is no longer quite the balancing act it might once have been, even when at a standstill. Visions of future mobility like Honda’s U3-X take such ideas in whole new directions, quite literally, by including multi-directional capabilities, and concepts such as Supple go even further still by ditching wheels altogether in favor of balls. It’s this freedom of movement that inspired a group of students from the Charles W Davidson College Of Engineering at San Jose State University to begin work on the ambitious Spherical Drive System (SDS) electric motorcycle. . . . Read Complete Report
POSTED BY: EVAN ACKERMAN / WED, SEPTEMBER 12, 2012
This glowing green egg with eyeballs (at least, that’s my interpretation) is the logo for an artificial intelligence project being undertaken by Fujitsu Laboratories and Japan’s National Institute of Informatics, with the goal of getting a robot to pass the math portion of the University of Tokyo’s entrance exam. . . Read Complete Report
By Robotics Trends’ News Sources – Filed Aug 29, 2012
Scientists at Rice University, the University of Houston (UH) and TIRR Memorial Hermann have received a $1.17 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the President’s National Robotics Initiative (NRI). The combined device will be validated by UTHealth physicians with as many as 40 volunteer patients in the final two years of the four-year R01 award, the oldest research grant offered by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The multidisciplinary team hopes to develop and validate a noninvasive brain-machine interface (BMI) to a robotic orthotic device that is expected to innovate upper-limb rehabilitation. . . . Read Complete Report
In this guest post, Norri Kageki interviews Masahiro Mori, who, as a professor of engineering at Tokyo Institute of Technology in the 1970s, proposed the now-famous concept of the uncanny valley. [Read the first authorized translation of his seminal article here.] Mori’s insight was that people would react with revulsion to humanlike robots, whose appearance resembled, but did not quite replicate, that of a real human. He called this phenomenon bukimi no tani (the term “uncanny valley” first appeared in the 1978 book Robots: Fact, Fiction, and Prediction, written by Jasia Reichardt).
Hold fire on those Christmas lists. Japanese artist Kogoro Kurata has unveiled a 13 ft (4 meter) tall, 9900 lb (4500 kg) prototype mecha robot called Kuratas, which comes complete with “weapon systems” and is apparently [capable] of being driven by an onboard human pilot.
Kuratas is controlled via a software system called V-Sido, which, in addition to the cockpit dash, allows control of the robot by smartphone (over a 3G network), or a master-slave system that sees Kuratas mimic the moves of a much smaller model, which can be manipulated into shapes by the user from a remote position. From the cockpit, a steering column is used to steer the robot, which also includes arms of its own which for manipulating the robot’s upper limbs. Kinect controls are also an option. . . . Read Complete Report w/ photos
This month, NASA engineer Eric Stackpole hiked to a spot in Trinity County, east of California’s rough Bigfoot country. Nestled at the base of a hill of loose rock, peppered by red and purple wildflowers, is Hall City Cave. For part of the winter the cave is infested with large spiders, but is mostly flooded year-round. Locals whisper the cave’s deep pools hold a cache of stolen gold, but Mr. Stackpole isn’t here to look for treasure.
He had, under his arm, what might appear to be a clunky toy blue submarine about the size of a lunchbox. The machine is the latest prototype of the OpenROV–an open-source, remotely operated vehicle that could map the cave in 3D using software from Autodesk and collect water in places too tight for a diver to go.
For now, it is exploring caves because it can only go down 100 meters. But it holds promise because it is cheap, links to a laptop, and is available to a large number of researchers for experimentation. . . . Read Complete Report
By Robotics Trends’ News Sources – Filed Jun 06, 2012
Researchers have studied how mosquitoes survive the impact of raindrops more than 50 times their body mass.
Dr. David Hu, professor of mechanical engineering and biology at Georgia Institute of Technology, says mosquitoes could provide clues to building flying robots of the future.
In a new study, Dr. Hu and his team of researchers studied how mosquitoes survive the impact of raindrops that are more than 50 times their body mass.
