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We've heard about Foxconn's legion of robots scheduled to take over for the company's human work force, and we know that robots are already working in many factories in the U.S. But bringing this kind of automation to the masses by making it simple to use and affordable has been elusive, until now.
Danish company Universal Robots has unveiled the UR5 and UR10 robots that offer the promise of a lightweight, easy to set up, cost efficient robot for small companies. Paired with a touchscreen tablet controller, the user has the ability to program the robot to carry out complex functions that require speed and a delicate touch. And, if the user decides to have the mechanism work alongside humans, the robot has a safety function that instantly brings it to a halt when met with resistance or an obstacle not programmed into its functions.
Universal Robots founder and CTO Esben Ostergaard said, "We decided to make programming intuitive by developing a graphical user interface combined with a 'teaching function' allowing the user to simply grab the robot arm and show it how a movement should be performed. The robot can be integrated into any production process very quickly. Our experience shows this is generally done in a few hours."
Service and Healthcare: Robotic Surgery Saves a British Soldier from Amputatio | Robotics TrendsCaptain James Murly-Gotto faced the prospect of amputation after being hit by machine gun fire during a 10-day mission in Helmand province.
One bullet passed straight through the flesh of his left leg, but the other tore through the bones in his right. The inside of his knee was destroyed, and two major leg bones were splintered.
However, he sought out a world-leading surgeon who helped create replacement parts that - in the soldier’s words - “slot in like flat-pack furniture”.
The operation at the King Edward VII’s Hospital Sister Agnes in London involved marrying two technologies for the first time.
Initially, he underwent 3D scanning to create tailor-made computer designed replacement parts.
Then Professor Justin Cobb, a leading orthopaedic surgeon, used a robotic arm to remove just the right amount of bone - and not a speck more.
The operation was such a success that Capt Murly-Gotto has been able to take to the golf course once again, with the help of a buggy, and even ride a bike.
A screenshot from a Russia Today video report about the Syrian rebels' homemade armored car that uses a PS3 controlller to aim the gun.
A Syrian rebel holding a PlayStation game controller looks like he's playing "Battlefield 3" or "Call of Duty: Black Ops II" on his flat panel TV. But it's no game — he's controlling a machine gun located on a homemade armored car cobbled together by enterprising rebel engineers in their fight against Syrian military forces.
The armored vehicle, called Sham II, has rusting steel armor about 2.5 centimeters thick that can supposedly survive 23 mm cannon fire, according to Agence France-Presse. But the rebels won't enjoy similar protection against incoming fire from tanks or rocket-propelled grenades.
University of Colorado Boulder Assistant Professor Nikolaus Correll dreams of great things in the future of distributed intelligence in the robotic sciences.
Every living organism is made from a swarm of collaborating cells. Perhaps some day, our swarms will colonize space where they will assemble habitats and lush gardens for future space explorers.
To speed up the achievements of new breakthroughs, Correll has set up a lab at U. Colorado Boulder where students can probe the possibilities that robot swarming can offer. The lab includes 20 robots the size of pingpong balls, which the team refers to as "droplets." When the droplets work together, they form a "liquid that thinks."
In a similar manner, tiny robots such as the “nanomorphs” envisioned in the “Terminator” films could swarm into oil spills to clean up, could work together to assemble equipment in space, could use sensor and pattern recognition technology to map and study difficult to access ecosystems. Correll also continues to work on a project in which robots learn to tend gardens, which he started when he was with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Pentagon-backed scientists on Monday announced they had created a robot hand that was the most advanced brain-controlled prosthetic limb ever made.
The mind-powered prosthesis is a breakthrough, the team of neurologists and bio-engineers reported in The Lancet. With further development "individuals with long-term paralysis could recover the natural and intuitive command signals for hand placement, orientation and reaching, allowing them to perform activities of daily living," they said.
She had been left paralysed from the neck down, unable to move her arms and legs due to a condition called spinocerebellar degeneration. Two weeks after the operation, the prosthesis was connected and the woman embarked on 14 weeks of training—but on only the second day, she was able to move the limb through mind power. The training aimed at achieving skills in nine tasks, such as gripping and moving small objects, stacking cones and bumping a ball so that it rolled outside a loose coil of wire. At the end, the volunteer completed the tasks with a success rate of up to 91.6%, and more than 30 seconds faster than at the start of the trial.
Jan Scheuermann, who is 53 and paralysed from the neck down, was able to deftly grasp and move a variety of objects just like a normal arm. Brain implants were used to control the robotic arm, in the study reported in the Lancet medical journal. Experts in the field said it was an "unprecedented performance" and a "remarkable achievement". Jan was diagnosed with spinocerebellar degeneration 13 years ago and progressively lost control of her body. She is now unable to move her arms or legs.
Robo-arm
She was implanted with two sensors - each four millimetres by four millimetres - in the motor cortex of her brain. A hundred tiny needles on each sensor pick up the electrical activity from about 200 individual brain cells. "The way that neurons communicate with each other is by how fast they fire pulses, it's a little bit akin to listening to a Geiger counter click, and it's that property that we lock onto," said Professor Andrew Schwartz from the University of Pittsburgh.
The pulses of electricity in the brain are then translated into commands to move the arm, which bends at the elbow, wrist and could grab an object. Jan was able to control the arm after the second day of training and over a period of 14 weeks became increasing skilful. The report said she gained "co-ordination, skill and speed almost similar to that of an able-bodied person" by the end of the study.
Prof Schwartz told the BBC that movements this good had not been achieved before. "They're fluid and they're way better, I don't know how to say it any other way, they're way better than anything that's been demonstrated before. "I think it really is convincing evidence that this technology is going to be therapeutic for spinal cord injured people. "They are doing tasks already that would be beneficial in their daily lives and I think that's fairly conclusive at this point."
Sense of touch
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sOvP9PhDQU&feature=player_embedded]Walking Quadcopter, or Flying Hexapod? - YouTube[/ame]Spiders, especially the big ones, can be creepy, right? But what if there was such a thing as a giant, flying spider? Now what if that giant, flying spider had the intelligence of say, a low-level robot? That would be a nightmare, right? Well, friends, some nightmares come true. Introducing, the Hexapod Quadcopter.
A powerful new microscale actuator that can flex like a miniature beckoning finger has been developed by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California, Berkeley.
It is based on a material that expands and contracts dramatically in response to a small (15 degrees C) temperature variation. It is smaller than the width of a human hair and is promising for microfluidics, drug delivery, and artificial muscles.
“We believe our microactuator is more efficient and powerful than any current microscale actuation technology, including human muscle cells,” says Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley scientist Junqiao Wu. “What’s more, it uses this very interesting material — vanadium dioxide (VO2).
(Phys.org)Today's dismounted warfighter can be saddled with more than 100 pounds of gear, resulting in physical strain, fatigue and degraded performance. Reducing the load on dismounted warfighters has become a major point of emphasis for defense research and development, because the increasing weight of individual equipment has a negative impact on warfighter readiness. The Army has identified physical overburden as one of its top five science and technology challenges. To help alleviate physical weight on troops, DARPA is developing a four-legged robot, the Legged Squad Support System (LS3), to integrate with a squad of Marines or Soldiers.
Leader-follower tight: LS3 attempts to follow as close as possible to the path its leader takes
Leader-follower corridor: LS3 sticks to the leader but has freedom to make local path decisions, so the leader doesn't need to think about LS3's mobility capabilities
Go-to-waypoint: LS3 uses its local perception to avoid obstacles on its way to a designated GPS coordinate
Additionally, technologies to allow squad members to speak commands to LS3 are anticipated to be added during this period.
Driverless vehicles travel road to future[1]|chinadaily.com.cnThe road to the future, for those who would like to take a hands-off approach to driving, could have been glimpsed recently on a highway from Beijing.
What was once the realm of science fiction, passengers in driverless vehicles reading or playing video games as their vehicle hurtles down the road, is now science fact.
A black driverless sport utility vehicle completed a 114-kilometer journey last month from Beijing to Tianjin in 85 minutes.
"The average speed was 79 km per hour, but it could have been higher as traffic on the road was a little heavy," said professor Xu Youchun, who is in charge of the research program.
Junjiaomengshi 3 (Lion 3), the vehicle's nickname, completed more than 10,000 km in tests, reaching a top speed of 120 km/h, said Xu, a specialist on "intelligent vehicles" at the Military Transportation University in Tianjin.
The vehicle looks exactly the same as any SUV, except for three sensors on the front, back and top. Three other sensors inside the vehicle, three cameras, a navigational system and three computers keep the vehicle safely on the road.
$16k 4-in-1 farming device could help save billions of dollars | DVICE65-year-old Sulaiman Famro built a prototype of his one-stop processing plant for vegetables and grains a few years ago. He calls his design Farmking and claims that it could save his home country of Nigeria $1 billion a year.
It cost Famro $16,000 to build his prototype, which can be used to process cassava, soy beans, maize, sweet potatoes, yams and a host of other vegetables and grains. The current processing methods of these foods in Nigeria tends to waste starch. But Famro's 4-in-one machine captures starch and recycles it for future use.
Farmking has a diesel engine and lighting for processing around the clock in remote locations. One side of Famro's design can handle chipping, grating and milling. The power plant is in the middle and there's a large steel drum in the back that can hold milled cassava. It uses a spin filter to turn tons of milled cassava into starch.
Famro hopes to market Farmking throughout Nigeria and that is what he's currently working on. That, and possibly adding a gasifier to his next prototype to power his creation with crop waste.
Continental first to receive Nevada automated driving testing license - SlashGearContinental, an international automotive supplier, became the first supplier to receive an Autonomous Vehicle Testing License. With this license, Continental will be able to test its automated driving vehicles on the state’s public roads. The license was issued after Continental provided automatic driving demonstrations in Nevada.
The car that Continental is testing is designed so that it can be easily spotted by those around it. One of its distinguishing marks is a red license plate with an infinity symbol on it, which is reserved for the public testing of automated driving vehicles. By testing on public roads, the automated cars can be taken to the next level.
Continental’s Executive Board Chairman Dr. Elmar Degenhart offered this statement. “At Continental, we continue to invest in research and development for next generation technologies – such as our highly automated vehicle – that will drive us toward a safer, more efficient and more comfortable future … We will be able to develop the first applications for highly and ultimately fully automated driving, even at higher speeds and in more complex driving situations, ready for production by 2020 or 2025.”
Read more at: Telepresence robots let employees 'beam' into work (Update)Terence Chea Engineer Dallas Goecker attends meetings, jokes with colleagues and roams the office building just like other employees at his company in Silicon Valley.
But Goecker isn't in California. He's more than 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) away, working at home in Seymour, Indiana. It's all made possible by the Beam—a mobile video-conferencing machine that he can drive around his company's offices and workshops in Palo Alto. The five-foot (1.5-meter)-tall device, topped with a large video screen, gives him a physical presence that makes him and his colleagues feel like he's actually there. "This gives you that casual interaction that you're used to at work," Goecker said, speaking on a Beam. "I'm sitting in my desk area with everybody else. I'm part of their conversations and their socializing." Suitable Technologies, which makes the Beam, is now one of more than a dozen companies that sell so-called telepresence robots. These remote-controlled machines are equipped with video cameras, speakers, microphones and wheels that allow users to see, hear, talk and "walk" in faraway locations.
HyTAQ robot rolls on the ground and flies through the air - SlashGearWe’ve seen plenty of remote-controlled toy robots over the years. We’ve seen remote-controlled devices that can fly such as the AR Drone and remote-controlled devices that roll around on the ground as well. What I don’t recall seeing is a remote-controlled device that combines both ground and air capability into one device.
This cool little toy is called the Hybrid Terrestrial and Aerial Quadrotor (HyTAQ) and was designed by Arash Kalantari and Matthew Spenko. Both of the designers hail from the robotics laboratory at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The device looks a lot like your typical four rotor flying helicopter toy inside a cage to help prevent you from breaking it when you smack into the wall.
Hewitt Crane was a practical minded kind of guy. To help the world get a better feel for just how much oil it used in a year, he came up the unit he called the cubic mile of oil (CMO), to considerable acclaim. Crane was actually one of the pioneers of computing. He was an early developer of magnetic core RAM, eye-tracking devices, pen input devices, and invented the first all-magnetic computers still finding extensive use for fail-safe systems in the military. Today, another kind of device he presciently envisioned back in 1960 is starting to attract attention — the neuristor.
A neuristor is the simplest possible device that can capture the essential property of a neuron — that is, the ability to generate a spike or impulse of activity when some threshold is exceeded. A neuristor can be thought of as a slightly leaky balloon that receives inputs in the form of puffs of air. When its limit is reached, it pops. The only major difference is that more complex neuristors can repeat the process again and again, as long as spikes occur no faster than a certain recharge period known as the refractory period. A neuristor uses a relatively simple electronic circuit to generate spikes. Incoming signals charge a capacitor that is placed in parallel with a device called a memristor. The memristor behaves like a resistor except that once the small currents passing through it start to heat it up, its resistance rapidly drops off. When that happens, the charge built up on the capacitor by incoming spikes discharges, and there you have it — a spiking neuron comprised of just two elementary circuit elements.
Robots will do a large part of farming by the middle of the century with 'driverless' tractors in UK by 2014, according to agriculture experts.
LAS VEGAS--People are getting very used to having robots like Roomba running around their floors. They're very popular as animal and baby vehicles too.
Chinese vacuum-maker Ecovacs, though, wants more functionality in domestic bots. At CES 2013, it demonstrated its Famibot and Minibot, which can perform a host of handy functions while you're busy being lazy.
Shown off at IFA 2012, Famibot is a service droid that can be controlled via your smartphone or any Wi-Fi connection.
Its primary function is to roam around your floors and purify the air. When it senses a particularly dirty zone, such as cigarette smoke, it will focus on that area.
Ecovacs staff put it through its paces, though interference from the Las Vegas Convention Center venue messed up wireless commands and it was slow to respond.
Equipped with cameras, Famibot can act as a telepresence robot when you're away, giving you video of what's going on at home, or letting you chat with an elderly relative living alone, for example.
It can also play music, and give you remote control of connected household appliances like your air conditioner or lights.
Famibot will also send you alerts if it detects an unexpected person in the home, or if it picks up smoke from a possible fire.
Minibot, meanwhile, is Famibot's smaller companion. It has many of the latter's features but not the air purifying.
Ecovacs says the two droids should hit U.S. markets in the first half of 2013, with Famibot having a suggested retail price of $899, and Minibot priced at $499.
Not bad for some very handy tin cans.
The hated cockroach has been the scourge of restaurants and big cities throughout history. But now a clever roboticist may have finally found a use for the pests by developing a way to mimic their legendary crawling speed.
Berkeley Ph.D. student Duncan Haldane wanted to explore the benefits of creating bio-inspired mechanisms to increase the terrestrial locomotion of robots. His research resulted in the creation of the VELOCIRoACH, a tiny robot that, according to Haldane, is the fastest running robot to date, relative to size. Weighing just 30 grams, the 10-centimeter-long hexapedal millirobot can travel as fast as 26 body lengths per second.
LAS VEGAS--How would you feel if you were hospitalized and your doctor were talking to you through a 5-foot robot?
RP-VITA (Remote Presence Virtual + Independent Telemedicine Assistant) is a remote-, iPad-operated telepresence bot. It's become the first self-navigating communications robot to receive FDA certification, developers InTouch and iRobot said at CES 2013.
The machine is approved "for telemedicine consults inclusive of active patient monitoring in high-acuity environments where immediate clinical action may be required," InTouch said in a release. Specifically, it's cleared for "active patient monitoring in pre-operative, peri-operative and post-surgical settings, including cardiovascular, neurological, prenatal, psychological, and critical care assessments and examinations."
Based on iRobot's AVA telepresence platform, RP-VITA was unveiled last year. It's been put through trials at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian, Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, and Children's Hospital of Orange County, and leasing will begin this year at about $6,000 a month.
