There are a number of ways to give a robotic actuator a sense of touch, but the AnySkin project aims to make it an overall more reliable and practical process. The idea is twofold: create modular grippy “skins” that can be slipped onto actuators, and separate the sensing electronics from the skins themselves. The whole […]
For as long as there have been machines, there have been fears of machines taking your job. One of the latest incarnations of this phenomenon is the fast-food ordering kiosk. No longer will you have some teenager asking you if you want fries with that. These days, you are more likely going to find the […]
A little under 25 years ago, a particularly bizarre game was released for Sega’s Dreamcast. In actually, calling it a “game” might be something of a stretch. It was more of a pet simulator, where you need to feed and care for a virtual animal as it grows. Except rather than something like a dog […]
When you think of tracked robots, you might think of bomb disposal robots or others used in military applications. You probably haven’t seen anything quite like this, however—it’s a “reconfigurable continuous track robot” from researchers [Tal Kislasi] and [David Zarrouk (via IEEE Spectrum). Neat party trick! The robot looks simple, like some kind of tracked […]
Here’s the thing about robots. It’s hard for them to figure out where to go or what they should be doing if they don’t know where they are. Giving them some method of localization is key to their usefulness in almost any task you can imagine. To that end, [Guy Elmakis], [Matan Coronel] and [David […]
When we think of assistive prostheses or braces, we often think of hard and rigid contraptions. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that prosthetic limbs were still being made out of wood. Even devices made of more modern materials tend to have a robotic quality that inevitably limits their dexterity. However, advancements in soft […]
A team at Google has spent a lot of time recently playing table tennis, purportedly only for science. Their goal was to see whether they could construct a robot which would not only play table tennis, but even keep up with practiced human players. In the paper available on ArXiv, they detail what it took […]
If you make anything that moves, like a robot, you quickly realize that turning can be a pain. That’s why there are a number of designs for wheels that can go in different directions. One of the most common is the mechanum wheel. [Jeremy] explains how they work by filming them from below on a […]
Unfortunately, [Dave Niewinski]’s kids are still too little to go on a real roller coaster. But they’re certainly big enough to be tossed around by this giant robot arm roller coaster simulator. As to the question of why [Dave] has a Kuka KR 150 robot in his house, we prefer to leave that unasked and […]
Even if you don’t like to build replicas of movie robots, you can often draw inspiration from cinema. Everyone knows Robby the Robot, Gort, and R2D2. But [Atomic Snack Bar] treats us to some lesser-known robots from movies in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. While we are pretty up on movies, we have to admit […]