DARPA does not just do research on creepy robots, they are also very much into bionic limbs. And their RE-NET program has two new projects which are dealing with the link between amputees and their prosthetics.

The aim of the program is to perfect the technology which connects nerves and muscles with artificial limbs. This will allow users to move their prosthetic as they would move their real arm or leg and also feel with it.

The Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago is working on improving the connection between muscles and an artificial arm. The first video below shows what they have achieved so far. It shows a former army officer, who was injured in Iraq, using his muscles to move his prosthetic.

The second video shows the studies done by the Case Western Reserve University to improve the sense of touch available via an artificial arm.

Although both the projects are far from being finished, the progress they have made is certainly impressive.

[Source]

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Ethics to be debated or not, robots are certainly becoming more popular these days. While some are busy arguing that we should all start asking questions as early as possible, before Skynet happens, many have already made plans with robots in the center. Say hello to “Mantis” and “Shrimp”, Australia’s agricultural robots.

Developed by Salah Sukkarieh, Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at the University of Sydney, these robots can sense color and therefore can tell if a fruit is ripe or not. And that’s why they are named after the Mantis shrimp which has 16 different color receptors for detecting up to 12 colors.

And not just colors. According to Sukkarieh, “We have fitted them with a lot of sensors, vision, laser, radar and conductivity sensors – including GPS and thermal sensors“. The robots are currently being tested at the moment and it is hoped that after more development the machines will be able to perform more complex tasks such as watering or applying fertilizer depending on the data collected and ultimately harvesting. Also under development are unmanned aircrafts, seen below.

So why there is a need to use robots, you ask? Australia has a limited workforce and a minimum wage of A$15.96 per hour. Using robots could help them to improve efficiency. Australia is currently one of the leaders in the agricultural field (the sector now accounts for 2 percent of the country’s GDP) and they are hoping to become the top suppliers to Asia in the coming years. And farming is very important to them as their once-booming mining sector has slowed down.

What do you think of this new development, bring on more robots or do you feel we should tread carefully with our robotic future?

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There are a variety of causes for the occurrence of blindness, such as the lack of enough blood supply for the retina. If it doesn’t get proper amounts of oxygen, the result will be permanent blindness. The chances of preventing it depend on when the doctors realize if a patient’s retina is not receiving sufficient oxygen; the sooner the better. Prof. Bradley Nelson and his team of researchers at ETH Zurich seem to have found out a solution.

Earlier the team created microrobots, measuring a millimeter in length and one third of a millimeter in width, which could be used to deliver medication or remove scar tissue in the eye. Magnetic fields can be used to guide these tiny robots through the vitreous fluid.

They coated these microrobots with nanospheres made of a dye, which fluoresces when exposed to a specific wavelength of light. This fluorescence fades faster if there is higher amount of oxygen surrounding the dye. Now the team can inject these oxygen sensing dye-coated robots into the vitreous fluid to move them to the surface of the retina. They would then apply light to observe the dye’s fluorescence, and thereby determine the amount of oxygen around the area. The robots can be removed from the eye later on by magnetically attaching them to an inserted needle.

According to ETH, other methods now available for determining the oxygen levels within the eye are not sensitive enough. The method using microrobots have already been tested in water samples with different O2 levels and were found to be a success.

[Source]

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When conditions become too dangerous for humans, we turn to robots. For example, robots have been used as bomb “defusers” and recon drones for years. As for radiation, robots can come in handy there, as well. Unfortunately, last year when Japan ran into a nuclear disaster at Fukushima they weren’t probably prepared for the incident and had to turn to the U.S. for nuclear disaster-ready robots. It seems that Japan is working directly with Toshiba to ensure they aren’t caught with their guard down ever again.

On Wednesday, Toshiba showed off a robot that would be able to withstand conditions similar to that of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant disaster. The robot has 4 legs for climbing up and down stairs (at about a step per minute) and over debris.

While it is a good step in the right direction, Toshiba’s robotic design isn’t without its faults. The machine’s awkward design proved detrimental in a demo with the press. More specifically, one of its legs froze and multiple people had to help it up and reboot. Additionally, Toshiba added that if the robot fell during a mission, it would not be able to get up by itself.

Despite its shortcomings, Toshiba’s four-legged robot is expected to make a debut at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant soon.

The post Toshiba Makes Robot to Aid in Nuclear Emergencies appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

This is just the initial deployment of Foxconn’s human-replacing robot army and they plan on having a much larger deployment in the coming years. In fact, Foxconn is planning to have 20,000 more of these “Foxbots” in their factories by the end of the year, leading up to a robot apocalypse-sized squadron of one million iPhone-creating bots within the next three years.

To be fair, these Foxbots can’t replace all of the human employees; they’re only good for repetitive tasks like “lifting, selecting and placement,” since the mechanical arms can’t really handle the incredibly intricate assembly of something like an iPhone. It’s only a matter of time, but it looks like many Foxconn employees could be out of the job. It’s like the industrial revolution all over again, except it’s not Detroit; it’s Shenzhen.

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UAV’s are one of those areas of technology that really opens a lot of doors for creativity, and for designers and manufacturers, there’s no better inspiration than the natural world around us. A team from Georgia Tech has been hard at work on mimicking the natural flying capabilities of a dragonfly, and with their new palm-sized TechJet Dragonfly, their work may have paid off.

The UAV uses a combination of quadrocopter, helicopter and fixed wing aircraft technology to help the device fly and hover just like a real life dragonfly would. It wasn’t cheap though, and along with their four years of hard work and research, it also cost the Georgia Tech team and the U.S Air Force a combined funding of $1 million.

The result is a UAV that has managed to mimic a Dragonfly in more than one aspect, and with a length of 6 inches, and a weight of just 25g, the 250 mAh lithium polymer powered TechJet Dragonfly is also very similar to its natural counterpart in shape and size, as well as its flying capabilities.

The TechJet development team hope to reach out to all sorts of consumers such as aerial photographers, gamers, military personal and many other occupations and it’s twenty on-board sensors help to support these needs. The TechJet also comes in four varying models and is currently on a crowd-funding page on Indiegogo. The TechJet team hopes to secure enough funding to now manufacture the devices so that their $1 million funded research can go straight to consumers instead of beind-the-scene military and security occupants.

The four models offer different uses and come with different computing and flying capabilities, with the first being $250, and the most expensive being planned for a $1,499 retail price, there’s a huge range of consumer functionality.

These prices may seem a little high for an average consumer, however with just a pledge of $99, funders can get their hands on the $250 model, and a pledge of $399 will grant funders the $1,499 model.

[Source]

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There’s only one thing more worrying than a robot wielding a knife, and that is a robot wielding a knife that it knows how to use it. However in this instance, CIROS, a unit suitably fit for the kitchen, robot knife skills may be more helpful than we may have thought before.

The Korean Institute of Science and Technology have designed CIROS to help around the house and handle everyday tasks such as making a salad, creating a cup of tea or scrubbing the dishes.

By using complicated algorithms to identify objects it may come across in its environment, the Korean institute hope that CIROS will be fully capable of making himself useful around the house as his own free will.

At its current state, CIROS seems awfully slow, and you may be better off cutting your cucumber and lettuce yourself, even if you’re feeling extra lazy that day. However, CIROS is definitely an interesting step in robotic technology, I’m just not sure if giving a robot a knife will ever be a smart thing to do.

Watch CIROS in action below:

[Slate via IEEE Spectrum]

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Researchers at Harvard are working hard to advance one step closer towards finishing a development project involving a micro air vehicle named the Robobee. The robot, that is smaller than a coin, was already able to lift off using its own power source, but now it has added functionalities to help control its flight.

The researchers have added two control mechanisms beneath its wings, allowing programmers to make the Robobee pitch and roll.

Still, with the improved mechanics, the Robobee is incapable of proper flight, and is currently crashing with each attempt. The developers of the project are now working on a third controller, a yaw actuator that along with the pitch and roll controls will allow the robot to hover, and successfully fly.

It seems Harvard aren’t the only ones looking further into micro-robotic flight, as information from the combined Green Brain project emerges from Universities of Sussex and Sheffield in the United Kingdom. The Green Brain project was founded to build a working replica of a bee’s brain by mimicking the complicated neural sensors and connections that are processed by bees whilst working.

“Because the honey bee brain is smaller and more accessible than any vertebrate brain, we hope to eventually be able to produce an accurate and complete model that we can test within a flying robot,” states Dr James Marshall, part of the Green Brain project, and a computer scientist at the University of Sheffield.

However, even with the two projects underway, it’d be unlikely we would see the projects working together for a long time, as there is still a lot of work to be done from both sides.

If both projects were to be successful, the robots could be applied in many circumstances in the future such as building robotic honey farms by programming the Robobees to perform pollination.

[Source]

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What could possibly be cooler than a robot? How about a robot that dances to all your favorite songs? Well, those at CEATEC 2012 may have been lucky enough to have spotted an appearance by none other than mRobo, the self-transforming beatbox/dancer, capable of grooving to your tunes from your iPod or MP3 player.

The robot, which is mainly white in color, starts off looking like an average inanimate speaker until it catches you off guard and begins transforming into a fully-fledged humanoid. The Michael Jackson wannabe then starts grooving its body parts to the music as it plays sound through its rumbling stomach.

It’s far short of the skills of a professional dancer, but it is quite amusing to watch. The robot itself doesn’t have any price tag, but is around the same size of a Robosapien, and if released to the public it would hopefully cost something similar to the original Robosapien when it first released, and hopefully do something purposeful too.

Please don’t get too attached to this robot though; mRobo looks like he could be the first prototype for a line of real-life Transformers, preparing to enslave the Earth population.  While us humans are looking at him and laughing at his dancing, he’s probably scanning everyones face for when he returns.

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A group of Swiss researchers have created a new video putting their high-tech quadrocopter’s flying efficiency to the test. The three flying robots fly back and forth in recognition with each other, whilst each being attached to a three sided net. The intuitive copters can catch incoming balls by flying in formation to move the net accordingly. Once the ball is in the net, they are then also able to launch it upwards by quickly stretching out the net.

“To toss the ball, the quadrocopters accelerate rapidly outward to stretch the net tight between them and launch the ball up. Notice in the video that the quadrocopters are then pulled forcefully inward by the tension in the elastic net, and must rapidly stabilize in order to avoid a collision. Once recovered, the quadrotors cooperatively position the net below the ball in order to catch it,” Explains Robin Ritz, the top contributor to the project, and Lead Researcher at ETH Zurich’s Flying Machine Arena.

“Because they are coupled to each other by the net, the quadrocopters experience complex forces that push the vehicles to the limits of their dynamic capabilities. To exploit the full potential of the vehicles under these circumstances requires several novel algorithms.”

“Algorithms include an optimally-based real-time trajectory generation algorithm for the catching maneuver, a time varying control strategy to manage the forces on the individual vehicles that are induced by the net and learning algorithms that compensate for model inaccuracies when aiming the ball.”

By the sounds of things, it must’ve taken a lot of time and skill to create a trio of robots that can work closely with one-another to accomplish a task without being a hindrance to eachother copter’s performance. The robots show an impressive trait, but their ability to catch the ball still needs to be improved a long way before it could be compared to the likes of a team of professional Baseball catchers.

However, video footage of the quadrocopters below shows great potential for robotic interventions for day-to-day life, and with smart mechanics, and well-thought out algorithms like those in the quadrocopters, I would imagine it wouldn’t be long before robots like this are catching stuff in mid air or completing more difficult tasks.

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