Axis Ai

The technique opens a door to manufacturing of pressure-monitoring bandages, shade-shifting fabrics, or touch-sensing robots. Imagine stretching a piece of film to reveal a hidden message. Or checking an arm band’s color to gauge muscle mass. Or sporting a swimsuit that changes hue as you do laps. Such chameleon-like, color-shifting materials could be on the horizon, thanks to a photographic technique that’s been resurrected and repurposed by MIT engineers. By applying a 19th-century color photography technique to modern holographic materials, an MIT team has printed large-scale images onto elastic materials that when stretched can transform their color, reflecting different wavelengths as the material is strained. The researchers produced stretchy films printed with detailed flower bouquets that morph from warm to cooler shades when the films are stretched. They also printed films that reveal the imprint of objects such as a strawberry, a coin, and a fingerprint. The team’s results pr...

A US-based YouTuber and engineer Allen Pan created a robot system that helps snakes to walk, says wanted to “give snakes back their legs”. Here’s the story. Snakes are one of the scariest reptiles you will find around the world. People fear almost everything about them - their hiss, their crawl, their long body. Everything about them makes us vexed. Now imagine this long reptile has four legs too? An engineer Allen pan created a wacky robot that allows snakes to walk. Although the idea of snakes getting legs is weirdly odd and scary, the snake driving in a four-legged robot is a whole level of bizarreness. He created the robot using a long tube and four plastic legs connected to a controlboard. A snake can be seen riding the four-legged robot while chilling in the transparent tube. Notably, Pan took the idea for the invention from the western three-toed skink (Chalcids striatus), a species of lizard with four tiny legs. That’s when he decided to end the ‘FOMO’ of snakes having legs. “T...

A museum in China has taken a page out of science fiction and is creating lifelike robots with veins in their legs and goosebumps on their skin.  The EX Future and Science Museum in the Chinese city of Dalian shows off advanced forms of robotic technology aimed at making robots as customizable and lifelike as possible.  The technicians at the museum can scan features and limbs to create dynamic 3D robots. A journalist has her facial features scanned to "customize an android of her own." Parts of her body are then 3D printed. The video shows her controlling the movements of a 3D printed robotic limb via a wearable glove.  The skin is made of medical-grade bionic silicone, and the goosebumps on the skin, the veins on the feet, and the palm lines — they're all very realistic. The museum's robots have also ventured outside of its compound. One of the museum's robots wears a face shield and guides people to COVID-19 test sites in Dalian.  The museum, which opened in Se...