Posts

Showing posts from October, 2022

Meet Loona - The most Intelligent Petbot

Image
Loona, a heartwarming robotic pet developed by KEYi Technology. Through advanced technology, animation design, emotional interaction model, and artificial intelligence, Loona functions with realistic pet behaviors and motion performances.  Loona includes a range of entertaining games and additional features, along with a cute approachable design for children. Furthermore, with its 3D ToF (time-of-flight) camera, Loona can roam freely using four-wheel and two-wheel motions through its proprietary self-balancing design.  Additionally, Loona features a high-performance CPU processor, allowing the chip to perform 54 trillion neural network convolution calculations per second, equating to one-quarter of PC's calculation capability, which is rarely seen in consumer robotics. Loona is one of very few consumer robotic pets on the market offering a wide range of capabilities, functionalities, and companionship, allowing consumers to playfully interact, learn, and communicate through mo...

MX-Phoenix | The tarantula-inspired robot was built by one man in his garage

Image
Norwegian engineer Kåre Halvorsen has created the MX-Phoenix, a 3D printed spider inspired hexapod robot that uses 18 different motors to crawl over uneven ground. Zenta has designed a number of hexapods and other varieties of robots over the years, including his award-winning MorpHex robots. He states his goals for this particular project: “A more dynamic gait engine and terrain adaptation. I also want a hexapod robot with a relative small body and large leg section, I’m also trying to keep the total weight as low as possible.” The robot’s tibia and body components were designed using Fusion 360 and printed on a Wanhao Duplicator i3. He then strengthened the printed ABS parts using an acetone vapor treatment. Weighing 4.76 kg (10.5 lb), the Mx-Phoenix utilizes a total of 18 Dynamixel servos from Robotis. The C++ code, which contains Zenta’s custom gait-algorithm for hexapod robots (called DynaZgait), is being run on a Teensy 3.6 MCU. The idea to design a hexapod walking robot was deve...

Scientists Create a Wearable Sensor for Plant Leaves to Detect Water Loss Early

Image
Plants can't speak up when they are thirsty. And visual signs, such as shriveling or browning leaves, don't start until it's too late. Metal electrodes have previously been used to monitor thirsty plants, but it's difficult attaching these devices to hairy leaves, which reduces their accuracy. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have created a wearable sensor for leaves that stays put, and makes it easy to remotely manage plants' water stress. Wearable devices for people are so sophisticated that some smart watches monitor the electrical activity of the wearer's heart, using electrodes that sit against the skin, and send the data to websites, which allow physicians to monitor and assess their patients from a distance. Similarly, plant-wearable devices could help farmers and gardeners remotely monitor plant health, including leaf water content – a key marker of metabolism and drought stress. Renato Lima and colleagues wanted to id...

China's $1 trillion 'artificial sun' fusion reactor

Image
Th e EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak) nuclear fusion reactor maintained a temperature of 158 million degrees Fahrenheit (70 million degrees Celsius) for 1,056 seconds, according to the Xinhua News Agency. The achievement brings scientists a small yet significant step closer to the creation of a source of near-unlimited clean energy .     The Chinese experimental nuclear fusion reactor smashed the previous record, set by France's Tore Supra tokamak in 2003, where plasma in a coiling loop remained at similar temperatures for 390 seconds. EAST had previously set another record in May 2021 by running for 101 seconds at an unprecedented 216 million F (120 million C). The core of the actual sun, by contrast, reaches temperatures of around 27 million F (15 million C). Scientists have been trying to harness the power of nuclear fusion — the process by which stars burn — for more than 70 years. By fusing hydrogen atoms to make helium under extremely high pressures ...

FIBERBOTS | The World's First Self Growing Robots

Image
FIBERBOTS are a swarm of robots designed to wind fiberglass filament around themselves to create high-strength tubular structures. These structures can be built in parallel and interwoven to rapidly create architectural structures.  The robots are mobile, using sensor feedback to control the length and curvature of each individual tube according to paths determined by a custom, environmentally informed, flocking-based design protocol.  This gives designers the ability to control high-level design parameters that govern the shape of the resulting structure without needing to tediously provide commands for each robot by hand. The 16 robots, including the design system to control them, were developed in-house and deployed to autonomously create a 4.5m-tall structure. The structure remained outside and undamaged through Massachusetts’ winter months, demonstrating the potential of this enabling technology towards future collaborative robotic systems to create once infeasible design...

Meet Optimus | Tesla's Most Advanced Humanoid Robot

Image
Optimus, also known as Tesla Bot, is a conceptual general-purpose robotic humanoid under development by Tesla. It contains a 2.3kWh battery pack, runs on a Tesla SoC, and has Wi-Fi and LTE connectivity. Demonstrations focused on addressing the robot's joints, like its hands, wrists, or knees, showed how they processed data for each joint, then looked for the common areas in each design to find a method using only six different actuators.  The human-like hands are a "Biologically Inspired Design" that engineers say will make them more suitable for picking up objects of various shapes and sizes, holding a 20-point bag, and having a "precision grip" on small parts. Tesla's Autopilot software was moved from its cars to the bot and retooled to work in the new body and environment. Tesla motion captured people doing real-world tasks like lifting a box and then using inverse kinematics, repeats the movements using Optimus. Then "online motion adaptation" ...