I have said it once, and I’ll say it again. 3D printing and robots will continue their inevitable convergence, leading to completely custom robots which can perform virtually any human-like task, and feature an appearance tailored to our individual preferences. We aren’t all the way there yet, but with 3D printing, we are getting ever so close.
One company, called RoboSavvy, is probably as close as any other company out there though, with their latest creation of a 3D printed humanoid robot. This robot is unlike any other robot you have seen before, and it is built mostly of 3D printed parts.
“The hands, fingers, forearms, head, chest shell, and several internal supports as well as the custom handle on the Segway are 3D printed,” Samantha Mehditash of RoboSavvy tells 3DPrint.com. “[The parts were printed on a] Makerbot Replicator 2X 3D Printer and our custom made large size 3D printer.”
A snowstorm can’t stop it. A blazing fire can’t stop it. And even getting run over by a car is no problem for this squishy little bot.
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Researchers from Harvard University have developed a soft robot that not only can stand up and walk on its own, but also withstand tough elements all while carrying the equipment it needs on its back — from its microcompressors to control systems to batteries. Just check it out in the video above, which was recently posted to the university’s YouTube account.
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Even a New England winter storm can’t stop this soft robot, which was recently developed by Harvard researchers.
Robotic telepresence remains one of those technologies that is always lingering just on the horizon; it’s going to change everything, the futurists say, just as soon as it gets here. But while several clever telerobotics solutions have come to market in recent years (Vgo and Double Robotics for instance), no solution has yet been both sophisticated and user-friendly enough for the mainstream. These robots — designed to give a remote human operator control of a mobile surrogate robot so that, for instance, a company manager in Chicago can virtually tour a factory floor in Topeka — allow users to move around an environment and interact with people and objects on the other side of the city, country, or planet. But for the most part, telerobots remain high-priced toys.
Imagine being able to control a flying robot with your mind.
Sounds like a flight of fancy, but researchers at the University of Minnesota have fashioned an electrode-studded cap that records brain waves and uses them to control a “quadcopter” via wi-fi. Results of the copter’s test flights were published in the June issue of the Journal of Neural Engineering.
How does it work? “It’s completely noninvasive. Nobody has to have a chip implanted in their brain to pick up the neuronal activity,” biomedical engineering student and one of the paper’s authors, Karl LaFleur, said in a written statement.
Thinking about moving a body part makes cells in an area of the brain called the motor cortex produce tiny electrical currents. The cap sends this information to a computer, which translates it into directions for the copter.
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A robot as small as a housefly has managed the delicate task of flying and hovering the way the actual insects do.
“This is a major engineering breakthrough, 15 years in the making,” says electrical engineer Ronald Fearing, who works on robotic flies at the University of California, Berkeley. The device uses layers of ultrathin materials that can make its wings flap 120 times a second, which is on a par with a housefly’s flapping rate. This “required tremendous innovation in design and fabrication techniques”, he adds.
The robot’s wings are composed of thin polyester films reinforced with carbon fibre ribs and its ‘muscles’ are made from piezoelectric crystals, which shrink or stretch depending on the voltage applied to them.
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If a squat, cardboard-framed robot with a high-pitched voice started asking you questions, would you answer it? Would you share your troubles? Unload your concerns?
Many people would — at least, that’s what roboticist and artist Alex Reben has found. He unleashed the smiling bot Boxie in the halls of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to see what people would share with a robot. His work and other research suggest we’re not so averse to bearing our souls to the bots. In some cases, we’ll even tell them things we wouldn’t admit to each other.
In fact, Reben suggests robots and dogs aren’t so different.
“Dogs are basically a human invention. They’re a technology,” Reben told HuffPost Live. “We’ve bred them to be companions over millennia, just like we’re designing robots, we’ve designed dogs to be companions.”
If you’re planning a big party in the near future — a wedding reception, perhaps, or a Bar Mitzvah, or an inauguration gala — you’re probably spending a lot of money on staff to make sure everything runs smoothly. Between catering, waiters, and decoration, you’ve got a lot of dough riding on a lot of different people.
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Engineers have created a robot that mimics a worm’s movements – crawling along surfaces by contracting segments of its body. The technique allows the machine to be made of soft materials so it can squeeze through tight spaces and mould its shape to rough terrain.
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RoboSavvy’s Robot
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