Robot

Conrad is stocking the Calliope Joy-Car educational robot from Joy-iT. “It features a horn, indicator lights, headlights, reversing and brake lights as well as line tracking, ultrasound, infrared and wheel speed sensors,” said Conrad. “Depending on your programming skills, these modules can be operated by a variety of both entry and advanced programming languages, simulating the behaviour of an autonomously ...

The facetious way to stop AI and robots taking over the world would simply be to unplug them. But what if a robot could move around to self-charge? Enter a modified self-docking Arduino Alvik robot!

University of California San Diego and French lab CEA-Leti have got together to create a novel high-voltage drive for electrostatic and piezoelectric actuators in mini-drones, describing the technique at ISSCC in San Francisco this week. The aim is to deliver tens of miliwatts at tens of volts and ten of hertz into a highly capacitive load, all from a 3 ...

Maxon has launched a range of back-drivable electromechanical joints for humanoid, quadruped and other mobile autonomous robots. The larger HEJ 90 (pictured) is aimed at locomotion, and generates up to 140Nm of torque, customisable up to 180Nm. Maximum joint velocity is 13rad/s. Mechanically, it is 110mm in diameter, 90mm long and weighs 1.96kg. Operation is from 30 to 60V. HEJ ...

Electro-hydraulic muscles are sometimes a viable alternative to electric motors in robot legs, according to researchers at Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems. This sort of electricity-to-movement transducer uses a liquid-filled bag with electrodes on opposite faces. A high potential difference across the electrodes pulls them together, squashing the liquid out of the way – and that action can ...

Artemy is a fully-automated tomato harvesting robot, according to its maker Certhon Build. “It uses AI to determine the ripeness of cherry truss tomatoes,” said the company. “Only ripe tomatoes are selected, and cherry truss tomato peduncles are cut using scissors attached to the top of the harvesting robot arm and stored in the loaded crates.” Harvesting continues under direct ...

Seeking more ways to move a robot through complex environments, researchers at Princeton University and North Carolina State University have turned to origami animated by thermally-activated bi-material strips. The body of the snake-like structure is folded from flat sheet using a Kresling pattern, named after Biruta Kresling, an architect that created a number of such folded structures during bio-inspired research ...

Northwestern University engineers have developed an artificial intelligence algorithm for smart robots that gather their own raw data. Dubbed ‘MaxDiff RL’ (maximum diffusion reinforcement learning), “the algorithm’s success lies in its ability to encourage robots to explore their environments as randomly as possible in order to gain a diverse set of experiences”, according to the university. “The algorithm works so ...

Researchers in Italy have made a robot that grows like a plant. Named FiloBot, it is the work of the Bioinspired Soft Robotics Laboratory at the Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genova. FiloBot it builds its own stem-like body, up to several metres long, curving it permanently in response to light, dark or gravity, and it can also vary ...

Korean engineers and scientists have developed a soft gripper that can be used to lift 100kg, while weighing only 130g. The device is inspired by weaving and can be made at different sizes, always maintaining large ratio between gripping capacity and its own mass. “Utilising soft, flexible materials such as cloth, paper and silicone, soft robotic grippers acts like a ...