Infi-Zeal's Blog

We have seen the development of a number of technologies that could be used to provide robots with a sense of touch, such as proximity and temperature sensing  hexagonal plates  and  artificial skin  constructed from semiconductor nanowires. However, perhaps none are as impressive as a tactile sensor developed by researchers at the University of California’s Viterbi School of Engineering. The group’s BioTac sensor was built to mimic a human fingertip and can outperform humans in identifying a wide range of materials, offering potential use for the technology in robotics and prostheses. The finger-sized BioTac sensor consists of a soft, flexible skin covering a liquid filling. The skin even has fingerprints that enhance the sensor’s sensitivity to vibration, so that as the sensor slides over a textured surface, it vibrates in characteristic ways. A microphone designed to be used underwater – known as a hydrophone – located within the sensor’s bone-like core detec...

Cockroaches are way faster than you and me. Relative to their body weight, they can flee at the equivalent of hundreds of miles per hour and are gone long before your newspaper hits the floor. But researchers from the University of California at Berkeley recently described how cockroaches can also run toward a ledge and then flip around to its underside in the blink of an eye, effectively disappearing from predators. Now they're working on robots that can do the same. Geckos can also perform this escape act, which involves using the hind legs as anchors on the ledge while the body swings under it. "Both species ran rapidly at 12-15 body lengths-per-second toward the ledge without braking, dove off the ledge, attached their feet by claws like a grappling hook, and used a pendulum-like motion that can exceed one meter-per-second to swing around to an inverted position under the ledge, out of sight," Jean-Michel Mongeau of UC Berkeley's biophysics group and coll...

When most of us think of electronics, we think of the sturdy stability of silicon and plastic. Flexibility is a trait that belongs to the organic world, where materials come in all shapes and stiffness. However, advances in materials science and electrical engineering have paved the way for a new type of electronic device: one that can bend and fold just like a piece of paper. From flexible displays to disposable  RFID tags , these new materials have enabled electronics to end up in places they never have before. They could even, thanks to Berkeley electrical engineering and computer science professor Ana Claudia Arias, end up in our own clothing. Professor Arias is a recent addition to the Berkeley engineering community, having begun her career in materials science at the company  Plastic Logic , developing materials called organic printed electronics. Just as one might print ink onto paper using a desktop printer, these electronics can be printed onto various flexible...

New intelligent algorithms could help robots to quickly recognize and respond to human gestures. Researchers at A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research in Singapore have created a computer program which recognizes human gestures quickly and accurately, and requires very little training. Many works of science fiction have imagined robots that could interact directly with people to provide entertainment, services or even health care. Robotics is now at a stage where some of these ideas can be realized, but it remains difficult to make robots easy to operate. One option is to train robots to recognize and respond to human gestures. In practice, however, this is difficult because a simple gesture such as waving a hand may appear very different between different people. Designers must develop intelligent computer algorithms that can be 'trained' to identify general patterns of motion and relate them correctly to individual commands. Now, Rui Yan and co-workers at the A*STAR ...

A new study in Nature  reports that two people with tetraplegia were able to reach for and grasp objects in three-dimensional space using robotic arms that they controlled directly with brain activity. They used the BrainGate neural interface system, an investigational device currently being studied under an Investigational Device Exemption. One participant used the system to serve herself coffee for the first time since becoming paralyzed nearly 15 years ago. On April 12, 2011, nearly 15 years after she became paralyzed and unable to speak, a woman controlled a robotic arm by thinking about moving her arm and hand to lift a bottle of coffee to her mouth and take a drink. That achievement is one of the advances in brain-computer interfaces, restorative neurotechnology, and assistive robot technology described in the May 17 edition of the journal  Nature  by the BrainGate2 collaboration of researchers at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Brown University, Mas...

It may be difficult to imagine, but pouring juice into a plastic cup can be a great challenge to a robot. While one hand holds the glass bottle firmly, the other one must gently grasp the cup. Researchers at Saarland University together with associates in Bologna and Naples have developed a robotic hand that can accomplish both tasks with ease and yet including the actuators is scarcely larger than a human arm. This was made possible by a novel string actuator, making use of small electric motors to twist strings. The robotic hand is thus powerful yet delicate and could one day be deployed as a helper around the house or in catastrophic scenarios."We wanted to impart our robotic hand with a broad spectrum of human traits. Its artificial muscles should be able to deliver enormous forces by simple and compact means," explains Chris May, scientist at Saarland University's Laboratory of Actuation Technology. The robotic hand was recently presented during a meeting at the Fors...

  Researchers at IBM have stored and retrieved digital 1s and 0s from an array of just 12 atoms, pushing the boundaries of the magnetic storage of information to the edge of what is possible. The findings, being reported Thursday in the journal Science, could help lead to a new class of nanomaterials for a generation of memory chips and disk drives that will not only have greater capabilities than the current silicon-based computers but will also consume significantly less power. And it may offer a new direction for research in quantum computing. "Magnetic materials are extremely useful and strategically important to many major economies, but there aren't that many of them," said Shan X Wang, director of the Center for Magnetic Nanotechnology at Stanford University . "To make a brand new material is very intriguing and scientifically very important." Until now, the most advanced magnetic storage systems have needed about 1 million atoms to ...

The prospect of electronics at the nanoscale may be even more promising with the first observation of metallic conductance in ferroelectric nanodomains by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Ferroelectric materials, which switch their polarization with the application of an electric field, have long been used in devices such as ultrasound machines and sensors. Now, discoveries about ferroelectrics' electronic properties are opening up possibilities of applications in nanoscale electronics and information storage. In a paper published in the American Chemical Society's Nano Letters, the ORNL-led team demonstrated metallic conductivity in a ferroelectric film that otherwise acts as an insulator. This phenomenon of an insulator-metal transition was predicted more than 40 years ago by theorists but has eluded experimental proof until now. "This finding unambiguously identifies a new conduction channel that percolates through the insulating matrix of the ...

Robots will be standing by to help paralyzed patients and the elderly walk. Toyota unveiled four such robots in Tokyo. The robots, designed to provide support in nursing and health care, are expected to be available for sale in 2013. They include sensors that detect the user's posture, grasp and holding strength, and high-precision motor control technology to facilitate the patient's desired motion. The first of the robots – the Independent Walk Assist – is a computerized leg brace that is mounted onto a paralyzed leg and helps the knee bend as the person walks. It can support the patient’s weight, and it adjusts as the patient develops more strength. The second robot uses similar technology but focuses on retraining those who are walking-impaired. The Walk Training Assist robot detects movements in the hips through sensors located at the foot and thigh of the computerized brace and supports the return to natural walking. The Balance Training Assist ...

Computer scientists and engineers at Harvard University have developed and licensed technology that will make it easy to test collective algorithms on hundreds, or even thousands, of tiny robots. Called Kilobots, the quarter-sized bug-like devices scuttle around on three toothpick-like legs, interacting and coordinating their own behavior as a team. A June 2011 Harvard Technical Report demonstrated a collective of 25 machines implementing swarming behaviors such as foraging, formation control, and synchronization. Once up and running, the machines are fully autonomous, meaning there is no need for a human to control their actions. The communicative critters were created by members of the Self-Organizing Systems Research Group led by Radhika Nagpal, the Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and a Core Faculty Member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. Her team als...

When engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, outfitted a six-legged robotic bug with wings in an effort to improve its mobility, they unexpectedly shed some light on the evolution of flight. Even though the wings significantly improved the running performance of the 10-centimeter-long robot -- called DASH, short for Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod -- they found that the extra boost would not have generated enough speed to launch the critter from the ground. The wing flapping also enhanced the aerial performance of the robot, consistent with the hypothesis that flight originated in gliding tree-dwellers. The research team, led by Ron Fearing, professor of electrical engineering and head of the Biomimetic Millisystems Lab at UC Berkeley, reports its conclusions online on Oct. 18, in the peer-reviewed journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics . Using robot models could play a useful role in studying the origins of flight, particularly since fossil evidence is so ...

There has been enormous progress in recent years toward the development of photonic chips — devices that use light beams instead of electrons to carry out their computational tasks. There has been enormous progress in recent years toward the development of photonic chips — devices that use light beams instead of electrons to carry out their computational tasks. Now, researchers at MIT have filled in a crucial piece of the puzzle that could enable the creation of photonic chips on the standard silicon material that forms the basis for most of today’s electronics. In many of today’s communication systems, data travels via light beams transmitted through optical fibers. Once the optical signal arrives at its destination, it is converted to electronic form, processed through electronic circuits and then converted back to light using a laser. The new device could eliminate those extra electronic-conversion steps, allowing the light signal to be processed directly. The new component is...