Tag: robotics

Anthropomorphic Robots

The scanner showed that the more human-like the features of the supposed opponent were, the more such neural activity increased. A questionnaire also revealed that the volunteers enjoyed the games most when they played human-like opponents, whom they imagined to be more intelligent.

using the prisoner’s dilemma and fMRI to confirm that humans prefer humanoid robots

MEMS robots 100x smaller

Each microrobot is shaped something like a spatula but with dimensions measuring just microns, or millionths of a meter. They are almost 100x smaller than any previous robotic designs of their kind and weigh even less. The devices are about 60 microns wide, 250 microns long and 10 microns high that each run off power scavenged from an electrified surface. Propelling themselves across such surfaces in an inchworm-like fashion impelled by a “scratch-drive” motion actuator, the microrobots advance in steps only 10 to 20 billionths of a meter each, but repeated as often as 20000x a second.

choco-nano bots can’t be far off. hmm chocolate!

Conveyor Belt Waiters

Up in the kitchen, it is man, not machine, that makes the food. They haven’t found a way of automating the chef, just yet. Everything is prepared from fresh. When it is ready, the meal is put in a pot and given a sticker and a color to match the customer’s seat. Then it is put on the rails and despatched downhill to the correct table. Replacing waiters with helter-skelters and computers is fun for the customers. It also makes financial sense for the restaurant.

Restaurant in Nuernberg, run by… ROBOTS

DARPA Hybrid Insect MEMS

The HI-MEMS program is aimed at developing tightly coupled machine-insect interfaces by placing micro-mechanical systems inside the insects during the early stages of metamorphosis. These early stages include the caterpillar and the pupae stages. Since a majority of the tissue development in insects occurs in the later stages of metamorphosis, the renewed tissue growth around the MEMS

Robot programming models

a model that deals with the inherent complexity of concurrency, and the coordination or orchestration of what’s going on. This was the whole reason for choosing the CCR and DSS pieces for robotics. This was actually an advanced programming model designed not for robotics per se, but as a general purpose programming model. We put it into the robotics SDK as a way to test this out, but now we’re seeing that people are lifting the hood on the engine inside this SDK and finding other uses for it. We have people who are using it to build trading systems, who are doing large data-set scientific modeling, the folks at MySpace are using it to manage their server farms.

need to check our the MSR robotics SDK