Meet the AtlastNEST: a smart drone docking station that facilitates fully automated missions. It is designed for the AtlasPRO UAS to protect it from the elements. It offers automatic battery replacement for take-off in less than 3 minutes.
In the past few months, we have covered a bunch of robots that can enhance your VR experience with haptic feedback. This video from IDH LIRMM shows how a robot arm can be used to give users feedback as they spend time in virtual words.
Robots are already being used to combat COVID-19. In the future, you can expect these machines to help with enforcement of social distancing guidelines and checking people’s temperature. Take Mobile Sentinel for instance: it is an unmanned, networked robot that can read license plates and body temperature.
In the past few years, we have covered a bunch of impressive commercial robot dogs here. Building your own is also a fun project to take on. Take POPI: it is an open source quadruped robot that was built from scratch with a budget of 4k euros.
What’s neat is the developers have made a bunch of awesome information, including drawings, source code, and bill of materials available for the rest of us. More info is available here.
In the past few years, we have covered plenty of agricultural robots that can help farmers automate certain tasks. The Greenoid is an autonomous robot with AI for paddy fields. It can turn on a dime and negotiate uneven terrain.
Remember the MVP robot? It is a training dummy for football players that can improve their tackling, increase their agility, and help them master other parts of the game. This self-righting training dummy is remote controlled. The below video shows how these robots can be used to chase quarterbacks, simulate blitzes, and for other QB drills.
Robot vacuums are getting smarter all the time. Take the Roborock S6 MaxV robot for instance: it comes with twin camera and AI obstacle recognition and avoidance. It has 2500Pa of suction to clean the floor effectively. It can optionally work as a mop.
Meet Moxie: a cute little robot designed to engage your children and help promote social, emotional, and cognitive development through play. It comes with weekly missions and life skills. It can also provide your children with breathing activities, guided meditation, reading activities, and creative play.
We all remember liquid metal robots from the Terminator franchise. While we are decades away from building such a robot, researchers are working on liquid metal lattice materials for aerospace and robotics. As Fanghang Deng, Quang-Kha Nguyen, and PuZhang explain:
These lattice materials consist of liquid metals and elastomers organized in a core-shell manner. This hybrid design induces a shape memory effect by harnessing the solid-liquid phase transition of liquid metals. several remarkable functionalities are achieved such as recoverable energy absorption, tunable rigidity, and reconfigurable behaviors. These liquid metal lattice materials are fabricated by using a hybrid manufacturing approach, which integrates the 3D printing, vacuum casting, and conformal coating techniques.
The above GIF gives you a better idea how these materials work.
There is no better way to learn robotics and coding than building and programming your own bots. This Line Tracking Obstacle Avoidance Mecanum Robot is a simple kit with everything you need to put it together. It has 4 x 60mm Mecanum wheels, a Mega 2560 microcontroller, sensors & tracking modules, and a motor driver board.
