Meet RoboTiCan’s KTR: a target robot designed to train military personnel and law enforcement. It helps prepare them for real time scenarios, so they can take the appropriate response to threats. The Komodo Target Robot can handle dynamic terrain.
Robotis is behind a bunch of awesome robot kits for kids and adults. The Robotis Engineer Kit is also worth a look. It has 3 modes and comes with all the parts you need to put your robot together. You can control the robot from your mobile device or PC.
Plenty of researchers are working on new ways to give robots a superior sense of touch. The Asynchronous Coded Electronic Skin (ACES) can give robots and prosthetics a sense of touch better than the human skin. It is made of up a network of sensors connected via a single electrical conductor. As the researchers explain:
ACES can detect touches more than 1,000 times faster than the human sensory nervous system. For example, it is capable of differentiating physical contact between different sensors in less than 60 nanoseconds — the fastest ever achieved for an electronic skin technology — even with large numbers of sensors. ACES-enabled skin can also accurately identify the shape, texture and hardness of objects within 10 milliseconds, ten times faster than the blinking of an eye.
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So you don’t want drones flying around your commercial property? The DroneGun Tactical can help. This rifle like device allows you to control drones without damaging their payload. It has a range of 2km. The drone gun immediately stops video transmission back to the operator. It can disrupt multiple frequency bands simultaneously (433MHz, 915MHz, 2.4GHz & 5.8GHz). It also has optional GNSS disruption capability.
In the future, we will have robots reading the news and doing many other tasks done by humans today. Take EX Robots’ human-like robot anchor for instance: it is a lifelike robot with a silicone skin over a mechanical skeleton. The company is also working on other robots that can do more than that.
Here is a bunch of tiny 3D-printed robots that move by harnessing vibration from piezoelectric actuators. They are the size of the world’s smallest ant. Swarms of these robots can work together to sense environmental changes and move materials.
As the researchers explain, these micro-bristle-bots “consist of a piezoelectric actuator glued onto a polymer body that is 3D-printed using two-photon polymerization lithography (TPP). The actuator generates vibration and is powered externally because no batteries are small enough to fit onto the bot. The vibrations can also come from a piezoelectric shaker beneath the surface on which the robots move, from an ultrasound/sonar source, or even from a tiny acoustic speaker.”
Vibrations move the legs up & down to propel the robot forward. The micro-bristle-bots measure 2mm in length and 1.8mm wide.
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Here is another robot built for your telepresence needs. The RP2W Generation 7 Vectoring Robot lets you stay connected with people at a different geographical location. It uses a Windows tablet with Skype for two-way audio and video.
Meet the Stork Plate: a drone dropper kit that lets you attach, carry, and deliver things with your DJI drone. Once you attach this to your drone, you can drop payload by panning down on your camera to trigger the release function.
Here is another robot that can take on labor-intensive tasks in greenhouses and nurseries autonomously. The BigTop robot has a set of smart sensors to observe its surroundings. While it can operate independently, BigTop can also be controlled by an operator.
Here is another Raspberry Pi robot that can teach you about coding and robotics. The Adeept RaspClaws Hexapod Robot Kit is ready for Python programming. It can recognize objects and track motion (based on OpenCV).
