Remember ANYmal? It is a quadrupedal robot that can be taught many tasks and take on autonomous navigation in challenging environments. With wheels, it can combine the advantages of walking and driving to handle uneven surfaces. Researchers have come up with dynamic locomotion strategies for such robots to handle flat and inclined terrains.
Robots handling a knife is not a complicated task. Teaching them to cut things with the right amount of force is another story though. Xiaoqian Mu, Yuechuan Xue, and Yan-Bin Jia from Iowa State University are teaching a robot how to use a knife to slice vegetables.
A 2DOF robotic arm with a force/torque sensor is used to perform press, push, and slice moves. A separate control strategy in Cartesian space is used for each move to account for contact and force constraints.
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Here is a wave-like robot that can crawl between two straight surfaces or over a single flat surface. This miniature Wave-like crawling robot was developed by Lee-Hee Drory and David Zarrouk from Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel to study locomotion dynamics of such robots.
So you would like to build your own robot with omnidirectional wheels? This Mecanum Wheel Robot Learning kit is worth a look. It comes with 4 12V DC motors with metal gear box. It is Arduino programmable. Your robot will be able to move forward, backward, sideways, and simply rotate.
The kit comes with an aluminum alloy frame, screws, and other necessary parts, including sample code.
There is no better way to learn robotics and electronics than building and programming your own Raspberry Pi robot. Yuri 3 is a Raspberry Pi B+ powered robot with 3D printed wheels and six 12 V DC brushed gears. Its wheels can be turned so it spins on the spot. It has individual steerable wheels.
Like what you see? You can find out about this cool rover here.
Landmines have taken many lives and injured a ton of people over the years. Detecting and removing mines is going to be easier with robots. WPI’s Robotic Landmine Destroyer relies on a rover to detect mines and a drone to drop a payload to detonate each.
By using such a system, mines can be detected and cleared without putting any human in danger. More info is available here.
Here is a soft social robot that can be built using wool and wood and easily customized with knitted exteriors. Blossom has a floating head platform with rubber bands and silicone for lifelike movements. It can be controlled using an open source app. The entire robot can be built for around $250 or less.
Here is a robot with full-body teleoperation that can move with greater agility and keep its balance. MIT’s Hermes weighs 45 kg and has a body 90% the size of an average human. It has custom actuators to power its joints instead of regular DC motors.
MIT’s Biomimetic Robotics Lab researchers are building a telerobotic system that allows motions to be sent to the robot and vice versa. That means the operators can keep the robot balanced in challenging environments. As the researchers explain:
the robot can harness the operator’s innate motor skills and split-second reflexes to keep its footing.
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Prosthetic limbs have come a long way over the years. Now Stanford researchers have developed a more efficient prosthetic leg that makes challenging terrain more manageable for amputees. This new design has a tripod foot that responds to rough terrain by shifting pressure between 3 different contact points.
Here is another compact selfie drone that you can take with you anywhere to capture great shots from the air. The AIR PIX is smaller than most phones and weighs only 52g. It can record 1080p @ 30fps videos with its 12MP 70-degree camera.
