In the past few years, we have covered plenty of robotic snakes capable of conducting inspection & search/rescue missions. If you love building your own robots, you can use this guide by Will Donaldson to make your own robot snake. The guide shows you how to make a single axis and double axis snake.
Here is a rugged robot capable of saving people’s lives in hostage situations. The SuperDroid HD2-S Mastiff Robot comes with a 5-axis arm. It has a 360-degree PTZ camera with 27x optical zoom. It is weatherproof and can take on bomb diffusing and removal jobs.
In the past few years, we have covered plenty of cool bio-inspired robots, even a few inspired by inspects. The HAMR is a cockroach inspired robot by Wyss Institute researchers. It can run at high speeds, jump, climb, and turn sharply. The robot can also carry payloads and survive falls from great distances.
DollSweet is a doll company working on a female robotic head capable of smiling, speaking, and singing. In the past, we have seen how a simple joystick or phone can be used to change the expressions on her face. The company has posted a new video that shows the progress it is making towards perfecting this robotic doll:
Meet the Gundam Concierge Haro Robot: a cute little robot with LED eyes and movable ears that responds to your questions by using AI. It searches a database to find the best answers. It can connect to your phone to work as an alarm clock.
Here is an interactive table that relies on a robot to allow people to interact with ferrofluid. It uses face tracking data to change the patterns. For Proteus, a KUKA KR3 robot with a magnetic end effector was mounted to the wall. Face tracking software (FaceOSC) and kukaPrc controller were used for its interactive features.
Here is an apple orchard that is using drones to pollinate trees. Dropcopter used a hexacopter drone to spray pollen on apple trees in the Beak & Skiff Apple Orchard in LaFayette. Such approach could be useful on cold spring days when bees are not active.
Here is a neat gift idea for young Pokemon fans in your life. The HelloPika Pikachu Talking Robot is a cute little toy that responds to your voice. It can nod and shake its head depending on what you say. Its red cheeks light up as the robot interacts with people.
Drones are already being used by businesses for surveillance and security purposes. In the future, they will be able to use a deep learning network to detect violent individuals. In the Eye in the Sky paper, Amarjot Singh, Devendra Patil, SN Omkar explore a real-time drone surveillance system to identify violent people in public areas. As they explain:
The system first uses the Feature Pyramid Network to detect humans from aerial images. The image region with the human is used by the proposed ScatterNet Hybrid Deep Learning (SHDL) network for human pose estimation. The orientations between the limbs of the estimated pose are next used to identify the violent individuals. The proposed deep network can learn meaningful representations quickly using ScatterNet and structural priors with relatively fewer labeled examples. The system detects the violent individuals in real-time by processing the drone images in the cloud.
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Meet the HoloSuit: a full body motion tracker with haptic feedback that helps you get a more realistic VR and AR experience. It can also be used to control robots and interact with other smart toys. The suit comes with 36 sensors, 9 haptic feedback devices, and 6 buttons.
