epfl

Cheetah-Cub robot learns to walk from the animals

We know Boston Dynamics is keen on four-legged robots, even creating a cheetah of its very own. So is the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland; its Cheetah-Cub has been in development at the Biorobotics Laboratory since 2008.

Teaching a quadruped robot to walk can be a tricky business, though. Something called a Central Pattern Generator (CPG) network is used to generate movements according to a repetitive pattern. But no matter how robust the rhythm of the movements is, it can be tough to implement outside of a lab environment, where the ground won't necessarily always be even.

Enter the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). The team there broke down the movements of horses via motion capture into what it calls "kinematic Motion Primitives" (kMP), analyses of the trajectories of limbs and bodies, translated into data that can be fed into a CPG. … Read more

Can this 'janitor satellite' clean up space junk?

Swiss scientists believe they have a solution to help tidy up the junkyard of satellites over our heads.

It's called CleanSpace One and it's designed to tackle the 17,000-mph mess we've made around our planet.

The $11 million "janitor satellite" is under development at the Swiss Space Center in the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology (EPFL). Its target: derelict satellites 430 miles up that threaten our communications and information networks.

There are some 16,000 bits of debris in the near heavens that are larger than 4 inches across. They're mostly satellite and rocket components hurtling around like hornets in a bag, and they can also endanger the lives of astronauts. The International Space Station has to adjust its orbit to get out of the traffic. … Read more

Haptic tech taps touch screen you can feel

If you've been avoiding all touch-screen devices because you love the feel of physical buttons, a new kind of tactile screen may have you singing a different tune.

Researchers at the Swiss Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) have come up with next-generation haptic technology that creates the feeling of pressing actual buttons on a touch screen.

"We're adding the sense of touch to tactile surfaces," said Christophe Winter, a Ph.D. student at EPFL's Integrated Actuators Laboratory (LAI) who is writing his thesis on the subject. "The term 'touch screen' that's used to describe current technology is really a misnomer, because they only provide visual and auditory feedback."

To achieve this, the scientists at the LAI used a piezoelectric material that vibrates when voltage is applied to it. The vibrations are undetected by human touch, but they create a thin layer of air between the touch screen and a user's finger to give the feeling of a raised surface. … Read more

Keystrokes can be recovered remotely

Wired keyboards, like those found on desktop PCs, emit electromagnetic waves that can be read remotely, according two Swiss researchers.

Researchers Martin Vuagnoux and Sylvain Pasini of the Swiss Security and Cryptography Laboratory at LASEC/EPFL, were able to recover keystrokes from wired keyboards at a distance up to 20 meters (about 65 feet), even through walls, simply by reading the electromagnetic emanations of the peripheral device. The experiments focused on wired keyboards attached to a computer either by PS/2 or USB connections.

In two videos, Vuagnoux demonstrates the attacks.

In the first video, he shows how only the … Read more