georgia tech

If MacGyver were trapped behind a jammed door in a burning room, he would use his shirt to filter the smoke, then craft an explosive from a paperclip and strand of hair to blow that baby open.

If today's most sophisticated robot found itself in the same conundrum, it would likely be unable to follow the famed secret agent's resourceful example. A team of Georgia Institute of Technology researchers hopes to change that.

They're working to equip machines to use objects in their path for high-level tasks, particularly those involved in tedious military operations. Robots are forging an increasing presence in military and civilian missions, with the U.S. military actively challenging roboticists to design robots for disaster relief.

"This project is challenging because there is a critical difference between moving objects out of the way and using objects to make a way," Mike Stilman, a Georgia Tech professor of robotics who's leading the research team, said in a statement. "Researchers in the robot motion planning field have traditionally used computerized vision systems to locate objects in a cluttered environment to plan collision-free paths, but these systems have not provided any information about the objects' functions." … Read more

Researchers at Georgia Tech today revealed a triboelectric generator that creates energy when two specific plastic materials rub against one another.

Zhong Lin Wang, a professor at Georgia Tech, created this new spin on an old concept by harnessing the power of rubbing together textured transparent sheets of polyester and polydimethysiloxane. When given an electrical load, a tiny current of electricity flows between the two materials during friction and separation. Repeating the action of grinding and separating creates an alternating current, also known as everyday electrical energy. The output of rubbing the materials yields as "much as 18 volts at about 0.13 microamps per square centimeter," according to a Georgia Tech press release. … Read more

Working at a restaurant requires doing many repetitious tasks, but perhaps the most tedious and lamented (aside from bathroom cleanup) is wrapping silverware in a napkin.

To solve that age-old annoyance of having to bundle countless utensils, the Capstone Design class at Georgia Tech created an autonomous silverware wrapper capable of perfectly packaging silverware at a respectable speed. … Read more

Hackers may be able to spy on your keystrokes if you keep your iPhone too close to your computer, a group of researchers reported this week.

According to Georgia Tech University computer science professor Patrick Traynor, it may be possible for hackers to hide malware on an iPhone 4 that is capable of sensing "keyboard vibrations [to] decipher complete sentences with up to 80 percent accuracy." And while Traynor and his team say that it would not be an easy thing to accomplish, it is definitely possible.

Because iPhone 4s--and other current-generation smart phones--have both an accelerometer and … Read more

PR2, the beer-fetching, laundry-folding, breakfast-making jack of all trades robot, has taken up a job as personal assistant for a man disabled by a stroke.

Maker Willow Garage has partnered with Georgia Tech's Charlie Kemp and colleagues of the Healthcare Robotics Lab to help Henry Evans and his wife Jane in a project dubbed Robots for Humanity.

It sounds rather grandiose, but the humanoid robot has made a real difference in the life of Evans, who suffered a brain stem stroke at age 40 that left him paralyzed and mute. Therapy has enabled him to move his head and a finger.

That allows him to use a computer and control PR2. The bot helped him scratch an itch for the first time in 10 years.

As the vid below shows, Evans prefers to shave himself with PR2 rather than have others do it. … Read more

Remember that little robot that scoots along the corridors of the Death Star? These Georgia Tech machines remind me of that little guy. But they're designed to help people on Earth by mapping out building interiors.

The rolling droids are being developed by Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, and the California Institute of Technology/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Equipped with two cameras and laser scanners, they can autonomously explore hallways in an unfamiliar building, detecting doors and windows, and create a map for users such as soldiers or firefighters.

The project is part of the Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST) program and is being sponsored by the Army Research Laboratory. The program is aimed at developing palm-size machines that can hover in place, enter buildings, and perform other insect-like stunts while gathering data and relaying it to human controllers.

The Georgia Tech robots in the vid below roll on treads and measure about a foot square, but researchers plan to shrink them. "Fully autonomous and collaborative, these tiny robots could swarm by the scores into hazardous situations," Georgia Tech said in a release.

Creepy? Definitely. The only thing worse than swarming robots are baby robots. But I digress. … Read more

One thing we can probably all agree on is that in the future, robots will be everywhere. But will they play the role of master or servant?

With luck, the latter will come to pass, and Cody, a concept robot from Georgia Tech, is an example of what we should hope for (or fear). Simply put, it's a sponge bath robot, three words I never thought I'd type in the same sentence.

The best part is it appears to do the job well, though it certainly takes all the sexiness out of the endeavor. The autonomous robot uses lasers--because, really, robots all have lasers, or at least should--to specify a body part that needs to be scrubbed.

A camera then feeds the information to a microprocessor which, in turn, commands the robot's arm to wipe the selected area, which it swabs first.

In tests conducted by Georgia Tech's Healthcare Robotics Lab, Cody used image processing to determine the hue of the "debris" (which we're guessing includes dead skin cells--and possibly bedbugs and dignity) and thus ascertain how much remained on the arm after the robot completed its task. Cody effectively removed 96 percent of the stuff.

Fortunately, it performs its duties using "relatively low force"--less than three newtons, which is science speak for, "Oh, yeah, right there, baby."

So let's recap: If you're in the hospital of the future, instead of a sexy nurse or orderly giving you your daily sponge bath, you will get a sterile, unthinking robo-doc named Cody. Sometimes progress isn't all it's meant to be. And just so you know what's coming, there's a video of Cody in action below. … Read more

This tech CEO has all the right credentials to steer a digital-music start-up.

In addition to degrees in computer science and economics from Stanford University, Prerna Gupta is expert in all things Britney Spears.

Gupta is a former beauty pageant winner who aspired to follow in the hip-hop dancing footsteps of her childhood idol, Spears. Now, as the 28-year-old CEO of Khush, the company behind a new iPhone app called LaDiDa, Gupta's performance background may help her as much as anything she learned in college.

LaDiDa works this way: compose a song, sing it into an iPhone or iPod Touch, and the software will provide the musical accompaniment. Think of it as reverse karaoke. Sing your own tune or "Taxman" by the Beatles. LaDiDa, which sells for $2.99, will determine what key you're singing in, match it with favorable chord progressions, and toss in some effects, such as reverb. LaDiDa will spit out a recording of your enhanced voice and backing tracks.

Parag Chordia, Gupta's husband and Khush's chief technology officer, is a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology and director of the school's music intelligence lab. LaDiDa was developed there, Gupta said.

The software is "trained" to recognize notes and common chord progressions, Gupta said. To do this, a composer inputs "musical atoms," the term she uses to describe small chunks of music. The software makes a guess based on its training on what will sound best with the song it hears to quickly arrange the chunks.

Whiz-bang technology is one thing, but to make LaDiDa a hit, it needed someone with an innate understanding of people's desire to put on a show. And no, that desire is not just about lots of sake. … Read more

In 2008, scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Ovarian Cancer Institute developed a potential treatment to fight cancer using magnetic nanoparticles designed to attach themselves to cancer cells. They found in their groundbreaking tests on mice that the particles not only attached to cancer cells, but they also moved those cells.

In what may well prove to be some of the most exciting health news in the year to come, the group announced in the journal Nanomedicine in December and further publicized on Tuesday that it has replicated the study on human cancer cells, with the nanoparticles … Read more