robotic arm

Robots in development can reach out and touch someone

Robotic prostheses may have a way to go before they work exactly like human limbs, but researchers are making great strides. A team out of Georgia Tech is working on new technology that could give these robotic limbs something akin to a sense of touch.

Thanks to tactile-sensing material that covers the entire prosthesis and software that integrates the gathered data, this robotic arm can maneuver through clutter and distinguish between hard and soft objects as it grips, pushes, and pulls more intuitively.

"Up until now, the dominant strategies for robot manipulation have discouraged contact between the robot's … Read more

DARPA's robot changes tire, aspires to defuse bombs

In the future, the U.S. Army could rely on low-cost ambidextrous autonomous robots, instead of bomb disposal technicians or remote control robots, to defuse improvised explosive devices. Better yet, activating and operating the smart robots may only require a nearby solider to say, "Go find and defuse the bomb."

As a precursor to that end goal, DARPA's Autonomous Robotic Manipulation program released a video that shows a robot changing a tire by itself. The robot, complete with a camera and an array of sensors, successfully uses two hands (one equipped with a drill) to remove a tire and put a new one in its place. A small screen shows the robot's virtual view of the tire, which reveals how software algorithms detect each the scene and its minute details in real time.… Read more

NY hotel books Yobot the luggage-handling robot

Not so keen on schlepping your suitcases through the streets of New York City after checking out of your hotel? Hand them over to Yobot, the luggage-handling robot.

The 15-foot bot will await visitors in the lobby of Yotel, which opens June 1 in Times Square and calls itself the "iPod of the hotel industry" for such sleek techno flourishes as touch-screen check-in, flat-panel TVs, purple mood lighting--and, of course, Yobot.

The robotic arm can pick up luggage and put it in one of 133 storage lockers in the hotel lobby in case you want to walk around unencumbered before or after checking in. You get a bar-coded ticket, which you then put into the system when you're ready for Yobot to fetch your stash.

Yobot's luggage lugging costs $2 a bag, so presumably you don't have to tip (although Yobot would probably offer a steely wave of appreciation if you did). You can, of course, store your luggage in most hotels for free, but then you get one less cool photo to show your friends back home in Minnetonka. … Read more

Study to test human ability to control robotics with the mind

Researchers are ready to advance their tests of a novel brain-computer interface (BCI) from animals to human subjects, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency just granted them more than $6 million over the next three years to get those human clinical trials under way.

Ongoing research out of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and the University of Pittsburgh has already demonstrated that the team's tiny 10x10 array of electrodes implanted on the surface of a monkey's brain can process activity from individual neurons to guide a robotic arm through such simple tasks as turning doorknobs and … Read more

New heart op to be performed remotely--in 3D

A cardiologist at Glenfield Hospital in Leicester, England, tomorrow will try to perform the world's first heart procedure using a robotic arm paired with advanced 3D mapping to treat a 63-year-old patient with atrial fibrillation (or AF, the most common arrhythmia).

The procedure, which will incorporate use of the CARTO-3 mapping software, comes just six months after Dr. André Ng became the first to perform a remote catheter ablation using the hospital's Amigo Robotic Catheter System, and just eight years after the hospital began performing ablation to treat AF.

In the procedure, a surgeon (or bot) inserts … Read more

Robotic arm found to work too easily

No, you are not reading The Onion. A computer program created at the University of Central Florida that directs a robotic arm to grab objects with just one touch was deemed by many participants in a pilot study to be "too easy" to use--a finding the designers had not anticipated.

"We focused so much on getting the technology right...We didn't expect this," says developer Aman Behal, an assistant professor of engineering and computer science at UCF.

The computer program directs the robotic arm into action based on voice command, touch screen, computer mouse, or … Read more

Robot tries to flip pancakes, luckily doesn't flip out

How many tries does it take for a robot to screw in a lightbulb? How about flip a pancake? If the video below is any indication, IHOP won't be robotized anytime soon.

Sylvain Calinon of the Italian Institute of Technology is into teaching robots skills by first taking the bots through the steps involved. For a cooking class on pancakes, Calinon and colleagues used a seven-axis Barrett WAM robotic arm and a simulated pancake with four tracking markers.

As the video shows, the arm needs more than a bit of practice to get the right touch--it finally manages to … Read more