http://phys.org/electronics-news/robotics/ en-us PhysOrg Team Phys.Org provides the latest news on robotics, robots, robotics sciences and technology science. (Phys.org) -- Robotics researchers in Spain and the U.S. are studying bats for their design work on drones. Bat wings are highly articulated, with skeletons similar to those of human arms and hands. The researchers have built a drone that mimics the way a bat changes its wing shape in flight. Bats achieve an “amazing” level of maneuverability, says a researcher, mainly because of their capacity of changing wing morphology during flight. Specifically, the "Batbot" replicates the way a bat changes the profile of its wing between the downstroke and upstroke. By folding wings toward their bodies on the upstroke, bats use 35 percent less energy and reduce aerodynamic drag, according to researchers at Brown. http://phys.org/news257925741.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-06-03T10:10:01-07:00 (Phys.org) -- Since he was 12 years old and successfully talked his way onto an underwater robotics club for kids aged 13 and up, Trevor Uptain has been building robots of the kind used by oceanographers and industry. http://phys.org/news257760233.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-06-01T09:04:13-07:00 (Phys.org) -- Researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Nimbus Lab are exploring wireless power transmission as a way to power devices. They have designed and built a custom power-transfer and receiving system optimized for use on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to do the job. Brent Griffin and Carrick Detweiler are the creators of these special "quadrotors" which are designed to wirelessly charge electronics making use of “strongly coupled resonances.” The Nimbus team have made a video showing these wireless quadrotor chargers in action. The video caption says the UAV sends nearly 5 watts at 25 cm. http://phys.org/news257661454.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-05-31T05:43:04-07:00 Imagine a tiny snake robot crawling through your body, helping a surgeon identify diseases and perform operations. http://phys.org/news257481400.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-05-29T03:36:58-07:00 (Phys.org) -- For several years, roboticists have been working out ways to get a group of robots to perform synchronized activities as demonstrated most often in dance routines. It’s not just about trying to create humanoid machines that can better entertain us though, it’s about getting them to perform simple small scale synchronized activities so that a means can be found to scale up such activities so that robots of the future can work together to autonomously accomplish certain goals that have been defined by their human masters. To that end, MIT researchers Patrick Bechon and Jean-Jacques Slotine have been studying ways to mimic so called quorum sensing, which some organisms use to figure out how many of their own kind are around, and then to perform actions based on it. The two have applied this principal to small dancing robots, to stunning effect. They have written a paper describing what they have learned and posted it on the preprint server arXiv. http://phys.org/news257155711.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-05-25T09:40:01-07:00 New intelligent algorithms could help robots to quickly recognize and respond to human gestures. Researchers at A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research in Singapore have created a computer program which recognises human gestures quickly and accurately, and requires very little training. http://phys.org/news257068765.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-05-24T09:50:06-07:00 (Phys.org) -- Sooner than you think, we may have robots to tidy up our homes. http://phys.org/news256886510.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-05-22T06:22:12-07:00 Jared Peterson, working away in the Caterpillar Mechatronics Laboratory in Iowa State University's Hoover Hall, recently held up a small electric motor. http://phys.org/news256806609.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-05-21T08:10:21-07:00 (Phys.org) -- As any gathering of scientists working with robots will suggest, attempts toward perfecting techniques and outcomes of grasping and maneuvering are key issues for researchers working on climbing robots. At this week’s IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Saint Paul, Minnesota, the robotics community got to see what a Chinese team has achieved in its presentation of Clothbot. This is a climbing robot that easily climbs up your pants or shirt. The Clothbot is small and lightweight, which did not deter from bloggers’ reactions that the device was “creepy.” System and Design of Clothbot: a Robot for Flexible Clothes Climbing, by Yuanyuan Liu, Xinyu Wu, Huihuan Qian, Duan Zheng, Jianquan Sun and Yangsheng Xu from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, was presented Tuesday at the IEEE event. http://phys.org/news256622333.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-05-19T05:50:01-07:00 MIT’s Johnson Athletic Center took on the aura of an old-fashioned county fair on Thursday night, complete with popcorn, balloons, jugglers, cotton candy and pitchmen wearing brightly colored jackets and bowties. But rather than ring tosses and sheep-shearing, the central event was a series of one-on-one matchups between an amazing variety of robots that students have spent the whole semester designing, building and testing. http://phys.org/news256192507.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-05-14T05:35:17-07:00 (Phys.org) -- When Cornell engineers developed a new type of robot hand that could pick up oddly shaped objects it presented a challenge: It was easy for a human operator to choose the best place to take hold of an object, but an autonomous robot, like the ones we may someday have helping around the home or office, would need a new kind of programming. So they have developed a procedure -- an algorithm -- that allows a robot to learn grasping skills from experience and apply them in new situations. http://phys.org/news255753770.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-05-09T03:43:22-07:00 Like a well-rehearsed formation team, a flock of flying robots rises slowly into the air with a loud buzzing noise. A good two dozen in number, they perform an intricate dance in the sky above the seething hordes of soccer fans. Rowdy hooligans have stormed the field and set off flares. Fights are breaking out all over, smoke is hindering visibility, and chaos is the order of the day. http://phys.org/news255272137.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-05-03T14:10:05-07:00 (Phys.org) -- One of the big disappointments of the computer age is the distinct lack of robots in our everyday lives. For years we’ve all been teased by the possibilities of robots in SciFi movies and television shows, and still, the only robots in our lives are those little Roomba vacuum cleaners. http://phys.org/news255251620.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-05-03T08:13:57-07:00 (Phys.org) -- Among the many challenges of designing flying robots is getting them to land gracefully. By taking a cue from birds, a team of engineers has developed a flapping-wing flying robot that can land by perching on a human hand. http://phys.org/news255231161.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-05-03T05:40:01-07:00 Robots that decompose once they have reached the end of their mission could soon be deployed in the environment, thanks to a Research Project Grant of over £200,000 from the Leverhulme Trust. http://phys.org/news255149195.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-05-02T03:46:43-07:00 (Phys.org) -- The Mediated Matter Group from the MIT Media Lab is working on a robot that might one day spin its own webs. Project team members are training a robot to weave a web-like architecture, similar to the way a silkworm creates cocoons. The team seeks to train its robot to mimic nature—namely to weave a cocoon like structure. The robot is getting some programming help but eventually the researchers want to see it weaving autonomously, spinning its own web. Latest reports reveal a robot arm deploying yarn-like thread on prearranged hooks. http://phys.org/news254894948.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-04-29T07:10:01-07:00 When industrial robots were first introduced in the early 1960s — initially on automobile assembly lines — computers were still in their infancy, so the robots were designed to perform only the most rigidly predetermined set of repetitive movements. Despite a half-century of exponential growth in computational power, that’s pretty much still the state of industrial robotics. But according to Rodney Brooks, who last year left a tenured position as MIT’s Panasonic Professor of Robotics to focus on his latest company, that may not be true for much longer. http://phys.org/news254551325.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-04-25T06:20:02-07:00 Within the framework of the EU project sFly, researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a new type of flying robot that can be navigated using only on-board cameras and a miniature computer. The micro helicopters require neither GPS nor remote control, thus reaching a new level of autonomy. http://phys.org/news254472266.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-04-24T07:44:55-07:00 As militaries develop autonomous robotic warriors to replace humans on the battlefield, new ethical questions emerge. If a robot in combat has a hardware malfunction or programming glitch that causes it to kill civilians, do we blame the robot, or the humans who created and deployed it? http://phys.org/news254405878.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-04-23T13:18:14-07:00 Tore Fløan smiles at me: “In the past we competed with European organizations, but now we have the Chinese breathing down our necks,” he says. http://phys.org/news254134807.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-04-20T10:03:02-07:00 A steerable, jumping mini-robot developed by Michigan State University researchers is generating interest among robotics engineers, who don’t let its small size obscure its potential. http://phys.org/news254124908.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-04-20T07:30:01-07:00 (Phys.org) -- South Korea, a nation with a self-proclaimed goal of being a leader in robotics technology has, through the Asian Forum of Corrections (AFC), begun testing the feasibility of using robots as prison guards in an actual prison in Pohang. The robots’ duties, at least initially, are to patrol the halls between cells looking for signs of trouble, and if it finds it, alert the human guards who will take appropriate action. http://phys.org/news253967489.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-04-18T12:20:01-07:00 Hardware, software, modeling and gaming developers sought to link with emergency response and science communities to design robots capable of supervised autonomous response to simulated disaster.     http://phys.org/news253349684.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-04-11T07:54:54-07:00 Renowned author Isaac Asimov died 20 years ago today. Although he wrote more than 500 books, the robot stories he began writing at age 19 are possibly his greatest accomplishment. They have become the starting point for any discussion about how smart robots will behave around humans. http://phys.org/news253178480.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-04-09T08:25:18-07:00 (PhysOrg.com) -- Robot nannies could diminish child care worries for parents of young children. Equipped with alarms and monitoring capabilities to guard children from harm, a robot nanny would let parents leave youngsters at home without a babysitter. http://phys.org/news252918132.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-04-06T08:02:33-07:00 Robot squirrels from the University of California, Davis, are going into rattlesnake country near San Jose, continuing a research project on the interaction between squirrels and rattlesnakes. http://phys.org/news252677353.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-04-03T13:10:00-07:00 Imagine going to a local store, picking out a design for a robot to help with some household chores, and having the device built within a matter of hours. http://phys.org/news252667603.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-04-03T10:40:02-07:00 Researchers at Saarland University together with associates in Bologna and Naples have developed a robotic hand that can accomplish both tasks with ease and yet including the actuators is scarcely larger than a human arm. http://phys.org/news252322981.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-03-30T10:43:16-07:00 A tiny prototype robot that functions like a living creature is being developed which one day could be safely used to pinpoint diseases within the human body. http://phys.org/news252226350.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-03-29T07:52:44-07:00 (PhysOrg.com) -- Boston Dynamics’ video gallery of troop-supporting robots that trek and haul loads has a new addition that is drawing a sea of impressed viewers. It’s the Sand Flea Robot, an eleven-pound wonder that jumps 30 feet high, with a style that stands out in the world of jumping robots. The entertainment value in watching the video is due to the new features that Boston Dynamics injected into it, following the debut of its jumping-robot predecessor, Precision Urban Hopper. http://phys.org/news252215396.html Electronics - Robotics 2012-03-29T05:40:01-07:00