Showing posts with label Household. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Household. Show all posts

Roombots Want To Be All The Furniture You'll Ever Need


Having lots of furniture is a terribly inefficient way to live, considering that most of your furniture is not actually in use most of the time. A much better way to do it would be to just have one single piece of furniture that manages to be, say, a chair, a table, and a bed whenever you need it to be. You know, like my couch. But if you need more specific functionality, you may soon be able to get it using Roombots, little modular robots that can configure themselves into all kinds of different objects.
One Roombot is a fairly simple (and therefore relatively cheap) modular robot with lots of connectors and a hinge in the middle. By itself, it's not good for much, but when it gets together with a bunch of its friends, they can autonomously combine to turn themselves into all sorts of different pieces of furniture. They'd be able to move around on command, and when you don't need them anymore, they'd stack themselves neatly against the wall.


Mini-Robot Detects Motion and Breathing through Concrete Walls


The flexible, light weight system having a tractable arm has an ultra-wideband (UWB), multi-Gigahertz radio frequency (RF) sensor array offering long standoff monitoring to map motion and immobile live objects. The imaging development was carried out by an SBIR Phase II from the Army's PEO AMMO, PM-CCS.

Various cameras make it possible to take pictures of a target that is being surveyed through the day and night from a safe distance. Fixed to a light arm, it relays signals through concrete walls, while a circuit in the receiver can pick up images received. All these signals are then processed.