Robot Skin Can Feel Touch, Sense Chemicals, and Soak Up Solar Power

When you meet your robot overlord, it may be wearing super-intelligent skin designed by a Stanford researcher--a solar-powered, super-sensitive, chemical-sampling covering that makes your meatbag covering look pathetic.

Zhenan Bao is behind the advances, and the recent development centers on a stretchable solar cell system that can expand and shrink along two different axes, making it perfect for incorporation into artificial skin for robots, human prosthetic limbs, or even clothing.

Bao's earlier successes with artificial skin have resulted in a highly flexible and durable material, which is part of a flexible organic-chemistry transistor, built on a thin polymer layer. When the skin is subjected to pressure, the current flowing through the transistors is modified as tiny pyramid shapes molded into the polymer layer compress, resulting in a super-sensitive transducer that can apparently detect the pressure from a house-fly's feet. By modifying the transistor with a biological coating, it's even been possible to make the "super skin," as Bao calls it, detect the presence of particular chemicals or biological molecules.

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German Researchers Build Terminator Robot Hand

The robot hand you see is German made, by researchers at the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics. In building the first part of the Terminator, the researchers were going for robustness, and they appear to have achieved quite chilling success.

Not that utility has been traded for toughness: As the video shows, the hand is capable of an astonishing range of movement. The fingers are controlled by 38 tendons, each of which is driven by its own motor inside the forearm. Two tendons serve each joint. When their motors turn the same way, the joint moves. When they turn in opposite directions, the joint stiffens. This lets it toughen up to catch balls, yet be loose enough to perform delicate operations.

During tests, the researchers went all Joe Pesci on their robot creation, and took a baseball bat to the arm — a 66G whack. The result? Nothing. The hand came away unscathed.

Not only can the hand take punishment, it can also deal it out, exerting up to 30 Newtons of pressure with its fingers, plenty for either a stimulating massage or a deadly choking grip. It is also fast. The joints can spin at 500-degrees per second. If it tenses the springs joined to the tendons first, and then releases that energy, the joints can reach a head-spinning 2,000-degrees per second, or 333 rpm. That’s fast enough for it to snap its fingers and summon a human slave to do its bidding.

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Android-Powered Lego Robot Solves Rubik's Cube in 12.5 Seconds

Anyone around in the early 1980s remembers the pop culture phenomenon that was the Rubik's Cube. Introduced in 1980, the mechanical puzzle quickly became a source of pride—and a landmark challenge for teenagers looking to show off their puzzle-solving skills. Many public competitions were held to see how fast someone could solve the puzzle.

Now it turns out that a Lego robot can do it in just 12.5 seconds—with the help of an Android phone. At this week's ARM Techcon 2010 developer conference in Silicon Valley, a Lego Mindstorms robotics kit paired with an ARM RISC CPU-powered HTC Nexus One smartphone did just that, DeviceGuru.com reports. Most attempts landed in the 15 second range, requiring 20 or 21 moves each.

Here's a short (1:51) video showing a quick interview with Gilday as the Lego Mindstorms robot solves a puzzle for the camera. The phone itself is sitting in a slot at the top of the robot. DeveloperDave Gilday places the Rubik's Cube inside the robot, which then closes its arms around the puzzle and begins solving it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77dbG6DPW_c&feature=player_embedded

he Nexus One was the one of the first Android phones to run a 1-GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, as well as the very first phone to run Android 2.1. Google has since discontinued the phone after poor sales, thanks to Google's unconventional (for the U.S., at least) sales and technical support setup. Many newer 1-GHz Android phones like the Droid X and the HTC Incredible would have no trouble running the same software, though.

Gilday's latest creation improves on a Nokia N95-powered earlier attempt back in 2006 that could solve the puzzle in about 25 seconds. Gilday attributes the improvements mainly to the Nexus One's much faster processor and 512MB of RAM, as opposed to the N95's 332-MHz processor and 64MB RAM.

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Robotic Arm Writes, Draws, Grasps Objects Without Fingers

The gripper’s mechanism works in such a way that once the soft and supple device is in position to pick up an object, an attached vacuum pump sucks all the air from the bag, and solidifies its grip to allow a user to pickup the object. Upon allowing the air to flow back into the bag, the gripper softens and releases the object.
To find the right material for the gripper, the researchers experimented with several things, including rice, couscous, and even ground-up tires. However, ground coffee beans provided the precise combination of light weight as well as good interlocking ability.

Noting that “ground coffee grains are like lots of small gears,” study co-author Hod Lipson, a mechanical engineer at the University of Chicago, said: “When they are not pressed together, they can roll over each other and flow. When they are pressed together just a little bit, the teeth interlock, and they become solid.”

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Robots Could Improve Everyday Life at Home or Work

They're mundane, yet daunting tasks: Tidying a messy room. Assembling a bookshelf from a kit of parts. Fetching a hairbrush for someone who can't do it herself. What if a robot could do it for you?

Assistant professor of computer science Ashutosh Saxena is working to bring such robots into homes and offices. He leads Cornell's Personal Robotics Lab, which develops software for complex, high-level robotics. Among the lab's goals are programming robots that can clean up a disheveled room, assemble an Ikea bookshelf and load and unload a dishwasher -- all without human intervention.

"Just like people buy a car, I envision that in five to 10 years, people will buy an assistive robot that will be cheaper or about the same cost as a car," Saxena said.

One of the biggest technical challenges is endowing robots with the ability to learn in uncertain environments. It's one thing to make a robot do simple tasks: Pick up this pen. Move to the left. Do a 360. It's quite another to make a robot understand how to pick up an object it's never encountered or navigate a room it's never seen.

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Robots make up surgical dream team

They may sound like an odd couple, but da Vinci and McSleepy are a robotic surgical dream team. 

In what's being billed as a world first, the two robots worked together in a Montreal hospital to perform a fully automated prostate operation while a surgeon and an anaesthesiologist manned workstations nearby.

Dr. Armen Aprikian, the chief urologist at the McGill University Health Centre, controlled the da Vinci machine during the delicate procedure last week.

Anaesthesiologist Dr. Thomas Hemmerling focused on vital signs and artificial ventilation while McSleepy anaesthetized and monitored the 68-year-old patient.

The robot doc team have called the vanguard surgery a success and Hemmerling - who helped develop McSleepy over two years ago - said he was impressed with how smoothly the demanding procedure went. 

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