Watch a swarm of 1000 mini-robots assemble into shapes - tech - 14 August 2014 - New Scientist

Watch a swarm of 1000 mini-robots assemble into shapes - tech - 14 August 2014 - New Scientist: To do the assembling, the desired end shape is first transmitted to all the robots and then four stationary robots are positioned by hand to mark the shape's starting point. Next, some of the robots start to shuffle until they reach a place-holding robot and then fan out from that point to stop in the right place. Each robot can only communicate with the others nearby. Successive robots build up the shape by stopping near the robots already in place. It can take about 12 hours for 1000 robots to fill in a pattern.

Self-organising origami robot unfolds itself… and walks - tech - 07 August 2014 - New Scientist

Self-organising origami robot unfolds itself… and walks - tech - 07 August 2014 - New Scientist

Muscle-powered bio-bots walk on command | News Bureau | University of Illinois

Muscle-powered bio-bots walk on command | News Bureau | University of Illinois: The new bio-bots are powered by a strip of skeletal muscle cells that can be triggered by an electric pulse...

“Skeletal muscles cells are very attractive because you can pace them using external signals,” Bashir said. “For example, you would use skeletal muscle when designing a device that you wanted to start functioning when it senses a chemical or when it received a certain signal. To us, it’s part of a design toolbox. We want to have different options that could be used by engineers to design these things.”

The design is inspired by the muscle-tendon-bone complex found in nature. There is a backbone of 3-D printed hydrogel, strong enough to give the bio-bot structure but flexible enough to bend like a joint. Two posts serve to anchor a strip of muscle to the backbone, like tendons attach muscle to bone, but the posts also act as feet for the bio-bot.

Make Your Own World With Programmable Matter - IEEE Spectrum

Make Your Own World With Programmable Matter - IEEE Spectrum: Goldstein and his colleagues think that an efficient way to produce shape changes might be to fill the initial blob of catoms with lots of little voids and then shift them around to achieve the right contours. Small local movements of adjacent catoms would be sufficient to shift the cavities, and if they are allowed to bubble to the surface, the overall volume would shrink. Conversely, the material could expand by opening up pockets at the surface and engulfing them.

Meet The Physicist Who's Building Snake Robots | Popular Science

Meet The Physicist Who's Building Snake Robots | Popular Science: No one has ever studied the complexities of a sidewinder rattlesnake’s movement on sand, its natural substrate. In principle, you can understand how a hummingbird stays aloft or how a shark swims by solving fluid-dynamics equations. We don’t yet have fundamental equations for complex terrain—sand, leaf litter, tree bark. To figure that out, we built giant sandboxes that are equipped with high-speed cameras and can tilt to mimic dunes.

Robot elephant trunk learns motor skills like a baby - tech - 13 March 2014 - New Scientist

Robot elephant trunk learns motor skills like a baby - tech - 13 March 2014 - New Scientist: The design showed that a trunk formed of 3D-printed segments can be controlled by an array of pneumatic artificial muscles...

They used a process called "goal babbling"... the robot remembers what happens to the trunk's position when tiny changes are made to the pressure in the thin pneumatic tubes feeding the artificial muscles. This creates a map that relates the trunk's precise position to the pressures in each tube.

The trunk can now be manually forced into a series of positions and learn to adopt them on command...

Spinning Yarn Into Muscles | Science/AAAS | News

Spinning Yarn Into Muscles | Science/AAAS | News: Baughman, along with colleagues in Texas, Australia, and China, twisted plastic fibers and threads into yarns. Then when they applied heat, they found that the yarns contracted by up to 50%, a result they report today in Science. And cooling the plastic muscles returns them to their original length. Natural muscles, by comparison, only contract by 20%. Twisting together a bundle of polyethylene fishing lines, whose total diameter is only about 10 times larger than a human hair, produces a coiled polymer muscle that can lift 7.2 kilograms, the team found. Operated in parallel, an arrangement that increases their power and is similar to the way natural muscles are configured, a hundred of these polymer muscles could lift about 725 kilograms, Baughman says. Producing this force requires only off-the-shelf materials that cost about $5 per kilogram.

A Micro-Muscular Break Through � Berkeley Lab News Center

A Micro-Muscular Break Through � Berkeley Lab News Center: ...a micro-sized robotic torsional muscle/motor made from vanadium dioxide that for its size is a thousand times more powerful than a human muscle, able to catapult objects 50 times heavier than itself over a distance five times its length within 60 milliseconds...

Wu and his colleagues fabricated their micro-muscle on a silicon substrate from a long “V-shaped” bimorph ribbon comprised of chromium and vanadium dioxide. When the V-shaped ribbon is released from the substrate it forms a helix consisting of a dual coil that is connected at either end to chromium electrode pads. Heating the dual coil actuates it, turning it into either a micro-catapult, in which an object held in the coil is hurled when the coil is actuated, or a proximity sensor, in which the remote sensing of an object (meaning without touching it) causes a “micro-explosion,” a rapid change in the micro-muscle’s resistance and shape that pushes the object away...

The vanadium dioxide micro-muscles demonstrated reversible  torsional motion over one million cycles with no degradation. They also showed a rotational speed of up to approximately 200,000 rpm, amplitude of 500 to 2,000 degrees per millimeters in length, and an energy power density up to approximately 39 kilowatts/kilogram.

Robotics first: Engineering team makes artificial muscles that can lift loads 80 times their weight

Robotics first: Engineering team makes artificial muscles that can lift loads 80 times their weight; In order to achieve this, Dr Koh and his team have used polymers which could be stretched over 10 times their original length. Translated scientifically, this means that these muscles have a strain displacement of 1,000 per cent.

A Blind Robot That Navigates By Touch | Popular Science

A Blind Robot That Navigates By Touch | Popular Science: When a whisker touches something, it bends backward, pushing a magnet at its base. A magnetic sensor detects the displacement and sends it to Shrewbot’s computer processor. Shrewbot uses these touch signals to create a picture of its environment and distinguish shapes and textures.

Robot face lets slime mould show its emotional side - tech - 08 August 2013 - New Scientist

Robot face lets slime mould show its emotional side - tech - 08 August 2013 - New Scientist: Gale placed slime mould on a forest of 64 micro electrodes, along with some oat flakes. As the mould moved across the electrodes towards the food, it produced electrical signals, which Gale converted into sound frequencies...

Using a popular psychological model, the team was then able to assign each sound chunk an emotion...

Robotic Skin Lights Up When Touched - Wired Science

Robotic Skin Lights Up When Touched - Wired Science Thinner than a sheet of paper, the skin is made from layers of plastic and a pressure-sensitive rubber. A conductive silver ink, organic LEDs, and thin-film transistors made from semiconductor-enriched carbon nanotubes are sandwiched between the layers. Applying pressure sends a signal through the rubber that ultimately turns on the LEDs, which light up in red, green, yellow or blue.

Air bubbles could be the secret to artificial skin

Air bubbles could be the secret to artificial skin: On a uniform elastomeric substrate, traction tests revealed the creation of micro-fissures in the metallic layer, which would eventually result in the rupture of the conducting network. But with foam substrates, these cracks only occurred above the air bubbles. "Between the bubbles, the metal remained intact. The conducting network is thus maintained and can function," she explains. "Our measurements showed that we could achieve a level of elasticity over 100% without disrupting the network. These metallic pathways built upon foam could thus be used as electrodes, sensors or interconnections for the electronic skin that we're developing."

Printed inchworm robot makes self-assembly moves (w/ Video)

Printed inchworm robot makes self-assembly moves (w/ Video): This robot uses shape-memory polymers (SMPs) for the self-folding process. These are "smart" materials that can go from one state to another via a stimulus such as temperature change. With the SMPs, the inchworm robot is able to fold into desired shapes. Once it folds, a battery and motor are attached. With enough current, the team's robot was able to fold into its functional form with fold angle deviations within six degrees. The printed robot demonstrated locomotion at a speed of two millimeters per second.

Zinc Oxide Nanowires Transistors Can Be Sophisticated Pressure Sensors | MIT Technology Review

Zinc Oxide Nanowires Transistors Can Be Sophisticated Pressure Sensors | MIT Technology Review: In the new research, Wang’s group demonstrates nanoelectronics that offer at least a 15-fold enhancement in sensor density and spatial resolution compared to the previous approaches... The density, resolution, and sensitivity of the sensors, says Wang, is comparable to that of the skin of a human finger...

In Wang’s nanowire transistors, the gate traditionally used in electronics is eliminated. Instead, the current flowing through the nanowires is controlled by the electrical charge generated when strain or force applied is to the transistors.

It's Almost Impossible To Believe There's a Robot In This Suit and Not a Real Human

It's Almost Impossible To Believe There's a Robot In This Suit and Not a Real Human: And it's not just Petman's gait and movements that are incredibly realistic. The humanoid's artificial skin is designed to detect chemical leaks if a suit has failed, and is actually able to produce its own micro-climate to recreate hot and sweaty conditions.

Video: Robotic Ants Solve Riddles Without Math

Video: Robotic Ants Solve Riddles Without Math: Researchers used tiny, cube-shaped robots that were powered by watch motors and ran on dime-sized wheels. They gave the machines three rules: to walk randomly in a given direction, to turn away from obstacles they bump into, and to follow a trail of light left by other robots (as seen in the video)—similar to the way real ants use their antennae to sense chemicals left behind by other ants. These simple tenets were enough to allow the robots to copy ants' ability to find the shortest path home.

Artificial muscle computer performs as a universal Turing machine

Artificial muscle computer performs as a universal Turing machine: The artificial muscle computer is modeled on Stephen Wolfram's "2, 3" Turing machine architecture, which is the simplest known universal Turing machine...


In its current version, the artificial muscle computer is very large (about 1 m3) and extremely slow (0.15 Hz).

Brilliant Robot Scraps Can Form Selves Into Anything

Brilliant Robot Scraps Can Form Selves Into Anything: But Skylar Tibbits today offered a very provocative alternative: technology for 3-D printing where the chunks start separated and intelligently arrange themselves into basically any object.

Tibbits’ latest technology for so-called “4-D printing...” uses water to activate and power strands of material that fold themselves into desired shapes.

Pneumatic Muscles Power Sinewy New Leopard Robot | Popular Science

Pneumatic Muscles Power Sinewy New Leopard Robot | Popular Science: But Pneupard's creators, a team of researchers from Osaka University in Japan, aren't looking to race against the DARPA cheetah. Instead, they hope to learn more about natural cheetahs' locomotive secrets, which in turn will help build more agile robots...

Pneupard is already able to handle unevenness on the road, which researchers demonstrated by slipping blocks of metal, wood and other materials under its feet as it strode along a treadmill...