Robotics has made tremendous strides in replicating the senses of sight and sound, but smell and taste are still lagging behind, and touch was thought to be the most difficult of them all...until new pressure-sensitive electronic skin came along.
The electronic skin is made out of germanium and silicon wrapped around a sticky polyimide film. The prototype measures about 7.6 square inches and can detect different pressures between 0 and 15 kilopascals, which is the range of pressures one might encounter while typing on a keyboard or holding a small object. The skin does this thanks to its rubber skin, which changes its thickness in response to changes in pressure, which is then measured and controlled by built-in capacitors.
Design team member Ali Javey explains why a robot with a well-developed sense of touch is so crucial to expanding robots' usefulness:
And the same logic is true outside of the household, of course, but it's worth remembering how many simple activities human take for granted would defeat current robots. Even something as basic as getting dressed or reading a newspaper requires a fairly intuitive sense of touch and pressure, and this new skin puts those abilities within robots' grasp.
This is definitely a breakthrough, but sensing a range of pressure is hardly a good substitute for the extremely sophisticated sensors we have built into our skin. We don't just sense pressure, but other linked sensations like heat, pain, and others. Of course, once we perfect one type of artificial sensor, we could make pretty much any other type of sensor we want, giving robots the ability to detect anything from radioactivity to biological agents purely by touch. That would greatly increase the usefulness of robotic probes in areas humans can't venture.
Even better, this artificial skin could one day help restore sensation to humans that have lost feeling in parts of their body, although research leader Zhenan Bao says that's still a ways off:
"Connecting the artificial skin with the human nerve system will be a very challenging task. Ultimately, in the very distant future, we would like to make a skin which performs really like human skin and to be able to connect it to nerve cells on the arm and thus restore sensation. Initially, the prototype that we envision would be more like a handheld device, or maybe a device that connects to other parts of the body that have skin sensation. The device would generate a pulse that would stimulate other parts of the skin, giving the kind of signal 'my (artificial) hand is touching something', for instance."
[Nature Materials; the image up top is only representative of this technology and is actually from the University of Tokyo's E-Skin project.]
Tibi and Dabo are 2 cute robots designed to provide a wide range of services to citizens in Barcelona’s public spaces. The final shape of Tibi & Dabo came from different conceptualization and development techniques, such as surveys, sociological, iconicity pyramids, and ethnographical tools. These robots are the result from collaboration between the School of Design ESDi and the Institute of Robotics and Industrial Informatics (IRI), who coordinated the European, funded URUS Project (Ubiquitous Networking Robotics in Urban Settings). Tibi & Dabo are here because the project URUS attempts to analyze and test the idea how robots can interact with human beings in a cooperative way. We can use robots to assist us like when we need transportation of goods or surveillance in urban areas in order to improve life quality.
Designer : ESDi and IRI (Institute of Robotics and Industrial Informatics)
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2010.09.15 11:11:54 AM
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Re: 樂高機器人知道怎樣在短時間玩出魔術方塊來
Robotic grasshoppers won’t eat your crops
Sometimes I wonder why Japan needs all of these robots. Researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have built a robotic grasshopper. It’s called the Air Hopper and it has four legs that allow it to move around.
And move it can! It can jump, roll thanks to its four wheels, and naturally, hop. This allows it to cross uneven ground easily. Bigger obstacles can be crossed using the pneumatic cylinders.
The researchers have measured that the Air Hopper can jump as far as 4 feet forward and about 1 foot high. The robot is made out of reinforced plastic and it’s 50 inches long, 21 inches tall, and weighs 72 pounds. That’s a heavy robot for something that can jump into the air. Ultimately, this type of technology will give us those tanks that can walk on four legs or robots to explore other planets, right out of scifi, animes, and mangas.
This is what happens when you let a radioactive snail in at night. Havoc! Luckily, Evolution Robotics' Mint cleaning robot did a darn good job cleaning up after it, as you can see from a long-exposure photo of its mopping.
The above photo was taken by BotJunkie, when the cleaner was set to the mopping function. It apparently took the cleaner 20 minutes to clean that space, but only 15 minutes to sweep the floor. As you can see from the photo below, it does a more thorough job when mopping.
Mint uses wet or dry Swiffer pads to clean floors with—floors, we should point out, that are non-carpet. $250 is quite a bit to spend on a vacuum cleaner that doesn't do carpet, but by the sounds of BotJunkie's review, it does hard floors very proud. [BotJunkie]
台灣科技產業進步，機器人研發也處於成長階段；台灣大學電機系為提升台灣智慧機器人產業和國際地位，今年爭取到全球規模最大的高科技專業協會IEEE(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)，來台舉辦「智慧型機器人與系統國際會議」（IROS 2010）。
Robots have been singing for a minute. But the HRP-4C doesn't just sing, she performs. Watch her chirp the lyrics to her song, work the crowd, and shake her stuff in sync with her back up dancers. It's pretty amazing.
Even by human standards, her dancing is not too bad. Her singing is actually quite good (if you played someone this and a Ke$ha song and asked which one was sung by a robot, etc). And aside from her strangely large hands and armored robot legs, she does an amazingly convincing job of looking like a real person while she's performing. Her singing's in sync with the song, her dancing's in sync with her singing, and, especially with the rhythmic accompaniment of her four backup dancers, the whole thing is just enjoyable to watch—not as a robot performing a catchy little pop song but simply as a catchy little pop song being performed. And that's pretty damn wild.
The divabot, as she's being called, is being developed at Japan's Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. She uses special software to precisely mimic a human singer's head movements and facial features and synthesizes notes with Yamaha's Vocaloid software. Masataka Goto, head of the Institute's interactive media group, hopes that someday the robots will be used by the entertainment industry. From the looks of things, that's not too far off. [YouTube, PopSci]
