The MERTZ speaking robot is a research study at MIT University involving the social interaction of robots. The MERTZ is an active vision head robot, designed for exploring scalable learning in a social context. MERTZ is designed to be placed in public places for long periods of time and continually interact with people. The intent is to have the robot slowly learn about various correlations of objects and people. The robot may even learn to correlate objects and people with frequently uttered phoneme sequences, differentiate among people and their interaction habits, and learn to dislike some people who tend to annoy the robot. This is a very harmless robot that is more humorous than anything. From what we see here, it appears to get confused easily. I’d love to greet it myself, it even displays human-like emotions.
Here is a snake for those of you that don’t like reptiles! It’s not slimy (though snakes never are), and it can’t bite, but it does move like one! Perhaps it even moves better than a snake because it knows how to roll instead of just sliding. This prototype it being studied by the Biorobotics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University. This robotic snake has the ability to climb up poles and inside of pipes and perform reconnaissance missions that no human could ever do. This snake robot is even capable of crawling, climbing, and swimming! That’s right, this robot will even climb up cracks or pipes or even swim through water like a real snake! This robot is designed using servos purchasable at hobby stores with some slight modifications. The chassis is built using a simple aluminum frame even you could make. Using common easy to purchase parts make these robots lower cost and easier to repair. Lower cost means it’s easier for people to buy them, and may possibly allow them to be commercially available. But the other cool part is that it may even be cheap enough to build your own simple prototype using the Parallax Propeller chip. The Parallax Propeller chip is perfectly suitable for this application because it even supports video which is necessary on this type of reconnaissance mission. Go for it, I think it a good idea.
Engineers at Cornell University have designed this odd-looking machine that can rebuild itself and also could perform repairs on itself. These robots are very cool, they are designed to demonstrate the concept that robots could have the ability to self replicate. This particular robot doesn’t actually create it’s own parts, but it does have the ability to repair it’s own links if it were damaged. This concept shows that future robots will be able to remotely repair themselves even if they were in harsh environments where humans could not reach them. This particular robot design actually looks fairly simple, a single robot link is just a cube with the ability to rotate along a single plane. It just uses a small motor and a worm gear to rotate the joint. The links connect to each other when the electromagnetic is energized. The other metal contacts are most likely for serial data transfer and for knowing which orientation the cubes are connected to each other. These concept models most likely don’t carry their own batteries, but future designs could possibly carry their own battery power and be able to charge one another independently. If and when researchers start applying this same principle to nano technology there would be the possibility of actually having generic robots that can replicate into almost any other larger machine either permanently or temporarily. When that happens the field of practical robotics will be completely revolutionized. But even in it’s development phase, self repairing robots are revolutionary in themselves. Just imagine buying a bag of microscopic robots that could be programmed to permanently fix anything in your house. Just imagine going to the doctor and receiving an injection of generic nano robots that could rebuild your organs. Wouldn’t that be cool.
Prosthetic limbs have come a long way since their first working developments. Fortunately, research on bionic limbs by Vanderbilt University is likely to hit the markets in a reasonable amount of time. Clinical testing for this bionic arm is scheduled for 2009, which is not too much of a wait for soldiers in Iraq who may need such bionic limbs. The research done by this team has lead them to use Nitrogen as a power source for the mechanisms. A liquid bottle is attached to the arm and then goes through a phase change into a gas state. With this they have successfully been able to produce a prosthetic arm with reasonable strength and speed as well as high accuracy. This may soon prove to be where science catches up with fiction and provides superhuman capabilities, but for now getting this far getting a robotic arm that looks this realistic is a huge step to what is currently on the market today. Progressing from a claw-like form to a human shaped hand is another big step to further bionic research.
It was long ago determined that simple fish have developed one of the most efficient ways to move through water. The fish shape is completely hydrodynamic and has a large amount of surface area to push water with. Over the years many people have tried to replicate the motion of fish, and most have failed or just made something that looks robotic. I think the makers of this robotic carp deserve great kudos because this robot fish looks very real when swimming. This robotic carp is a research project studied by the Essex University and is being funded and on display at the London Aquarium. It most likely run off lithium ion batteries because batteries are most often the thing that stunts our technology. We always want things that are smaller and faster, but batteries ofter keep us from doing that. Fortunately we have finally gotten to the point in our technology that we can design things we couldn’t before, like this robot fish! I love the skin they put on this thing, it looks silicone based, but yet it’s shiny.
