Posts tagged robots
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Exoskeleton suit gives man chance to walk again
Cutting edge technology has a Darien man taking miraculous steps.
He was paralyzed after he was struck by a car while riding his bike, training for an ironman four years ago.
Mike Loura was beaming as he was walking and showcasing this amazing robotic exoskeleton technology. He was doing something he never imagined he’d be able to do again.
"Ever since the accident all the doctors said you’re never going to walk again," Loura said.
However, the husband and father of two girls is walking again. Thursday was day 15, the day Loura strapped on the wearable robot, a breakthrough technology, but it’s the first time he’s taking steps for others to see.
"Every time I take a step I kinda have to balance myself in a certain position for the machine to know that it’s ready to take the next step," said Loura.
"It has an exoskeleton system with battery powered motor that allows someone who can’t feel and can’t move," said Dr. David Rosenblum, "who’s paralyzed, the ability to go from sit to stand to actually taking steps."
Dr. Rosenblum is the medical director of Rehabilitation at Gaylord Specialty Healthcare, the only center in Connecticut to offer the Ekso Bionics’ Robotic Exoskeleton technology to patients with spinal chord injuries.
"We’re using it as a tool to work on balance to get someone up and moving," said Dr. Rosenblum. "From a wellness perspective to improve their quality of life."
Proving that robots aren’t just for people any longer, African grey parrot, Pepper, has learned to drive a robot that was specially designed for him. Pepper, whose wing feathers are clipped to preventing him from flying around his humans’ house and destroying their things, now manipulates the joystick on his riding robot to guide it to where ever he wishes to go.
This robotic “bird buggy” was the brainchild of his human companion, Andrew Gray, a 29-year-old electrical and computer engineering graduate student at the University of Florida.
Electronic brain hacks are turning insects into robotic helpers
We’re a long way from directly controlling human minds remotely, but recent years have seen a string of breakthroughs in hacking the minds of insects. Insect brains are probably the simplest interesting brains, as insects can perform a range of tasks (flying, smelling, carrying, etc.) with brains that have numbers of neurons orders of magnitude less than those in complex vertebrates. A fruit fly has around 100,00 neurons, compared to 85 billion in humans.So at the conjunction of neuroscience and robotics lie insects — their tiny brains still too complex to model completely, but offering an easy way into modelling certain parts of the brain. It’s how engineers from Sheffield and Sussex universities can claim they’re preparing to upload the smell and sight parts of a bee’s brain into a bee-like flying robot, enmeshed with human-created software to create a completely new “brain”.
The hope is that the bee-bot could fly in areas that other robots can’t fit, like a collapsed building. And it makes sense to use nature’s own smell modules instead of developing new ones — their combination of efficiency in size and operation is so far unmatched by anything synthetic. A bee-bot could smell out explosives in a warzone, or drugs in shipping containers, or any of many other myriad uses, and actually go investigate. They can even be used as little spies. Who would notice a fly sitting on the wall of a meeting room?
A lot of research in the area of bug brains is being funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the Pentagon agency which seeks out new technologies for military use. It’s not hard to imagine a future where drones are grown on farms, with extra controls implanted at the larval stage — a process developed by bionic researchers at North Carolina State University.
Crawling Bio-Robot Runs on Rat Heart Cells
A new biological robot has been made from rat heart cells and synthetic materials, a new study says—and the machine could someday lead to others that will attack diseases inside the human body.
The centimeter-long “biobot" was made by attaching heart muscle cells onto a flexible structure, or body, of hydrogel—the same material used to make contact lenses for human eyes.
To make the biobot’s body, the team used a 3-D printer, which creates solid objects by laying down successive layers of soft materials that fuse together and harden.
Gathering the heart cells was a bit trickier. The researchers removed whole hearts from anesthetized newborn rats, cut the organs into tiny pieces, and then processed the fragments to loosen and separate the heart cells. The cells were then added to the robot body—each bot contains between a few thousand and a few hundred thousand.
"In a few days they start beating, and the bots start to move," explained study co-author Rashid Bashir, an engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who helped develop the robot.
As the biobot’s “engine,” the heart cells’ contractions bend the machine’s body, causing it to move forward fractions of an inch per second. The biobot has two legs, one that propels it forward and another that acts as a stabilizer.
Heart cells were chosen for the biobot because they spontaneously contract, or “beat,” in time with one another, Bashir said by email.
We live in a world of sounds, full of beautiful music, birds chirping, and the voices of our friends. It’s a rich cacophony, with blaring beeps, accented alarms, and knock-knock jokes. The sound of a door opening can alert us to a friend’s arrival, and a door slamming can alert us to an impending argument.
HEARBO (HEAR-ing roBOt) is a robot developed at Honda Research Institute–Japan (HRI-JP), and its job is to understand this world of sound, in a field called Computational Auditory Scene Analysis.
"I feel like the Terminator": One-armed man’s life transformed by advanced robot hand
A one-armed man’s life has been transformed by a robot hand so accurate it can grip an egg without cracking it.
Nigel Ackland’s advanced bionic limb has given him back the ability to do everyday tasks such as peeling vegetables, tying laces and typing.
The 53-year-old lost his right arm below the elbow after it was crushed in an industrial accident six years ago.
He struggled with NHS prosthetic parts and was selected to take part in a trial of the pioneering limb – controlled by him twitching muscles in his upper arm.
Nigel said: “I have been blown away by the robotic hand. I could sit and watch it all day. I feel like the Terminator.
"The fingers even move when I yawn and stretch.
“I am slowly becoming more at one with it. Tying a shoe lace and chopping a vegetable are now much easier.”
The former precious metals smelter said: “It has made a massive difference to my life and health. Losing a limb can take you into a dark place.”
Right-handed Nigel, who lives with wife Vanessa, 50, and son Conor, 19, in Royston, Cambridgeshire, was one of seven amputees around the world picked by British prosthetics firm RSLSteeper to try out the bebionic3 hand that costs between £8,000 and £12,000.
A US man who lost his right leg in a motorcycle accident is to attempt history by using a thought-controlled bionic leg to reach the top of one of the world’s tallest skyscrapers simply by thinking: “Climb stairs”.
Advanced exoskeleton promises more independence for people with paraplegia
The dream of regaining the ability to stand up and walk has come closer to reality for people paralyzed below the waist who thought they would never take another step.
A team of engineers at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Intelligent Mechatronics has developed a powered exoskeleton that enables people with severe spinal cord injuries to stand, walk, sit and climb stairs. Its light weight, compact size and modular design promise to provide users with an unprecedented degree of independence.
The university has several patents pending on the design and Parker Hannifin Corporation – a global leader in motion and control technologies – has signed an exclusive licensing agreement to develop a commercial version of the device, which it plans on introducing in 2014.
People plus: is transhumanism the next stage in our evolution?
Inviting artificial intelligence into our bodies has appeal – but it also carries certain risks.
I have often wondered what it would be like to rid myself of a keyboard for data entry, and a computer screen for display. Some of my greatest moments of reflection are when I am in the car driving long distances, cooking in my kitchen, watching the kids play at the park, waiting for a doctor’s appointment or on a plane thousands of metres above sea level.
I have always been great at multitasking but at these times it is often not practical or convenient to be head down typing on a laptop, tablet or smartphone.
It would be much easier if I could just make a mental note to record an idea and have it recorded, there and then. And who wouldn’t want the ability to “jack into” all the world’s knowledge sources in an instant via a network?
Who wouldn’t want instant access to their life-pages filled with all those memorable occasions? Or even the ability to slow down the process of ageing, as long as living longer equated to living with mind and body fully intact, as outlined in the video.
Transhumanists would have us believe that these things are not only possible but inevitable. In short: we Homo sapiens may dictate the next stage of our evolution through our use of technology.
