Two Israeli scientists may have created the catalyst for a medical revolution with their new project: a tiny, 1-millimeter-diameter robot which is capable of crawling through human veins and arteries. The bot can cling to vessel walls using small, powerful arms which protrude from a hub in its center. Manned control is accomplished by using a magnetic field outside of the body, and the robot is able to swim against the flow of blood, as well as squeeze through a variety of arterial openings. Right now the doctors don’t know what the medical applications might be, though they speculate that a large number of the bots could be used to fight certain types of cancer. Other ideas on the table include using the bots to exact revenge on anyone opposing their crazy ideas.
AUR is a robotic desk lamp, a collaborative lighting assistant. It serves as a non-anthropomorphic robotic platform as part of my Ph.D thesis on human-robot fluency and nonverbal behavior.
The lamp’s design was conceived around an existing 5-DoF robotic arm, and is aimed to evoke a personal relationship with the human partner without resorting to human-like features. By retaining the lamp’s “objectness”, I hope to explore the relationship that can be maintained through abstract gestures and nonverbal behavior alone.
The lamp is animated using a custom pipeline enabling the dynamic control of behaviors authored in a 3d animation system, and will perform in a unique human-robot joint theater performance this spring.
The Robocoaster is a variation on the robot arms which are used in factories to build cars. By adding seats, designers have turned a functional machine into the fastest, most unpredictable ride you’ll ever take. It can be self programmed to travel in millions of movement combinations. No ride will ever be the same.
MIT physics professor Marin Soljacic and his team of researchers behind the latest wireless electricity scheme have demoed their magnetically coupled resonator technology on a 60-watt lightbulb that wasn’t plugged in. This new technology is called WiTricity. WiTricity is based on using coupled resonant objects. Two resonant objects of the same resonant frequency tend to exchange energy efficiently, while interacting weakly with extraneous off-resonant objects.
Magnetic coupling is particularly suitable for everyday applications because most common materials interact only very weakly with magnetic fields, so interactions with extraneous environmental objects are suppressed even further. “The fact that magnetic fields interact so weakly with biological organisms is also important for safety considerations,” Kurs, a graduate student in physics, points out.
The investigated design consists of two copper coils, each a self-resonant system. One of the coils, attached to the power source, is the sending unit. Instead of irradiating the environment with electromagnetic waves, it fills the space around it with a non-radiative magnetic field oscillating at MHz frequencies. The non-radiative field mediates the power exchange with the other coil (the receiving unit), which is specially designed to resonate with the field. The resonant nature of the process ensures the strong interaction between the sending unit and the receiving unit, while the interaction with the rest of the environment is weak.
Dubbed “Surface” and five years in the making, it’s set to establish a paradigm of what Microsoft calls “surface computers” which use touch as the sole method of input.
Painting with surface sounds particularly intuitive (and fun): you can use a paint brush or simply dip your fingers into virtual paint cups. Photo resizing and stacking works much like the iPhone’s zoom gestures. Also cool is the capacity for multiple users.
With the units running $10,000, Microsoft expects prices to plummet over the next three to five years to the point they’ll be in your homes. In the meantime you’ll be able to play with them at T-Mobile stores, Harrah’s and Sheraton hotels.
According to Technabob, HP wowed crowds with their multi-touch display wall at the recent Wall Street Journal D5 Conference. The screen is 16 by 8-feet and allows multiple visitors to simultaneously control audio, video, photos and other multimedia content using their hands to navigate.
Spatial Robots, created by Miles Kemp in 2007, is a website dedicated to cataloging, discussing and promoting interactive spatial systems, user interfaces and emerging technology in architecture.
