Universal Robotic Gripper

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Graduate student John Amend, left, and associate professor
Hod Lipson with the universal robotic gripper.
(Credit: Robert Barker/University Photography)

A question may have flashed in your mind, What's a robotic gripper.....??!! Go on reading you will come to know...:)

First, look at your hand, can you see how amazing machine our hand is..??!! It can grab anything in this world. Its a piece of perfection. Robotics is nothing but trying to replicate or design such masterpieces of nature.

Robotic arms to work as a human arm are being created but there many limitations.These cant grab everything. But this latest "Robotic Gripper" is the most advanced and works in a very similar way and it can grab nearly everything...!!

Traditional robotics arm designs are more like a human hand but the researchers from Cornell University, University of Chicago and iRobot have gone beyond such designs and created a very unique and versatile design using, everyday ground coffee and a latex party balloon...!!!!

This universal gripper as the researchers like to call it, is a work of Lipson, Heinrich Jaeger at the University of Chicago, and Chris Jones at iRobot Corp.

Now let me tell you how it works and what is the significance of that coffee and balloon......
everyday party balloon filled with ground coffee -- any variety will do -- is attached to a robotic arm. The coffee-filled balloon presses down and deforms around the desired object, and then a vacuum sucks the air out of the balloon, solidifying its grip. When the vacuum is released, the balloon becomes soft again, and the gripper lets go.

What Hod Lipson, Cornell associate professor of mechanical engineering and computer science says regarding the universal gripper is,"This is one of the closest things we've ever done that could be on the market tomorrow".

yes.. he is absolutely right and the future applications of this robotic arm may be limitless..!

• it can be used in military to dismantle explosive devises or to move potentially dangerous objects
• These robotics arms can be used in factories.
• on the feet of a robot that could walk on walls
• on prosthetic limbs

Think about it there are many more of its applications....

Quasi - a robotic teacher

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Robots are one of the most interesting and happening field today. There are robots being built almost every single work. Robotics is very fascinating, now Interbots ( click me to know about Interbots ) thought why not fascinate kids about the same and at the same time give them some knowledge.

Interbots have created their latest entertainment robot, called Quasi.Its being used in "Rockin Robots", its Carnegie Mellon University’s traveling science show for kids.

The robot Quasi teaches kids the various subjects and I think kids will love it and it may help them to better concentrate on the subject.Its an entertainment robot and its like a perfect mixture of science and puppetry. Quasi is more like a puppet and can be controlled by an unseen human performer.

But don't underestimate Quasi....:) its much much advanced than a puppet..:)
Watch the video... you will understand...

Uncle Sam - The snake robot...!!!

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Nature is the finest designer. Just see around you, you are surrounded by countless amazing creations of the nature.Leave other things, look at yourself you are a masterpiece....!! Scientists and researchers are just trying to understand what nature has done and are attempting to duplicate it. Yes.. and that's Robotics....! Nature is the inspiration for building robots.Well.. we may be billions of years behind the nature.....but we should not forget we are approaching that excellence very fast.
Scientists have already created so many intelligent robots... you can check out my older posts on robots....

Now the Biorobotics Laboratory at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have got inspired another one of the creations by nature, the snake...!! They have been successful in building such an awesome robot and its named Uncle Sam.

The movements of 'Uncle Sam' are biomimetic. It can mimic the movements of a real snake including side-winding, wiggling and rolling.To our amazement, it can also wrap itself around a tree trunk and climb vertically up the outside of the tree.Uncle Sam is built using modular segments containing actuators and sensors, and the head segment is fitted with a camera.

There are some advantages to the robot being modular...

• allows the snake robot the potential to be self-assembled in the field.
• easy to repair of the robot if sections are damaged
• robot’s length can be adjusted easily as needed.

According to the Biorobotics lab, Uncle Sam is still need to be improved.There are a lot of work to do on the robot such as...

• Uncle Sam was designed for a specific trunk diameter and a specific tree.So they are trying to give Uncle Sam the ability to climb any try with any diameter.
• power supply for the robot, since at the moment it must be tethered to the power supply.

No discovery or invention is complete without its applications.... So Uncle Sam is not useless...

• locating survivors in collapsed buildings after earthquakes or other natural disasters
• for inspecting bridges, mines, and any spaces too tight for humans
• disarming bombs

See these videos I uploaded..... I bet you will be left with your jaw dropped at the end...!!





For more info please visit....HERE

Emotions expressing robot...!!!

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Noa

Robotics is one of the most happening fields of science n technology. There are so many robots that have been developed with a technology beyond once imagination. I have collected some of most advanced human assisting robots around the world in one my older posts called "Rise of robots" .

Now another mind blowing robot has been developed which can interact with humans and can do so with expressing emotions.....!!!!

A scientific team led by Dr. Lola Cañamero at the university of Hertfordshire and in collaboration with a consortium of universities and robotic companies across Europe is the genius behind this awesome robot. Compared other advanced robots existing today, this robot differs in the way that it can form attachments, interact and express emotion through bodily expression. Being a part of the FEELIX GROWING project (it means feel,interact,express. Its a research project that is working to design robots that can detect and respond to human emotional cues.), the name of this cute little robot ( you will come to know why i called it cute after you are finished reading..!!) is Noa.

Noa is programmed to learn just like small children and respond us in a very similar way.It can use the same types of expressive and behavioural cues that babies use to learn to interact socially and emotionally with others.Noa is programmed in such a way that it can learn and adapt adapt to the actions and mood of their human caregivers, and to become particularly attached to an individual who interacts with the robot. The more you interact, the more Noa learns and it gets attached to you emotionally.

Amazingly Noa is capable of expressing anger, fear, sadness, happiness, excitement and pride and will demonstrate very visible distress when it undergoes a stressful situation and the caregiver fails to comfort it...!! Even the infants of chimpanzees were studied extensively in order to learn its communication skills and hence to program Noa.

One of the aims of the project is to provide 24-hour companionship for young children in hospital and to provide support for their parents, carers, doctors and nurses. "Our goal was to create companions who can live with people and support them in daily activities. We want them to live socially and emotionally, to become adapted and to do things in the way humans expect them to," said Lola Cañamero.

See what Dr. Lola Cañamero feels about these emotion expressing robots in her own words in the video uploaded below........

Artificial bee eye

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Did you know how bees navigate ? Bees can fly in a particular constant direction.They can track the way back to beehive by sensing the polarization of sunlight(Which we cant see) and orient themselves by the pattern it forms in a blue sky,....!!!

Bee eye view

Just imagine how well developed would their eye have been to sense the polarization of sunlight..!!
Did you know bees posses 5 eyes..??!! And they have got some special photoreceptors embedded in their eyes and the arrray of these photoreceptors areused by the bees to scan and map the polarization patterns in the sky.Also it is interesting to know that bees can perceive movements that are separated by 1/300th of a second..where as humans can only sense movements separated by 1/50th of a second.If a bee enters a cinema hall, it can differentiate individual movie frame bein projected....!!!

Now researchers from the Center of Excellence 'Cognitive Interaction Technology' at Bielefield University Germany have succeeded in recreating an imaging system, which mimics the vision of a bee...!!

This artificial bee eye consists of a light-weight mirror-lens combination attached to a USB Video camera.Using a combination of a curved reflective surface that is built into acrylic glass (Poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) its a transparent thermoplastic) with lenses covering the frontal field in the bee eye camera, the researchers are able to take some unique images showing us the world in a bee's point of view.

In the future the researchers have thoughts of including UV (Ultra Violet), so that they can simulate the colour sensing capabilities of the bee and even the polarization sensing.

This artificial bee eye is expected to be useful for many purposes such as the simulation of bee-like agents in virtual environments and, in combination with presented imaging system, for testing bee-inspired visual navigation strategies on mobile robots.

The Transformer..!!!

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The robot developed at MIT


Transformer robot from the movie Transformers



Who haven't seen and enjoyed the movie Transformers...? Its one of the best sci-fi movies ever made. In this movie , some alien machines come to earth from a planet called cybertron. Those alien robots in the movie have a power of transforming themselves into any shape they want. This is one amazing idea to build a shape changing robot is hovering the minds of scientists for a long time. Now finally the researchers from MIT and Harvard have succeeded in getting a step closer in building a transformer...!!!!


Professor Daniela Rus, director of the Distributed Robotics Laboratory at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory(CSAIL) at MIT and Erik Demaine, the youngest professor in the history of MIT (who is also from CSAIL) are the 'beautiful minds' behind the creation of this transformer.

By combining the origami and electrical engineering , Rus and Erik have built a prototype that that can automatically assume the shape of either an origami boat or a paper airplane when it receives different electrical signals.

One of the big research areas in distributed robotics – systems of robots that can work together to tackle complicated tasks – is what’s called “programmable matter,” the idea that small, uniform robots could snap together like intelligent Legos to create larger, more versatile robots.
But according to Rus the approach has some drawbacks. “Most people are looking at separate modules, and they’re really worried about how these separate modules aggregate themselves and find other modules to connect with to create the shape that they’re supposed to create,” Rus says. But, she adds, “actively gathering modules to build up a shape bottom-up, from scratch, is just really hard given the current state of the art in our hardware.”

One of the research areas of Erik is Mathematics of origami, so their idea of combining origami with electrical engineering led to the idea of a flat sheet of material with tiny robotic muscles, or actuators, which could fold itself into useful objects.

About a year ago, Demaine and several colleagues proved that a large enough sheet creased in what’s called the “box pleat pattern” could be folded into a close approximation of any possible three-dimensional shape. The box pleat pattern divides the sheet into squares, each of which has a diagonal crease across it; but if two squares share an edge, their diagonal creases are mirror images.

Based on this result, the team of researchers developed an algorithm that, given an arbitrary three-dimensional shape, could generate a sequence of folds that would produce it from a box-pleated sheet.They also developed another set of algorithms that, given sequences of folds for several different shapes, would determine the minimum number of actuators necessary to produce all of them.

Thus the researchers at MIT successfully built the World's first shape changing robot...!!! Check out this revolutionary prototype of transformer live in action in the video uploaded....

Rise of the robots

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Robots were made in earlier days to search the surface of mars or moon. But now its no longer the sole purpose of building robots. There was this sms I got which said " The laziest person in this world is the greatest inventor....!!! you know why...?? because he always finds an easier way to do things...!!!" So man was getting lazier day by day and he started to build robots to serve him. and now Robotics is one of the most developing branch in the field of technology.

Here in this post lets check out some of the most advanced human assisting robots around the world...........



Riba (Robot for Interactive Body Assistance)


PerMMA(Personal Mobility and Manipulation Appliance)
Kompai(a plainspoken personal assistant for grandma)

Herb(Home Exploring Robot Butler)

Tamer(robotic "touvh therapist' soothes anxiety)

Cyclops(a legally blind robotic guinea pig for testinf artificial eyes)

RISER (Robot for Interactive Sensory Engagement and Rehabilitation)
Raven 2 (a robo surgeon who does the work of two doctors)

Cardioarm(the slinkiest surgical tool)


Taizo(the workout instructor)