MEET ATLAS, the Pentagon’s 6'2", 330-pound humanitarian robot. He was designed to save lives in disaster zones (like Fukushima). But while this Tin Man has a heart, he lacks a brain. In December, seven teams of scientists from top institutions, including MIT and Virginia Tech, will compete to code the bot for action. Each team will send its own Atlas into Darpa’s trials—eight tasks that will test his ability to navigate degraded terrain, drive a utility vehicle, and enter buildings. “We designed Atlas to facilitate programming, but we expect Darpa to make the competition challenging,” says Marc Raibert, president of Boston Dynamics, Atlas’ maker. Here’s the skinny on the massive bot.
Archive for 2013
In building drones that kill people, the US has a couple-decade head start on China. But when it comes to domestic uses, US businesses are hamstrung because the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) isn’t required to issue commercial drone rules until 2015. In the meantime, one of China’s biggest delivery companies is tinkering with using drones—with Chinese government permission.
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SF Express is testing a drone it has built for delivering packages to remote areas, according to Chinese media reports. The drone can hit an maximum altitude of 100 meters (328 feet) and deliver parcels within two meters of its target. It’s not clear what sort of weight these puppies can handle, but Beijing journalists calculated that it probably can’t carry more than 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds).
Stopping and accelerating again at each station will waste both energy and time. But in this brilliant new Chinese train innovation No time is wasted- get on & off the bullet train without the train stopping. The bullet train is moving all the time.
A mere 5 min stop per station (elderly passengers cannot be hurried) will result in a total loss of 5 min x 30 stations or 2.5 hours of train journey time!
How it works (view the movie):
1. To board the train : The passengers at a station embarks onto to a connector cabin way before the train even arrives at the station. When the train arrives, it will not stop at all. It just slows down to pick up the connector cabin which will move with the train on the roof of the train.
While the train is still moving away from the station, those passengers will board the train from the connector cabin mounted on the train’s roof. After fully unloading all its passengers, the cabin connector cabin will be moved to the back of the train so that the next batch of outgoing passengers who want to alight at the next station will board the connector cabin at the rear of the train roof.
2. To get off the train: As stated after fully unloading all its passengers, the cabin connector cabin will be moved to the back of the train so that the next batch of outgoing passengers who want to alight at the next station will board the connector cabin at the rear of the train roof. When the train arrives at the next station, it will simply drop the whole connector cabin at the station itself and leave it behind at the station. The outgoing passengers can take their own time to disembark at the station while the train had already left. At the same time, the train will pick up the incoming embarking passengers on another connector cabin in the front part of the train’s roof. So the train will always drop one connector cabin at the rear of its roof and pick up a new connector cabin in the front part of the train’s roof at each station.
Source: RealityPod
Categories: Robotics, Technology
- Surce:awescience
With the recent advances in technology, their has been a deluge of new gadgets flooding the markets. From new smartphones to new robots that complete your daily tasks in an orderly and efficient manner, we cannot imagine our lives without the presence of these gadgets.
There are Gadgets that make it to mainstream media and everyone knows about them. But then, there are also novelty gadgets that don’t make it to the limelight but they can greatly improve our life. Today, we have rounded up a similar list of unusual but very useful gadgets that you should have with you.
There are Gadgets that make it to mainstream media and everyone knows about them. But then, there are also novelty gadgets that don’t make it to the limelight but they can greatly improve our life. Today, we have rounded up a similar list of unusual but very useful gadgets that you should have with you.
MEET ATLAS, the Pentagon’s 6'2", 330-pound humanitarian robot. He was designed to save lives in disaster zones (like Fukushima). But while this Tin Man has a heart, he lacks a brain. In December, seven teams of scientists from top institutions, including MIT and Virginia Tech, will compete to code the bot for action. Each team will send its own Atlas into Darpa’s trials—eight tasks that will test his ability to navigate degraded terrain, drive a utility vehicle, and enter buildings. “We designed Atlas to facilitate programming, but we expect Darpa to make the competition challenging,” says Marc Raibert, president of Boston Dynamics, Atlas’ maker. Here’s the skinny on the massive bot.
The Geneva Drive, or Maltese Mechanism, converts continuous rotational motion into an intermittent ‘tick.’ This is usually responsible for the ticking of the minute and/or second hand in clocks.
Geneva Drive
Young Australian of the Year, Marita Cheng assembling a robot at Melbourne University last year. Photo: Ken Irwin
You're a brilliant young computer science student who was awarded Young Australian of the Year in 2012 after you founded an international organisation to get girls interested in high tech careers.
A worm drive is a gear arrangement in which a worm (which is a gear in the form of a screw) meshes with a worm gear (which is similar in appearance to a spur gear, and is also called a worm wheel).Like other gear arrangements, a worm drive can reduce rotational speed or allow higher torque to be transmitted. Unlike with ordinary gear trains, the direction of transmission (input shaft vs output shaft) is not reversible when using large reduction ratios, due to the greater friction involved between the worm and worm-wheel, when usually a single start (one spiral) worm is used
Worm drives are used in presses, in rolling mills, in conveying engineering, in mining industry machines, and on rudders. In addition, milling heads and rotary tables are positioned using high-precision duplex worm drives with adjustable backlash. Worm gears are used on many lift- (in US English known as elevator) and escalator-drive applications due to their compact size and the non-reversibility of the gear
Worm drives are used in presses, in rolling mills, in conveying engineering, in mining industry machines, and on rudders. In addition, milling heads and rotary tables are positioned using high-precision duplex worm drives with adjustable backlash. Worm gears are used on many lift- (in US English known as elevator) and escalator-drive applications due to their compact size and the non-reversibility of the gear
Uploaded by Saurabh Jain, Mechanical Engineering
Drive shaft:-
A drive shaft, driveshaft, driving shaft, propeller shaft (prop shaft), or Cardan shaft is a mechanical component for transmitting torque and rotation, usually used to connect other components of a drive train that cannot be connected directly because of distance or the need to allow for relative movement between them.
Drive shafts are carriers of torque: they are subject to torsion and shear stress, equivalent to the difference between the input torque and the load. They must therefore be strong enough to bear the stress, whilst avoiding too much additional weight as that would in turn increase their inertia.
TELESAR V is a telexistence robot system, being researched by a group at Keio University led by Professor Tachi. Telexistence is a concept first advocated by Professor Tachi in the 1980s. The aim of this technology is to free people from time and space constraints, by using remotely operated robots to interact with the remote environment.
"What you can do with this telexistence robot is, you can see the things you usually see, even at a remote location. If you're a physician, for example, to examine a patient, you need to extend your hands. With this system, you have hands that you can move just like your own. You can also hear what's going on around you. Those are the first things we've achieved with this system. And now, as a feature of TELESAR V, we've added sensors that communicate what the robot's fingers are touching, and a system to feed the touch sensation back to the operator. This technology makes it possible to operate the robot as your avatar, and feel what you're touching, even if you're a long distance away."
The operator uses a 3D head mounted display which covers the entire field of view, to see exactly what the robot can see. The sense of touch, recorded using force vectors and temperature data obtained by the robot's sensors, is also transmitted to the operator allowing them to feel the shape and temperature of objects. Currently, the robot can recognize surface unevenness as fine as that on Lego blocks.
"The robot consists of a body, arms, and hands. The body has 7 degrees of freedom, the head has 8, and the arm joints have 7, like a person's arms. The robot's hands can't move as freely as a person's, but they do come very close, with 15 degrees of freedom."
"Our aim is to make it feel as if you're really in another place, and this is really your body, and to enable you to do the things you can with your own body."
This multi-viewpoint robotic camera system, under development by NHK, links the motion of eight sub-cameras to that of an individual camera, so that all the cameras film the same moving object.
"Using this system, you can create the effect of stopping time, and moving the viewpoint all around the subject."
"Previous methods used a fixed camera, so they could only capture subjects moving in a narrow or limited space. But this multi-viewpoint robot camera system can film dynamically moving sports, or subjects at lots of locations in an extensive space."
Mechatronics Engineer
What is "Mechatronics"
In playing devil's advocate to spark controversy and conversation ...It use to be USA’s manufacturing and other industries where set apart from the rest of the world by its innovation and efficiency brought about by education, teamwork and individual capitalistic drive. In plain English, our young knew the way to a financially secure future was to become a master of their trade. If you had an electrical problem you called a master electrician, mechanical problem… get a master mechanic, need something machined, a machinist. Need electronic device designed, you get electronic engineer, an electrical control designed… get an electrical engineer.
10 Weird & Amazing Robot Facts
1. Elektro, the world’s first humanoid robot, debuted in 1939. Built by Westinghouse, the seven-foot-tall walking machine “spoke” more than 700 words. Elektro later appeared in the 1960 B movie Sex Kittens Go to College.
