'Robo-suit' lets man lift 100kg. Engineers in Italy have developed a wearable robot which can enable users to lift up to 50kg in each extended hand. It could be developed to work in factories or to clear debris and rescue survivors in earthquake zones, they say. The “body extender” has been built by the Perceptual Robotics Laboratory (Percro) at Pisa's Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna. The exoskeleton is one of many being developed around the world for manufacturing, therapeutic and military purposes. Percro's Fabio Salsedo demonstrates how the machine works. Source

GTCMT - Robotic Drum Prosthesis Project. Jason Barnes demonstrating his new robotic drumming prosthesis, developed by GTCMT’s Robotic Musicianship Group. Free concert - March 22, Bailey Performance Center, Kennesaw State University. Jason will perform with musicians from Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, Kennesaw State University Music Department, and Atlanta Institute of Music.

Robots can catch. http://www.plasticpals.com/?p=27592 Agile Justin (built by DLR / German Aerospace Center) can catch balls by watching their trajectory and moving its hands into the correct position in just 5 milliseconds! Source

Autonomous, self-contained soft robotic fish at MIT. Soft robots — which don’t just have soft exteriors but are also powered by fluid flowing through flexible channels — have become a sufficiently popular research topic that they now have their own journal, Soft Robotics. In the first issue of that journal, out this month, MIT researchers report the first self-contained autonomous soft robot, a “fish” that can execute an escape maneuver, convulsing its body to change direction, in just 100 milliseconds, or as quickly as a real fish can.

"We’re excited about soft robots for a variety of reasons," says Daniela Rus, a professor of computer science and engineering, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and one of the researchers who designed and built the fish. "As robots penetrate the physical world and start interacting with people more and more, it’s much easier to make robots safe if their bodies are so wonderfully soft that there’s no danger if they whack you."

The robotic fish was built by Andrew Marchese, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and lead author on the new paper, where he’s joined by Rus and postdoc Cagdas D. Onal. Each side of the fish’s tail is bored through with a long, tightly undulating channel. Carbon dioxide released from a canister in the fish’s abdomen causes the channel to inflate, bending the tail in the opposite direction.

CINDY - a capable robotic helper. Here we see a fully autonomous robot by the name of “Cindy”, navigating through a building, when a remote human operator gets in touch with her, informing her that Commander Z needs a medical kit and that one should be located in the room she is in. Cindy is able to infer the implicit instruction from the dialogue and offers her help to get the medical kit. When her offer is accepted, she forms a goal to look for a medical kit in the current room, but she also discovers that she does not know what the medkit looks like, so she asks and gets a description. From that description, she is able to build a visual model of the medkit, which allows her to look for it. Once she finds it on the table, she approaches the table and aligns herself with it, carefully looking for the handle which will allow her to pick it up. Although she has never picked up a medkit before, she is able to plan (through internal simulations) a trajectory for her right hand to grab the medkit, at which point she forms a goal to drive to the room with the green door, where she was told Commander Z is located. All reasoning, inference, natural language understanding, as well as perceptual and action learning algorithms are general and implemented in our DIARC control architecture. Source

Drone-Aided Long Exposure Shots Yield Mouthwatering Light Graffiti

Using the leanest and meanest in quadcopter drone technology, the team at production group FICTION have blessed the Internet with a mind-boggling new photo series that combines long exposure photography with colorful LEDs and mirroring. The results, well, see for yourself: 

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Robot strippers. Robot pole dancing what!!! Germany: Poledancing robots sleaze up CeBIT. German developer Tobit Software brought along its programmable pole dancing robots to liven up its booth at the CeBIT trade fair in Hanover on Monday. Designed by British artist, Giles Walker, the robot dancers can be controlled with a smartphone app that allows users to change their position and the colour of their internal lighting. Source

Papercut Light Boxes by Hari & Deepti

As part of this year’s SCOPE NY art show, Black Book Gallery presented stunning hand cut paper works by artists Hari & Deepti. The creative couple, based out of Denver, Colorado, each brings to the table different skill sets. Hari, whose full name is Harikrishnan Panicker, is a trained graphic designer and illustrator while Deepti Nair specializes in paper cut art. After experimenting with paper cut shadow boxes in 2010, they started to incorporate light to their works. Now, they’re known for their unique style of adding flexible LED strip lights to their intricate papercut pieces.

"Paper is brutal in its simplicity as a medium," they state. "It demands the attention of the artist while it provides the softness they need to mold it in to something beautiful. It is playful, light, colorless and colorful. It is minimal and intricate. It reflects light, creates depth and illusions in a way that it takes the artist through a journey with limitless possibilities.”

“What amazes us about the paper cut light boxes is the dichotomy of the piece in its lit and unlit state, the contrast is so stark that it has this mystical effect on the viewers.”

Black Book Gallery website
Photos via [HiFructose, Black Book Gallery]

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