Lifeboat Foundation

A year after Tesla announced its humanoid robot — the Tesla Bot — the conceptual general-purpose robot is up against some Chinese competition. On the sidelines of Xiaomi’s Autumn launch event in Beijing, the company announced its first full-size humanoid bionic robot. The rather unimaginatively named Xiaomi CyberOne is the second robotic product from Xiaomi and comes a year after the announcement of the Xiaomi Cyberdog, which they showcased at their 2021 Autumn launch event.

Xiaomi.

Continue reading “Xiaomi CyberOne Robot Revealed To Give Tesla Bot A Humanoid Rival” »

A pair of UCLA bioengineers and a former postdoctoral scholar have developed a new class of bionic 3D camera systems that can mimic flies’ multiview vision and bats’ natural sonar sensing, resulting in multidimensional imaging with extraordinary depth range that can also scan through blind spots.

Powered by computational image processing, the camera can decipher the size and shape of objects hidden around corners or behind other items. The technology could be incorporated into autonomous vehicles or medical imaging tools with sensing capabilities far beyond what is considered state of the art today. This research has been published in Nature Communications.

Continue reading “Bug eyes and bat sonar: Bioengineers turn to animal kingdom for creation of bionic super 3D cameras” »

In recent years, material scientists have designed a wide range of innovative materials that could be used to create new technologies, including soft robots, controllers and smart textiles. These materials include artificial muscles, structures that resemble biological muscles in shape and that could improve the movements of robots or enable the creation of clothing that adapts to different environmental conditions.

As part of an ongoing project focused on textile-based soft actuators, a team of researchers at Jiangnan University in China recently developed new artificial muscles based on free-standing, single-helical woolen yarn. Their artificial muscles, introduced in a paper published in Smart Materials and Structures, could be used to easily and affordably produce twisted actuators that can detect and respond to humidity in their environment.

“We are trying to design flexible and versatile actuators by leveraging the hierarchical structure design of textiles, ranging from microscales (e.g., molecular chains and aggregation structures) to macroscales (e.g., fiber morphology and textile architectures),” Fengxin Sun, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. “Realizing a yarn-based artificial muscle with free-standing and single-helical architecture via eco-friendly and easy-fabrication manufacturing process is still challenging.”

Dubbed GRACE, the robot hand can even bend fingers and make realistic human movements.

Scientists have developed a new type of artificial muscle that can lift 1,000 times its own weight * 3D actuators were combined to form a real-life robot hand that could lift 8kg * The high-strength properties could be applied to create higher capabilities in other body parts and a range of devices.

A team of researchers from the Italian Institute of Technology has just developed a new class of high-strength artificial muscles that can stretch and contract like a human muscle in a way that has never been done before. According to a recent research paper, the muscles perform with a level of versatility and grace closely matched to life-like movements, and provide a boost in the development of three-dimensional functional devices such as artificial body parts. class of strong pneumatic artificial muscles has been developed and combined to form a robot hand that can lift up to thousand times its own weight.

In medicine, a prosthesis, or a prosthetic implant, is an artificial device that replaces a missing body part, which may be lost through trauma, disease, or a condition present at birth. A pioneering project to develop advanced pressure sensors for use in robotic systems could transform prosthetics and robotic limbs. The innovative research project aspires to develop sensors that provide enhanced capabilities to robots, helping improve their motor skills and dexterity, through the use of highly accurate pressure sensors that provide haptic feedback and distributed touch.

It is led by the University of the West of Scotland (UWS), Integrated Graphene Ltd, and supported by the Scottish Research Partnership in Engineering (SRPe) and the National Manufacturing Institute for Scotland (NMIS) Industry Doctorate Programme in Advanced Manufacturing. This is not for the first time when the team of highly talented researchers have decided to bring the much needed transformative change in prosthetics and robotic limbs.

The human brain relies on a constant stream of tactile information to carry out basic tasks, like holding a cup of coffee. Yet some of the most advanced motorized limbs — including those controlled solely by a person’s thoughts — don’t provide this sort of feedback. As a result, even state-of-the-art prosthetics can often frustrate their users.

So, Artificial intelligence predicts selfies would dominate, ghoulish humans, holding mobiles, at the end of the earth, an event that would destroy every sign of life. Indeed, it is hypothetical and difficult to imagine the situation. An AI image generator, Midjourney, an obscure but close associate of Open AI, imagined a few of them revealing how scary they can be. Shared by a tik-tok account, @Robot Overloads, the images were hellish in tone and gory in substance. The images generated depict disfigured human beings with eyes as big as rat holes and fingers long enough to scoop out curdled blood from creatures of another world. These frames artificial intelligence has generated go beyond the portrayal of annihilation. Firstly, they are cut off from reality, and secondly, they are very few. The end of the world is billion years away when selfies would become a fossilized concept and humans are considered biological ancestors of cyborgs.

The pictures are stunning though in the sense that the elements like huge explosions going off in the background while a man maniacally staring into the camera are included in one frame. The imaginative spark of artificial intelligence should really be appreciated here. Perhaps it must have taken a hint or two from images of people taking selfies in the backdrop of accidents and natural calamities, to use them as click baits. Apparently, image generators give the users the power to visualize their imagination, how much ever removed from reality. However, the netizens are finding them captivating pleasantly, so much so that one of them wonders if they are from nibiru or planet X theories!! That one tik-tok video has got more than 12.7 million views and the reply, “OK no more sleeping,” posted by a Tik Tok user summarises, more than anything, the superficiality of melodramatic AI’s image generating capability.

A team of researchers at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia’s Bioinspired Soft Robotics Laboratory has developed a new pleat-based soft robotic actuator that can be used in a variety of sizes, down to just 1 centimeter. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group describes the technology behind their new actuator and how well it worked when they tested it under varied circumstances.

Engineers working on soft robotics projects have often found themselves constrained by standard pneumatic artificial muscle actuators, which tend to only work well at a given size due to the large number of complex parts. In this new effort, the researchers have added a new feature to such actuators that requires fewer parts, resulting in a smaller actuator.

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Scientists strapped a steering wheel and a lockbox of cancer-treating drugs onto bacteria. The biohybrids could reduce the toxic side effects of cancer treatment.