MorpHex is a robot over a year in the making by Kare Halvorsen and he is not yet done with it. Using 25 servos, an Xbee radio and various other parts, Kare has made an amazing robot.
One of our favorite parts is how the robot is turned on and off with a long “key”. Kare hopes to give the robot the ability to roll like a ball in the future.
Check out all the details on Kare’s blog.
Link via (CNET)
Researchers from Harvard University led by George M. Whitesides have created a 5 inch soft robot.
The robot has air pumped into it that allows it to slither or crawl. The robot is made out of elastomeric polymers and modeled on squid, starfish and other creatures that do not have internal skeletons.
Soft robots are becoming a popular research field as evidenced by this robot and iRobot’s Blob Robot among others.
The Telesar V robot avatar was developed by Keio University in Tokyo. Similar to the telepresence robot QB from Anybots, the Telesar V goes further by allowing users to actually feel objects thanks to sensor laden hands.
The amazing hands are touch sensitive as well as allowing the user to feel how hot or cold the object is.
The Telesar V is a telexistence robot where the user is required to wear a head mounted display that covers their vision.
I’m not sure how practical a Telesar V would be for a regular office setting, but it could be good for other environments like hospitals. That is, if it doesn’t scare the patients.
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Eszter Ozsvald from the Center for Biorobotics in Estonia has created a robotic fish with only 1 servo called Ariel.
Eszter used a real fish as the her original model and made a cast of it. Shown here are the electronics being put inside an epoxy shell. She then used fiberglass and plastic resin to isolate and waterproof the electronics.
Here is what Eszter has to say about Ariel:
The end product was a biologically inspired robot fish. Instead of a rigid body, I implemented a novel material combination (silicon-polymer) that allows a flexible embodiment. The operation of a compliant tail proved to be very difficult to model theoretically: not only are compliant bodies non-linear, but the fish-flow interaction is of tremendous complexity. With the iterative approach in design, however, the result was excellent. The robot’s locomotion was surprisingly fish-like; it even left the same vortexes behind as biological fish do.
See our previous post on Maurizio Pofiri and his robotic fish.
Click through for a video of Ariel in action.
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German firm Fraunhofer has created a robotic spider for hazardous missions using 3D printing.
Spiders are very agile, and some can even jump. They owe this capability to their hydraulically operated limbs. Researchers have now designed a mobile robot modeled on the same principle that moves spider legs. Created using a 3-D printing process, this lightweight can explore terrain that is beyond human reach.
Using an elastic drive bellows, the eight legs are pneumatically controlled. The robot is light , quick to produce and not costly thanks to a 3D printing method. The spider robot is so cheap that Fraunhofer envisions throwing it away after being only used once. Anyone want a cheap 3D printable robotic spider army?
The robot will be shown at the upcoming Euromold trade show in Frankfurt Germany from November 29 – December 12.
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