While a student at Florida Atlantic University Jennifer Frame developed a robotic jellyfish she called Jennifish.
The robot is made of silicone rubber and uses a Teensy microcontroller to control its actions. Small pumps on the underside take water in and shoot it out, propelling Jennifish upward.
In the future, sensors could be added to track the ocean’s temperature or salinity. Jennifer’s thesis advisor was Dr. Erik Engeberg, Associate Professor.
Meet Nybbles, the side project of Dr. Rongzhong Li. While teaching computer science, Dr Li developed an interest in robotics and soon began tinkering with microcontrollers.
Recently Dr Li launched the company Petoi with Nybble as its first product currently available on indigogo.
Nybble features open source code and cancan teach you programming. Programming can be done with the Arduino IDE.
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Atlas, the human like robot from Boston Dynamics now does parkour. Atlas is just under 5′ tall and weighs about 165 pounds.
Thanks to 28 different joints Atlas is very agile and also sport LiDAR and Stereo Vision.
In the latest video, Atlas is seen running, jumping over a log and then hopping up several large steps. Atlas is very well balanced but if knocked over, can get up on his own.
As we get closer to robotic farming, one company near San Fransisco aims to make it a reality. Iron Ox uses two robots in its 8,000 sq ft hydroponic farm facility.
One robot carries the heavy trays around while another picks up the plants and puts them in spaces with more room as they grow bigger.
The company states they are trying to fill the shortage of farm employees while also shortening the distance food travels before it is consumed.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) doctoral graduate You Wu has created a soft robot called Lighthouse that can find pipe leaks. Looking like a badminton shuttlecock, the robot can detect leaks as small as 4mm.
Because of the robots shape, it can go through elbows in the pipes and also adjust its size up to 20% to compensate for dirt and debris in the pipe.
