Content for teachers and students about robotics in our world. Is robotics the Perfect Platform for 21st Century Learning? Read on!.. Would you like your student robotics activities presented here? Leave a comment or Facebook Messenger me...
as read on CNET's CRAVE Gadget Blog... "Inteltaps student's robot for processor demo
While I've always been a little scared of spiders, watching student Matt Bunting's hexapod robot dancing has all but cured me. Maybe it's the combination of the folk guitar and little leg sways in the below video, but all of a sudden, spiders (at least the robotic kind) look so damn cute. Cuteness aside, the hexapod bot has gotten some attention from high places. Two days after Bunting, a University of Arizona electrical-engineering senior, posted a YouTube video of his bot, Intel ordered two of them to promote its Atom processors at trade shows and engineering meetings. The robot uses Intel's 1.60GHz Atom Z530 and US15W chipset. It runs on the Ubuntu open-source operating system.
The hexapod robot uses a Logitech QuickCam Communicate Deluxe Webcam mounted on its front for vision. (Credit: Matt Bunting) Bunting built the as-yet unnamed robot from spare parts as a final project for a UA class on cognitive robotics. A camera mounted on the front of the six-legged creature (each leg has three degrees of freedom) takes successive images, which are used to help Hex determine if it is moving forward, sideways, or backward or tilting. By analyzing the visual feedback, the 14x17x8-inch robot adaptively "learns" how to most effectively achieve its forward-moving goal. "One of the things I wanted to explore was the idea of reinforcement learning. What I wanted to do was not preprogram any of those walking algorithms, I wanted it to figure out how to walk straight forward on its own," Bunting said. "It has the ability to figure it out itself..."
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>From telegram.com "WORCESTER — Whenever Ty N. Tremblay went to a supermarket, he noticed a problem: An elderly and disabled shopper seated in a motorized cart could only collect what would fill a small basket on the cart or would have to rely on someone else to follow with a large shopping carriage.
The solution? The Autonomous Shopping Cart, a robotic shopping carriage created by Mr. Tremblay and other Worcester Polytechnic Institute students that would follow any shopper through the aisles of a store. “That way the elderly don't have to push a shopping cart, the handicapped don't have to get in (a cart),” said Mr. Tremblay, or your kid doesn't push it into your ankles..." Read the full article at its source:http://www.telegram.com/article/20091108/NEWS/911080416/0/NEWS02
The pool-playing robot - another way for robots to defeat humans from THE RIDICULANT "In yet another small step towards the time when robots will be able to rise up and overthrow their human masters, scientists have taught a robot how to play pool.
'Deep Green' - named after Deep Blue, the chess-playing supercomputer that beat reigning world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 - was created by Robotics & Computer Vision lab at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, with the intention of it becoming good enough at shot-playing and game strategy that it can eventually beat a human..."
WATCH: The Israeli robot who wants to be Spider-Manfrom HAARETZ.com Even before the movie franchise existed, Spider-Man was known for his ability to scale great heights by shooting webs with his wrists that attach to buildings and allow him to swing for kilometers from one to the next. Spider-Man's agility recently inspired students in the robotics department at Ben-Gurion University to create a robot that can move like the superhero. The robot's prototype, which recently took its first steps in a video posted on YouTube, is called Spiderbot... read the full article at its source: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1114694.html
From the Berkshire STEM Pipeline - a glowing review of Classroom Robotics (click on the link below for the full text of the review)
"Have you ever wanted more information about a particular subject? Were you able to find what you needed written in a book? Well, let me tell you that I just happened to pick a book titled, "Classroom Robotics Case Stories of 21st Century Instruction for Millennial Students", edited by Mark Gura and Kathleen P. King, as a last resort when I couldn't obtain one of my first three choices (always the case when you are looking for information on any topic, right?). I was in for a wonderful treat, which I hadn't expected, since I was still feeling quite glum at not getting one of my top picks on the subject of classroom robotics. My interest level in robotics increased when I attended a seminar at MCLA this fall, hence one of the reasons for my search for more on the topic. This book turned out to be just what I was looking for to help me understand many facets about classroom robotics which I had been intrigued with for some time. As the title suggested, I was expecting to read stories from teachers who had incorporated robotics in their classrooms. It was even more than just teachers' experiences! This was the wonderful treat! I had wanted to learn how to start robotics either in the classroom or as an after school program. Where did I start? How did I know which materials to choose? How does robotics fit into the fifth grade curriculum? I had so many questions- many of which were answered by reading this book. This book provided the best tool I could have hoped for as one of its main purposes was to reach out to people like myself just starting to explore the idea of classroom robotics..."
StomachBot: Magnetic Self-Assembly of Swallowable Modular Robots
Found @ http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081129173859.htm: "A Surgeon You Can Swallow" "ScienceDaily (Dec. 1, 2008) — In the future, tablet-shaped robots could perform some surgical operations without injuring the body. A new publication by the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems of ETH Zurich shows how such surgical bio-microrobots might function.
Paolo Dario, Professor of Biomedical Robotics at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, Italy, explained the dawn of a new medical era in the September edition of the American financial magazine “The Economist”. Surgical operations with open wounds are increasingly being replaced by non-invasive techniques extending even to systems that enable operations without a single scar.
Bio-microrobotics has a decisive role in this development. Like the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, ETH Zurich is also a part of the EU’s ARES research project (Assembling Reconfigurable Endoluminal Surgical System), a consortium of robotics experts from four European higher education institutions. Together, the researchers want to make micro-robots usable for medical applications. The plan is that, in the future, robots no bigger than a conventional capsule will perform a series of tasks in the gastro-intestinal tract, e.g. a gastroscopy or a tissue biopsy.
Although pill-shaped micro-cameras have existed for seven years now and are currently being used successfully in surgery to study the gastro-intestinal tract, these systems are passive. The camera takes thousands of pictures as it passes through the gastro-intestinal tract, but its position during this time cannot be controlled. This should soon change, because the ARES scientists are currently developing micro-robots with controllable insect-like legs with which the “robot pills” would be able to move around in the stomach. Other groups are working on special devices for tissue biopsy. In the future, such instruments could be used to make a precise examination of damaged regions in the gastro-intestinal tract while at the same time taking tissue samples for subsequent investigation.
Multi-segment, self-assembling stomach robots One of the biggest challenges facing the robotics scientists relates to the enormous miniaturisation of the electronic systems. Room for the system’s entire technology, including the power supply, must be found within a few cubic millimetres. In the micro-cameras that are already established, the battery alone takes up 60 percent of the capsule’s volume. Hence one key question: how can a series of surgical robot functions be brought into a form that the patient can swallow and which is at the same time compatible with the body?
In a recent publication, Zoltan Nagy, a doctoral student at the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems of ETH Zurich (IRIS) since 2006, presents the following approach to a solution: the patient swallows not one but several “robot pills” fitted with individual functions, such as the controller or forceps for tissue sampling. The pills can be swallowed one after another and assemble themselves automatically to form a larger, more powerful system only when they reach the stomach. For this purpose, Nagy developed a magnetic mechanism that enables the parts of the robot to join together automatically in the stomach to form an entire system. The individual components are polarized at right angles to the surface, so they arrange themselves in a predictable sequence when they come together.
The system was tested in an artificial stomach with a 75 percent success rate. Because a rigid chain of several robot components moves only with difficulty through the stomach and intestine, Nagy has also developed intermediate links that make the system more mobile. This would enable the surgical system to move as a whole through the stomach and intestine, like a multi-link chain. A magnetic system has the added advantage that the magnetic field changes in a characteristic way when the individual members of the chain come together. This change is measurable and can be communicated to a computer and used as an indicator of the exact position and arrangement of the robot snake.
Getting Started with LEGO Robotics. Anyone who works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too) This books explains it all!
