Tag: robotics

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The Forced Finger Project: Can A Machine Help You Sketch Like a Pro?

If the early days of your time at design school were anything like mine, you probably look back fondly (maybe a bit too rose-tintedly) on simpler days of ‘getting back to basics’ with hour after hour of practice drawing free-hand straight lines, ellipses, and cuboids in perspective (kids still do this these days, right?)—developing all the basic building blocks for the sketching skills you now wield so expertly.  the radical impact robotics could have on human life and culture  As AI, algorithms and robotics continue their seemingly inevitable march towards human usurpation, could this nobel tradition be next in line for…
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Red alert: there are now robotic cheetahs

After seeing the “design features” that enable the cheetah to run so fast, I wanted to circle back to Boston Dynamics’ robo-cheetah, which we looked at a few years ago. Their creation isn’t faster than a Ferrari, but with a top speed of 28 miles per hour, it’s faster than Usain Bolt. The concept rendering is a good deal more optimistic-looking than the actually built version, which is headless, tailless and needs to be connected to an external power supply: However, more recently another Boston-based team has been working on a cheetah-bot of their own, and this one runs under its own…
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Okay, fine: this robot is better at videogames than any of us

This year’s Awesome Games Done Quick charity event started on Sunday, and one team has already used a bot to put Twitch into Pokémon Red, and Super Mario Bros. into Super Mario World. Usually, a Tool-Assisted Speedrun can only be accomplished with an emulator—the button-presses have to be frame-perfect, and at 30 or 60 frames a second, that’s way too fast for regular humans. The TASBot—mounted on an R.O.B. unit, of course—is a modified Super Nintendo controller designed for accomplishing Tool-Assisted Speedruns in the real world. The bot is attached to a computer, and inputs a list of pre-written button-presses…
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Celebrate Cyber Monday by watching these crappy robots destroy each other

Well this is probably the best thing you’re going to see all day. Remember Battlebots? This is why Battlebots sucked. A group of 31 people got together in Japan recently for Hebocon: The Robot Contest for Dummies. The sumo-like matches pitted one crappy machine against another to see which could stay in the ring the longest. The wrinkle that makes it interesting is what they called “the high tech penalty”—that is, robots were not allowed to have a “high-tech element.”  Thus sprang forth abominations like the “amazing quick floor,” which was a piece of cardboard attached to two small motors;…
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Scientists are trying to make robots that can feel things

The use of robots is widespread throughout society: in medicine, combat, warehouses and factories. However, one limitation is holding them back from advancing into other industries: a lack of touch. Human touch is complex and highly sensitive, sensitive enough to detect textures on a nanoscale level. So, translating that into equivalent haptic feedback is a difficult task. Human touch is complex and highly sensitive.  “It just takes time, and it’s more complicated,” said Ken Goldberg, a University of California, Berkeley, in an article for the New York Times. “Humans are really good at this, and they have millions of years…