Amphibionics: Build YourOwn Biologically Inspired Reptilian Robot

Good Ebook. With this ebook, you can learn and making your own robot, the amphibionics robot like a frog, crocodile, and many more other projects. All part used in this projects you can find easily, so what do you waiting for? download this useful ebook and build your robot immediately.

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iCub: 3.5 year old child humanoid robot

iCub is a project from RobotCub and is a 5 years long project and funded by the European Commission through Unit E5 "Cognitive Systems, Interaction & Robotics". The main goal is to study cognition through the implementation of a humanoid robot the size of a 3.5 year old child.
iCub has 53 DOF ( Degrees Of Freedom ), has fully articulated hands, head and eyes. This project uses an open systems platform that other researchers are encouraged to utilize, customize, and improve upon.

Hand Design
The Hand design is great. Look good and very compact. With 18 dof, the hand movement become more natural and closed to human hand movement.





Facial Expressions
If we look at the video, there the robot face can make various expressions with changing the mouth and eyebrow. It's look like the mouth and eyebrow made from light,so they can change it with various form by changing the light. Clever way. Great.


Lower Body design
The design for lower body with more dof make the iCub can make more movement and more look natural if used for walking. See the Video below.

Overall, this is great project and produced great humanoid. With this humanoid, people can learn more about robotic design, robotic platform, robotic programming. robotic cognitive, robotic mimic and so on. So, who wanna and interest to this Humanoid? Of course i am lol.

Snake Robot

Researchers at the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory at Virginia Tech have designed a series of serpentine robots that are able to climb poles and inspect structures too dangerous or inaccessible for humans. The robots coil themselves around a beam and roll upward using an oscillating joint motion, gathering important structural data with cameras and sensors.

A 2006 US Bureau of Labor Statistics report listed 809 fatal falls from raised structures and scaffolding. The RoMeLa team hope that by increasing the use of autonomous robots in construction, humans can work in safer conditions. The HyDRAS models (Hyper-redundant Discrete Robotic Articulated Serpentine for climbing) use electric motors , while the CIRCA (Climbing Inspection Robot with Compressed Air) uses a compressed air muscle. Currently the robots are tethered to laptops, but future designs will incorporate a microprocessor and power source, allowing them to operate independently. All robots in the series are roughly three feet long, though the CIRCA is lighter than the HyDRAS.

Dennis Hong, director of Virginia Techs Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory said, The use of compressed air makes this approach feasible by enabling it to be light weight, providing compliant actuation force for generating the gripping force for traction, and allowing it to use a simple discrete control scheme to activate the muscles in a predetermined sequence.

These are really wicked cool robots, Hong said. Unlike inchworm type gaits often being developed for serpentine robot locomotion, this novel climbing gait requires the serpentine robot to wrap around the structure in a helical shape, and twist its whole body to climb or descend by rolling up or down the structure.

The HyDRAS-Ascent, HyDRAS-Ascent II, and CIRCA recently earned recognition at the 2008 International Symposium on Educational Excellence.

Robot Hand Powered by Rocket

The new rocket-powered robotic arm, shown in this diagram, is stronger and faster than the ones on the market. Here's how it works: The propellant cartridge contains pressurized liquid hydrogen peroxide, which is routed through two flexible lines (not shown) across the elbow joint and into two catalyst packs. The catalyst burns the hydrogen peroxide, generating steam that pushes pistons up and down — allowing the arm to move.

Michael Goldfarb, a professor at Vanderbilt University, has led the development of a prosthetic arm that, get this, is powered by miniature rocket motor systems! The fuel, hydrogen peroxide, is burnt in a catalytic reaction generating steam that opens and closes valves connected to the joints of the arm. The mechanical parts that make up the arm were precision machined to avoid any leaks. A small canister of hydrogen peroxide loaded into the arm provides sufficient energy to allow 18 hours of normal arm movement! At 450°F (232°C) one would think the super-heated steam would cause a tincy mincy discomfort to the user. Fortunately, the researchers thought of end-user comfort and insulated the really (really) hot parts of the arm. Look at the video.. the motion is quite amazing. The thumb and fingers are controlled independently. It probably sounds really cool too!

"Our design does not have superhuman strength or capability, but it is closer in terms of function and power to a human arm than any previous prosthetic device that is self-powered and weighs about the same as a natural arm," said researcher Michael Goldfarb, a roboticist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Conventional prosthetic arms do not have the strength of their flesh-and-blood counterparts, the reason being the batteries. In order to lift comparable weights, a prosthetic arm would need a massive battery, too large for the prosthesis itself. So (project leader) Michael Goldfarb started thinking about other ways to power the artificial limbs, and came up with the idea of using the monopropellant rocket motor system that the space shuttle uses to maneuver in space.

The researchers say their fuel system is superior to the traditional method of powering prostheses, batteries. Batteries are heavy relative to the power they produce; the rocket-powered arm, says Michael Goldfarb, the professor who led the team, produces more power with less weight than limbs that use other power sources.

The prototype also produces more natural movement that conventional prosthetic arms. Instead of two joints -- typical arms only move at the elbow and at the "claw" -- the new device has fingers that can open and close independently of each other, and a wrist that twists and bends.

The Vanderbilt engineers are competing with teams at several other universities and corporations in a program that the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency calls "Revolutionizing Prosthetics 2009," an effort to build an advanced bionic arm to help soldiers who've been injured at war perform the sort of daily tasks most of take for granted.

HRP-4C Young Lady

AIST (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology) have developed a humanoid robot (a cybernetic human called "HRP-4C") which has the appearance and shape of a human being, can walk and move like one, and interacts with humans using speech recognition and so forth.

Standing 158 cm tall and weighing 43 kg (including the battery), with the joints and dimensions set to average values for young Japanese females, HRP-4C looks very human-like. Its walking motion and general movements were developed by motion-capturing those of humans and then mimicking them by applying the walking control technology developed in the Humanoid Robotics Project (HRP.) Interactions with humans have been enabled through speech recognition and so forth.

HRP-4C was developed as part of the User Centered Robot Open Architecture (UCROA), one of the projects under the AIST Industrial Transformation Research Initiative ("AIST Initiative"), a 3-year industry-academia joint project implemented by AIST since fiscal 2006 with intended applications in the entertainment industry including use at fashion shows.

HRP-4C is expected to be useful in the entertainment industry, for device evaluation for humans working as human simulators, and mechanical products to assist human movements by incorporating the following new functions and features:

(1) Looks like a human being with a height of 158 cm and body weight of 43 kg (including the battery), and the positions of the joints and dimensions are set to the average values for young Japanese females in the "Japanese Body Dimension Database 1997 – 98."

(2) To closely mimic the movements of humans, there are 3 degrees of freedom in the hip, 3 in the neck and 8 in the face.

(3) By adopting the walking control technology developed in HRP and motion-captured human movements for reference, the robot walks and moves very much like a human being.

(4) The speech recognition component of RT middleware, which is installed in the computer in the head section, recognizes human speech and the robot can respond in varisous ways.

Furthermore, HRP-4C inherits the technologies of HRP-2 and utilizes patented technology of Honda Motor Co., Ltd.

Although current motion patterns (including walking) of HRP-4C are limited, they are quite similar to humans. It is expected to be used in the entertainment industry such as for exhibitions and fashion shows. Since its appearance and shape are human-like, it can be also used as a human simulator to evaluate devices for humans. Furthermore, the whole-body control technology used in this robot might be applied in devices that assist human life (power-assisted suits, etc.).

HRP-4C is expected to pave the way for the early practical application of humanoid robots by utilizing the key characteristic of humanoid robots, namely a human appearance.