The existence of robots that harm humans incident led researchers to seek new breakthroughs. They also created a special system that makes the machines will stop operating when it detects human flesh.

This robot was designed by Alin Albu-Schaffer and Gerd Hirzinger. From the results, they created a robot that can detect the presence of humans so as not to attack and injure him.

These robots are given arm weighing 30 kg and more than three meters long and equipped with various sharp weapons including knives to cut meat, kitchen knives, scissors and a screwdriver.

Robotic arm was given a program to use weapons, stabbing, cutting meat, and human arm. A human volunteers willing to try the robot. Fortunately, the robot was able to distinguish a human arm with the other objects.

These scientists wanted to try to reduce the danger by using a security system that can detect when the robot has to deal with the ‘opponent’. They use a torque sensor, to propel and stop the movement of the robot.

First, in the year 1981 robot ‘killer’ began to appear. Kenji Urada a Japanese worker who was doing his job does not accidentally get into the hydraulic machine in which there is a robot. The robot was unable to detect the man’s age was 37 years, making it the first victim of the robot has ever recorded.

Since then, many people were affected, even there us an accident in which a robot pouring molten aluminum to the human. According to the Health and Safety Executive, years ago there were 77 robot-related accidents in the UK.

The Germany Aerospace Center (DLR) hopes the robot will be more sensitive to human presence. Thus making a robot could actually support human life.

Here the Robotic arm which used to make a ramen (one of japanese food)… the movement is so great… Robotics is now support the restaurant..

Micro robots built by researchers for medical purpose. Here the complete news:

Artificial bacterial flagella are about half as long as the thickness of a human hair. They can swim at a speed of up to one body length per second. This means that they already resemble their natural role models very closely.

They look like spirals with tiny heads, and screw through the liquid like miniature corkscrews. When moving, they resemble rather ungainly bacteria with long whip-like tails. They can only be observed under a microscope because, at a total length of 25 to 60 µm, they are almost as small as natural flagellated bacteria. Most are between 5 and 15 µm long, a few are more than 20 µm.

Mimicking nature

The tiny spiral-shaped, nature-mimicking lookalikes of E. coli and similar bacteria. are called ?Artificial Bacterial Flagella? (ABFs), the ?flagella? referring to their whip-like tails. They were invented, manufactured and enabled to swim in a controllable way by researchers in the group led by Bradley Nelson, Professor at the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zurich. In contrast to their natural role model, some of which cause diseases, the ABFs are intended to help cure diseases in the future.

The practical realization of these artificial bacteria, the smallest yet created, with a rigid flagellum and external actuation, was made possible mainly by the self-scrolling technique from which the spiral-shaped ABFs are constructed. ABFs are fabricated by vapor-depositing several ultra-thin layers of the elements indium, gallium, arsenic and chromium onto a substrate in a particular sequence. They are then patterned from it by means of lithography and etching. This forms super-thin, very long narrow ribbons that curl themselves into a spiral shape as soon as they are detached from the substrate, because of the unequal molecular lattice structures of the various layers. Depending on the deposited layer thickness and composition, a spiral is formed with different sizes which can be precisely defined by the researchers. Nelson says, ?We can specify not only how small the spiral is, but even the scrolling direction of the ribbon that forms the spiral.?

External propulsion via magnetic field

Even before releasing the ribbon that will afterwards form the artificial flagellum, a kind of head for the mini-robot is attached to one of its ends. It consists of a chromium-nickel-gold tri-layer film, also vapor-deposited. Nickel is soft-magnetic, in contrast to the other materials used, which are non-magnetic. Nelson explains that, ?This tiny magnetic head enables the ABF to move in a specific way in a magnetic field.? The spiral-shaped ABF swim through the liquid and its movements can be observed and recorded under a microscope.

With the software developed by the group, the ABF can be steered to a specific target by tuning the strength and direction of the rotating magnetic field which is generated by several coils. The ABFs can move forwards and backwards, upwards and downwards, and can also rotate in all directions. Brad Nelson says ?There?s a lot of physics and mathematics behind the software.? The ABFs do not need energy of their own to swim, nor do they have any moving parts. The only decisive thing is the magnetic field, towards which the tiny head constantly tries to orientate itself and in whose direction it moves. The ABFs currently swim at a speed of up to 20 µm, i.e. up to one body length, per second. Nelson expects that it will be possible to increase the speed to more than 100 µm per second. For comparison: E. coli swims at 30 µm per second.

Possible applications in medicine

The ABFs have been designed for biomedical applications. For example, they could carry medicines to predetermined targets in the body, remove plaque deposits in the arteries or help biologists to modify cellular structures that are too small for direct manipulation by researchers. In initial experiments, the ETH Zurich researchers have already made the ABFs carry around polystyrene micro-spheres.

At the moment, however, the group is still carrying out basic research. Further investigations will be needed before there can be any practical applications. Nelson explains that, ?For applications in the human body, it would first of all be necessary to steer the ABFs precisely, track their route without optical monitoring and guarantee their localization at all times.? If ABFs are to deliver drugs, they would first of all have to be functionalized in a feasible way and then need to be able to release the drugs precisely in situ. The plan is for the ABFs themselves to become even faster and smaller. Nelson is enthusiastic about how ingeniously nature has designed natural bacteria. He is happy that his group?s ABFs already resemble the originals so closely.

www.sciencedaily.com

This news comes from ehealtheurope.net. I believe others robots will soon be created to make human life easier…

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French robotics specialist Robosoft and SRI International have demonstrated a new service robot designed to assist the elderly at home.

The RobuLAB, is able to navigate, follow and assist people moving from room to room using SRI Karto navigation software.

The robot is aimed at developers and integrators building home-centric service robots. Robosoft predicts these may become part of everyday life for the ageing population within the next five years.

Vincent Dupourqué, chief executive of Robosoft said: ?The market for home centric robots that provide assistance to the elderly is one of our priorities.

?We?ve chosen to equip this robot with SRI?s Karto localisation technology. Beyond the technical quality of this software, we see the collaboration with SRI as a major plus for developing our activities in the US.?

Robosoft and SRI joined forced in 2008 with the goal of developing innovative commercial offerings in the home-centric service robot market.

Robosoft worked with SRI to integrate SRI?s Karto navigation system software on the RobuBOX, a module programmed using Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio.

Doug Bercow, director of business development at SRI said: ?A core requirement for any home-centric robot application is the ability to navigate interior spaces both safely and reliably.

?We are very pleased that Robosoft selected SRI?s navigation software, which leverages existing navigation technologies that have been validated in military and transportation robotics and can easily transfer to robots for residential use.?

The development of the RobuLAB is the latest development in a three-year phase focusing on a turnkey solution with technology suppliers and partners, with the intention of a subsequent large scale deployment.

The proof-of-concept demonstration was shown at the 6th annual RoboBusiness Conference and Exposition that took place April on the 15th and 16th of April in Boston, Massachusetts.

An interesting news come from http://www.lsureveille.com/1.931045. Great news,
the future of robotics is in front of our eyes…

The Robotics Research Laboratory, tucked away in a corner of Coates Hall, tends to go unnoticed by most University students.

But out of this remote nook, Dr. S.S. Iyengar and two computer science graduate students hope to bring national recognition to the University through a new robot they have been working on for the past year and a half.

Iyengar, computer science department chair, Bharat Narahari and Jong Hoon Kim are making great strides in the robotics community by building a robot with technology that hasn?t been used anywhere else, Iyengar said.

The AgBot, powered by solar panels, includes features such as lawn fertilization, seed planting and security.

But Narahari, one of the creators of the AgBot, said he hopes the AgBot will be able to take on many different duties in the future.

?What we are imagining is, about five years down the line, suppose if you want to do a toilet cleaning job … buy a module and fit it inside the AgBot so it will clean your toilet,? he said. ?And if you are out on a vacation for a month, and you need to guard and protect your house, so you go to some robot store, buy a security module, and just place it in the AgBot, so you have a full feature intrusion detection robot.?

Iyengar compared the robot to a cell phone. He said 10 years ago, a cell phone would just make calls, but today it has many different features. In the same way, he said, the AgBot is just a prototype that will be expanded to provide many functions as it is developed.

The AgBot, an invention Iyengar said could be worth a lot of money, is safely secured by the University. He said he didn?t want to give the idea to a large company because he didn?t want them to take the machine apart after buying it and make it into something completely different.

?I want LSU and the computer science department to make a niche here,? Iyengar said.

Some of the other projects being worked on by the RRL include a ?pipeline robot,? which can inspect pipes for cracks and leakage, and a ?maze robot,? which uses sensors to detect obstacles.

?All of it is built here,? he said. ?And the very interesting thing is, [it was built] for probably a price of $2,000.?

The AgBot is being prepared for the commercial market, Iyengar said.

?We have proven the concept,? he said. ?We have applied for patents, so now it is going to be ready for execution.?

Iygenar said he wants the robot to be available across the nation and be very cost-effective.

?We want to do it at a very cheap price,? he said. ?If somebody wants the base of the robot only for doing a few things, that?s very cheap.?

Iyengar said he expects potential buyers to not only be homeowners but also golf clubs and baseball fields because the AgBot would cut back on lawn maintenance.

To see a video of the AgBot, click here.

Download Sharp GP2D12 Analog Distance Sensor Manual and Tutorial
SharpGP2D12Snrs.pdf

Block Diagram

The robot uses IR sensors to sense the line, an array of 8 IR LEDs (Tx) and sensors (Rx), facing the ground has been used in this setup. The output of the sensors is an analog signal which depends on the amount of light reflected back, this analog signal is given to the comparator to produce 0s and 1s which are then fed to the µC.

L4

L3

L2

L1

R1

R2

R3

R4

Left Center Right

Sensor Array

Starting from the center, the sensors on the left are named L1, L2, L3, L4 and those on the right are named R1, R2, R3, R4.

Let us assume that when a sensor is on the line it reads 0 and when it is off the line it reads 1

The µC decides the next move so as to position the robot such that L1 and R1 both read 0 and the rest read 1.

L4

L3

L2

L1

R1

R2

R3

R4

Left Center Right

Desired State L1=R1=0, and Rest=1

Algorithm: (more…)

Why would you want to interface the Keyboard? The IBM keyboard can be a cheap alternative to a keyboard on a Microprocessor development system. Or maybe you want a remote terminal, just couple it with a LCD Module.

Maybe you have a RS-232 Barcode Scanner or other input devices, which you want to use with existing software which only allows you to key in numbers or letters. You could design yourself a little box to convert RS-232 into a Keyboard Transmission, making it transparent to the software.

An interfacing example is given showing the keyboard’s protocols in action. This interfacing example uses a 89s51 MCU to decode an IBM AT keyboard and output the ASCII equivalent of the key pressed at 9600 BPS.

Note that this page only deals with AT Keyboards. If you have any XT keyboards, you wish to interface, consider placing them in a museum. We will not deal with this type of keyboard in this document. XT Keyboards use a different protocol compared to the AT, thus code contained on this page will be incompatible.

PC Keyboard Theory

The IBM keyboard you most probably have sitting in front of you, sends scan codes to your computer. The scan codes tell your Keyboard Bios, what keys you have pressed or released. Take for example the ‘A’ Key. The ‘A’ key has a scan code of 1C (hex). When you press the ‘A’ key, your keyboard will send 1C down it’s serial line. If you are still holding it down, for longer than it’s typematic delay, another 1C will be sent. This keeps occurring until another key has been pressed, or if the ‘A’ key has been released. (more…)

The object of the fire detection is to navigate the robots through a maze of walls and look into the rooms and see if there is a fire. Using a UV sensor, a flame the size of a single candle can be seen 5 meters away. The Trekker utilizes a Hamamatsu UV sensor that is mounted onto the Trekker sweeping sensor brackets. The Trekker scans the area and finds an open flame.The Hamamatsu UV TRON Flame Detector is lightweight, has low current consumption, and operates as high sensitivity UV Sensor. The UV TRON is an ultraviolet detector that makes use of the photoelectric effect of metal combined with the gas multiplication effect. It has a narrow spectral sensitivity of 185 to 260 nm. Thus it is solar blind, being completely insensitive to visible light. Unlike semiconductor detectors, it does not require optical Visible-cut filters, thus making it easy to use.

The driver for the UV TRON is operated by applying DC low voltage and outputs a high-voltage power supply. It also contains a signal processing circuit on the same printed circuit board. Since background discharges of the UV TRON caused by natural excitation lights (such as a cosmic ray, scattered sunlight, etc.) can be cancelled in the signal processing circuit, the output signals from the C3704 series can be used without errors.UV TRON Flame detector is small, but has a wide angular sensitivity (directivity) and can reliably and quickly detect weak ultraviolet radiation emitted from a flame due to use of the metal plate cathode (e.g. it can detect the flame of a cigarette lighter at a distance of more than 5 m.). The Flame detector is well suited for use in flame detectors and fire alarms, and also in detection of invisible discharge phenomena such as corona discharge of high-voltage transmission lines. To minimize the area the sensor sees the flame, a field of view mask can be used. The shields are useful when you are trying to locate the location of the flame. (more…)

If you?re interested in robotics, motion control, or just want to learn about stepper motors, then you should try building this versatile stepper motor controller.

This project allows you to control the speed, direction, and step size of a unipolar four-phase stepper motor. The controller is capable of handling motor winding currents of up to 1.25 amps per phase and it operates from a single supply voltage of 6-30 volts DC. A unique feature f this project is that the circuit can operate in either remote mode or stand-alone mode. In the stand-alone mode, an on-board pulse generator and a four-position DIP switch allows you to demonstrate all of the functions without any additional connections. This mode is perfect for demonstrating basic stepper motor control principles. The circuit even has LEDs that show the energized phases for each step. In remote mode, all motor functions can be interfaced to external logic or a microcontroller. This allows the controller to be incorporated into a robot, an X-Y plotter, or any motion control project you have in mind!

CIRCUIT DESCRIPTION
Refer to the schematic of the stepper driver shown in Figure 1. Power is supplied by a DC wall transformer or DC power supply at P1. The voltage can be anything from 6 to 30 volts, depending upon the rating of the stepper motor. The stepper motor uses most of the current in this circuit, so it is powered directly from the transformer output through resistors R1 & R2. These resistors limit the current to the motor and allow the motor to be operated with a power supply voltage greater than the voltage rating of the motor for improved performance.

(more…)

Another robot project you can find here:

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Introduction
Once I made this robot to get some study points while I was studying at the Technical High school in Rijswijk, the Netherlands. I made this in my limited free time, that is why it took me about a year to finish the project. A lot of the used techniques where new, so the research took a lot of the time, but is also the reason why this project had great value to me.

Target
Before I started developing the robot I made a few targets: (more…)

Cybernetics was defined by Norbert Wiener, in his book of that title, as the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine. Stafford Beer called it the science of effective organization and Gordon Pask extended it to include information flows “in all media” from stars to brains. It includes the study of feedback, black boxes and derived concepts such as communication and control in living organisms, machines and organisations including self-organization. Its focus is how anything (digital, mechanical or biological) processes information, reacts to information, and changes or can be changed to better accomplish the first two tasks. A more philosophical definition, suggested in 1956 by Louis Couffignal, one of the pioneers of cybernetics, characterizes cybernetics as “the art of ensuring the efficacy of action”.

Overview

The term cybernetics stems from the Greek ?????????? (kybernetes, steersman, governor, pilot, or rudder ? the same root as government). Cybernetics is a broad field of study, but the essential goal of cybernetics is to understand and define the functions and processes of systems. Studies of this field are all ultimately means of examining different forms of systems and applying what is known to make artificial systems, such as business management, more efficient and effective.

Concepts studied by cyberneticists include, but are not limited to: learning, cognition, adaption, social control, emergence, communication, efficiency, efficacy and interconnectivity. These concepts are studied by other subjects such as engineering and biology, but in cybernetics these are removed from the context of the individual organism or device. (more…)

Cognitive robotics (CR) is concerned with endowing robots with high-level cognitive capabilities to enable the achievement of complex goals in complex environments using limited computational resources.

Robotic cognitive capabilities include perception processing, attention allocation, anticipation, planning, reasoning about other agents, and reasoning about their own mental states. Robotic cognition embodies the behaviour of intelligent agents in the physical world (or a virtual world, in the case of simulated CR).

A cognitive robot should exhibit:

• knowledge
• beliefs
• preferences
• goals
• informational attitudes
• motivational attitudes (observing, communicating, revising beliefs, planning)

Cognitive robotics involves the application and integration of (more…)

The government of South Korea is drawing up a code of ethics to prevent human abuse of robots?and vice versa. The so-called Robot Ethics Charter will cover standards for robotics users and manufacturers, as well as guidelines on ethical standards to be programmed into robots, South Korea’s Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy announced last week.

“The move anticipates the day when robots, particularly intelligent service robots, could become a part of daily life as greater technological advancements are made,” the ministry said in a statement.A five-member task force that includes futurists and a science-fiction writer began work on the charter last November.

Gianmarco Veruggio of the School of Robotics in Genoa, Italy, is recognized as a leading authority on roboethics. (more…)

Biomorphic robotics is a sub-discipline of robotics focused upon emulating the mechanics, sensor systems, computing structures and methodologies used by animals. In short, it is building robots inspired by the principles of biological systems.

One of the most prominent researchers in the field of biomorphic robotics has been Mark W. Tilden, who has taken Rodney Brooks’ theory of removing the world model from robots to a low hardware level not even using microprocessors. This is not to say the lack of microprocessors makes something biomorphic - quite the contrary. There is a huge amount of work be done implementing biological nervous and neural networks into computing devices. (more…)

Robot kinematics is the study of the motion (kinematics) of robots. In a kinematic analysis the position, velocity and acceleration of all the links are calculated without considering the forces that cause this motion. The relationship between motion, and the associated forces and torques is studied in robot dynamics. One of the most active areas within robot kinematics is the screw theory.

Robot kinematics deals with aspects of redundancy, collision avoidance and singularity avoidance. While dealing with the kinematics used in the robots we deal each parts of the robot by assigning a frame of reference to it and hence a robot with many parts may have many individual frames assigned to each movable parts. For simplicity we deal with the single manipulator arm of the robot. Each frames are named systematically with numbers, for example the immovable base part of the manipulator is numbered 0, and the first link joined to the base is numbered 1, and the next link 2 and similarly till n for the last nth link. (more…)

The SCARA acronym stands for Selective Compliant Assembly Robot Arm or Selective Compliant Articulated Robot Arm.

In general, traditional SCARA?s are 4-axis robot arms, i.e., they can move to any X-Y-Z coordinate within their work envelope. There is a fourth axis of motion which is the wrist rotate (Theta-Z). The ?X?, ?Y? and the ?Theta-Z? movements are obtained with three parallel-axis rotary joints. The vertical motion is usually an independent linear axis at the wrist or in the base. SCARA robots are used in assembly operations where the final move to insert the part is a single vertical move. Component insertion into printed circuit boards is an example. This is often called “vertical assembly”.

(more…)

Biorobotics is a term that loosely covers the fields of cybernetics, bionics and even genetic engineering as a collective study.

Biorobotics is often used to refer to a real subfield of robotics: studying how to make robots that emulate or simulate living biological organisms mechanically or even chemically. The term is also used in a reverse definition: making biological organisms as manipulatable and functional as robots. (more…)

Overview

Mobile robots have the capability to move around in their environment and are not fixed to one physical location. In contrast, industrial robots usually consist of a jointed arm (multi-linked manipulator) and gripper assembly (or end effector) that is attached to a fixed surface.

Mobile robots are the focus of a great deal of current research and almost every major university has one or more labs that focus on mobile robot research. Mobile robots are also found in industry, military and security environments. They also appear as consumer products, for entertainment or to perform certain tasks like vacuum cleaning or mowing.

(more…)