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To assist humans around the house, robots will need to be able to deal with the unfamiliar. But while researchers can preprogram robots to do increasingly sophisticated tasks, they face a much bigger challenge in teaching them to adapt to unstructured environments. A robot developed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, however, is able to learn to use objects that it has never encountered before.

The robot--called the UMass Mobile Manipulator, or UMan--pushes objects around on a table to see how they move. Once it identifies an object's moving parts, it begins to experiment with it, manipulating it to perform tasks. "You can imagine a baby playing with a toy and pulling the different parts and seeing what moves how," says lead author and graduate student Dov Katz, who did the work with Oliver Brock, a professor of computer science.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/21027/

Scientists from the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan have developed modular robot, capable of changing its 3D structure and its motions as a function of its environment. The Modular Transformer (M-TRAN) robot has been under development at AIST and Tokyo Tech since 1998. The latest prototype, the M-TRAN III, was demonstrated at the annual World Exposition (EXPO), which took place in Aichi, Japan.

The M-TRAN is composed of identical robotic modules, each of which is equipped with a connection mechanism, actuators, sensors, and microprocessors. The robot can be constructed from a different number of separate modules, making it possible to build robots in a variety of sizes and shapes. Once an initial 3D structure is constructed, the M-TRAN system can transform itself from one configuration to another, changing not only its shape, but also its size and type of motion.

Source: http://www.tfot.info/news/1085/the-real-transformer.html

Scientists from the Chonnam National University in Korea have developed a robot that is able to move inside blood vessels. The micro robot has many possible applications, such as performing tests and releasing drugs when hitting a blood clot. The robot, less than 1 millimeter big, can stay in the body for up to ten days.

The robot’s skeleton is made of a biocompatible and elastic material (PDMS- polydimethylsiloxane) and the engine is basically a heart muscle tissue grafted of the skeleton. The robot has a rectangular body and six legs, three on each end. The front three legs are short (400 micrometers long) and the three rear legs are longer (1200 micrometer long).

When the robot's muscle contracts it bends the long front legs. This creates more friction on the rear legs than on the front legs, causing the robot to move. The average speed of the robot is 100 micrometers per second, meaning it can pass a distance of 50 meters in a week. The robot's engine is powered by sugars, oxygen and other nutrients present in the blood.

Source: http://www.tfot.info/news/1042/microrobots-to-travel-in-our-blood-vessels.html

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with scientists at NASA’s Ames Research Center, have built a low-cost robotic device that enables any digital camera to produce breathtaking gigapixel (billions of pixels) panoramas, called GigaPans.

The technology gives people a new way to make and share images of their environment. It is being used by students to document their communities and by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to make Civil War sites accessible on the Web. To promote further sharing of this imagery, Carnegie Mellon has launched a public Web site, http://www.gigapan.org , where people can upload and interactively explore panoramic images of any format.

Source: http://physorg.com/news110030329.html

Rockets can help power robotic arms, which could help lead to "better, stronger, faster" bionic limbs, research now reveals.

A new prototype rocket-powered mechanical arm can lift about 20 to 25 pounds—three to four times more than current commercial prosthetic arms—and can do so three to four times faster.
"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.

"It has about 10 times as much power as other [robotic] arms," Goldfarb said.
The rocket-powered arm also has greater dexterity and freedom of movement than any other prosthetic to date. Conventional prosthetic arms have only two joints, at the elbow and the "claw." This prototype functions more naturally than previous models, with a wrist that can twist and bend, and fingers that open and close independently.

Source: http://www.livescience.com/technology/070829_rocket_arm.html