Collaborate Disseminate
I fell in love with cable driven mechanisms a few years ago and put together some of my first mechanical tentacles to celebrate. But only after playing with them did I start to understand the principles that made them work. …read more
Continue reading Cable Mechanism Maths: Designing Against the Capstan Equation
I fell in love with cable driven mechanisms a few years ago and put together some of my first mechanical tentacles to celebrate. But only after playing with them did I start to understand the principles that made them work. …read more
Continue reading Cable Mechanism Maths: Designing Against the Capstan Equation
We’re pretty familiar with budget resistor-based bend sensors at this point, but this sensor is in a totally different class. Instead of relying on resistive elements, [Useok Jeong] and [Kyu-Jin Cho] devised a bend sensor that relies on geometric properties of the sensor itself. The result is a higher-fidelity measuring …read more
Continue reading Budget-Friendly Bend Sensor Deforms with Precision
There’s something mesmerizing about delta robots. Whether they are used at a stately pace for a 3D-printer or going so fast you can barely see them move in a pick and place machine, the way that three rotary actuators can work together to produce motion in three axes is always a treat to watch. Especially with a delta robot as small as this one.
[KarelK16] says this is one of those “just because I can” projects with no real application. And he appears to have been working on it for a while; the video below is from eight years ago. …read more
Continue reading Dainty Delta Is About As Small As A Robot Can Be
Wearables and robots don’t often intersect, because most robots rely on rigid bodies and programming while we don’t. Exoskeletons are an instance where robots interact with our bodies, and a soft exosuit is even closer to our physiology. Machine learning is closer to our minds than a simple state machine. The combination of machine learning software and a soft exosuit is a match made in heaven for the Harvard Biodesign Lab and Agile Robotics Lab.
Machine learning studies a walker’s steady gait for twenty periods while vitals are monitored to assess how much energy is being expended. After watching, the …read more
When our new computer overlord arrives it’ll likely give orders using an electromagnetic speaker (or more likely, by texting instead of talking). But for a merely artificial human being, shouldn’t we use an artificial mouth with vocal chords, nasal cavity, tongue, teeth and lips? Work on such a thing is scarce these days, but [Martin Riches] developed a delightful one called MotorMouth between 1996 and 1999.
It’s delightful for its use of a Z80 processor and assembly language, things many of us remember fondly, as well as its transparent side panel, allowing us to see the workings in action. As …read more
