Collaborate Disseminate
We’ve seen some impressive nature-inspired flying bots from the creative minds at Festo’s Bionic Learning Network over the years, but the autonomous BionicBee is not only the smallest so far but also the first capable of swarming.Continue ReadingCatego… Continue reading Who would have thought swarming robo-bees could be so captivating?
German electrical automation company Festo has good form for pushing the envelope in robot development, previously showing off bio-inspired bot versions of ants, a kangaroo, flying penguins and more. Now the firm’s engineers have revealed the latest de… Continue reading Graceful robotic swifts take flight in latest Festo demo
[Festo] have come up with yet another amazing robot, a swimming one this time with an elegant propulsion mechanism. They call it the BionicFinWave. Two fins on either side almost a body-length long create a wave which pushes water backward, making the robot move forward. It’s modeled after such fish as the cuttlefish and the Nile perch.
What was their elegant solution for making the find undulate? Nine lever arms are attached to each fin. Those lever arms are controlled by two crankshafts which extend from the front of the body to the rear, one for each side. A servo …read more
Continue reading [Festo’s] Underwater Robot Uses Body-Length Fins
Festo’s latest robotic creature is a semi-autonomous “flying fox.” Continue reading Watch This Robot Bat Fly Into Your Nightmares
Festo has released a video showing the workings of their BionicCobot, a pneumatic robot arm developed for lending a helping hand to humans at a workstation. Since it works intimately with humans, it has to be safe, producing no harmful movements, and reacting when encountering an obstacle such as an arm containing delicate human bone. This it does using pneumatics and rotary vanes.
The arm has seven degrees of freedom, three in the shoulder, one in the elbow, another in the lower arm, and two in the wrist. But you won’t find any electric motor or gears. Instead each contains …read more
Continue reading Pneumatic Rotary Vane Joints Lend A Gentle Helping Hand
If you’ve ever experimented with a robot gripper, you’ll know that while it is easy to make an analogue of the human ability to grip between thumb and forefinger, it is extremely difficult to capture the nuances of grip with the benefit of touch feedback to supply only just enough of the force required to grip and hold an object. You as a human can pick up a delicate eggshell without breaking it using the same hand you might use to pick up a baseball or a cricket ball, but making your robot do the same thing is something of …read more
Continue reading A Robot Arm With The Tender Grip Of An Octopus
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn. Continue reading This Robotic Octopus Tentacle Is Not Creepy At All, Nope
[FESTO] keeps coming up with new tricks that make us both envious and inspired. Take their bionicANTs for example. Watching a group of them cooperate to move objects around looks so real that you’re instantly reminded of the pests crawling across your floor, but looking at them up close they’re a treasure trove of ideas for your next robot project.
The exoskeleton is 3D printed but they then use the outer surface of that exoskeleton as a circuit board for much of the circuitry. The wiring is “painted on” using a 3D MID (Molded Interconnect Device) process. While FESTO didn’t …read more
Sometimes it feels like we haven’t yet tapped into all the possibilities of additive manufacturing. Festo, a company that loves to try innovative things (and not always bring them to market), just came up with something called the 3D Cocooner — essentially, a rostock style 3D printer on its side, with a UV cure feature to allow it to build up skeletal structures and lattice style shapes.
Similar to the MX3D-Metal 3D printer (which is currently on a mission to build a bridge end-to-end — by itself), this 3D printer specializes in printing structures as opposed to the more traditional …read more
