Collaborate Disseminate
There are already swim-tracking wearables such as watches, that track basic data such as the number of pool-lengths swum. Toronto-based TritonWear is taking things considerably further, however, with its just-announced Triton 2 – the device t… Continue reading Swim wearable uses AI to track and improve performance
[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
This unusual 3D printed Rolling Robot by [ebaera] uses two tiny hobby servos for locomotion in an unexpected way. The motors drive the front wheel only indirectly, by moving two articulated arms in a reach-and-retract motion similar to a breaststroke. The arms are joined together at the front, where a ratcheting wheel rests underneath. When the arms extend, the wheel rolls forward freely. When the arms retract, the wheel’s ratchet locks and the rest of the body is pulled forward. It looks as though extending one arm more than the other provides for rudimentary steering.
The parts are all 3D …read more
Continue reading Rolling Robot With Two Motors, But None Are On the Wheels
There are 75 litres of pee in a standard swimming pool, but don’t freak out. Continue reading Is Peeing In the Pool Really That Bad?
Perhaps our future overlords won’t be made up of electrical circuits after all but will instead be soft-bodied like ourselves. However, their design will have its origins in electrical analogues, as with the Octobot.
The Octobot is the brainchild a team of Harvard University researchers who recently published an article about it in Nature. Its body is modeled on the octopus and is composed of all soft body parts that were made using a combination of 3D printing, molding and soft lithography. Two sets of arms on either side of the Octobot move, taking turns under the control of a …read more
Public pools contain 30 to 80 milliliters of urine per person. Continue reading Peeing in the Pool Isn’t Just Gross, It’s Unhealthy
There’s no scientific reason why Michael Phelps couldn’t come back for the 2020 Olympics. Continue reading The Scientific Explanation for Why Michael Phelps Can Still Win Gold Medals
Why Phelps was able to pull off an underwater turn no one else in the pool even bothered to try. Continue reading The Science of Michael Phelps’s Gold Medal-Winning Turn
We’re about to enter a new age in robotics. Forget the servos, the microcontrollers, the H-bridges and the steppers. Start thinking in terms of optogenetically engineered myocytes, microfabricated gold endoskeletons, and hydrodynamically optimized elastomeric skins, because all of these have now come together in a tissue-engineered swimming robotic stingray that pushes the boundary between machine and life.
In a paper in Science, [Kevin Kit Parker] and his team at the fantastically named Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering describe the achievement. It turns out that the batoid fishes like skates and rays have a pretty good handle on how …read more
Continue reading Tissue-Engineered Soft Robot Swims Like a Stingray
