microrobots

RoboBees ready for mass production. Thanks, Harvard!

Harvard University has developed a method for churning out coin-size microrobots en masse.

By drawing on the ideas of origami, researchers have engineered a fabrication technique that produces a small flying robot much the way a children's pop-up book creates a structure.

The method can be used for different types of millimeter-scale electromechanical machines, Harvard said yesterday. But researchers developed the system specifically to replace the painstakingly slow process of manually making insect-like flying robots for its RoboBees project.

"You'd take a very fine tungsten wire and dip it in a little bit of superglue," Pratheev … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 950: Hackers brave bats and dragons

AT&T had an outage yesterday morning in the bay area due to fiber-optical cables being cut. This didn't just affect landlines, but cell phones as well. Rafe describes the dangers hackers would face in trying to cut those cables. We also estimate the distance to New York as 12 worms, and give a plus-five Holy Avenger sword salute to Dave Arneson.

Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 950

AT&T was vandalized in the Bay Area? http://www.att.com/gen/press-room?pid=4800&cdvn=news&newsarticleid=26715

AT&T uses Twitter … Read more

Researchers build 'flying' micro-robot

A flying micro-robot has been developed by researchers at the University of Waterloo in Ontario.

A research team, led by Professor Mir Behrad Khamesee, manipulates magnetic fields to levitate and move around three axes a robot weighing about three-hundredths of an ounce.

According to a paper shared with ZDNet UK--"MechMN: Design and Implementation of a Micromanipulation System using a Magnetically Levitated MEMS Robot"--this is accomplished with an array of electromagnets that creates a three-dimensional parabolic magnetic field.

The robot is magnetized itself and sits on top of the parabola, supported by the interaction between its own … Read more

A robot powered by heart muscles

You can't accuse this robot of not having any heart.

A group of South Korean researchers from the Nano/Micro System Laboratory at Seoul National University has created a miniature robot powered by living heart tissue. The "microrobot" was designed to be injected into the human body and loaded up with a dissolving agent to clear blockages in arteries and other biological systems.

The scientists created the miniature robot by growing heart muscles from a rat on an elastic polymer called polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS).

As this video shows (AVI format), the robot scoots along on its three legs, … Read more