Students at Tokyo's University of Science have developed a new version of their muscle suit, a wearable robotic suit that assists the muscles when carrying out strenuous tasks.
The original version of the suit, which has been in production for several years, provides assistance to the arms and back but the new version provides assistance to the back only. That means it is lighter and more compact than the original model.
In a demonstration on Wednesday at the International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo, a student wearing the suit was able to bend down and lift 15 kilograms of weights with the assistance of the robotic suit. Doing so without assistance would be difficult for many people and could cause injury to some.The university is still developing the suit and the model demonstrated on Wednesday was the first prototype. A production version is due some time in 2010.
With its greater assistance the original version of the suit will remain the most useful for heavier tasks.
In a demonstration of that model on Wednesday a student was asked to carry 10-kilogram bags of rice. With the suit switched off he could manage up to three bags before they started to get too heavy to carry, but with the suit switched on another two bags could be loaded into his arms. He quickly dropped the bags when the suit was switched off as without assistance it was too much weight to carry.
Such suits are being developed with an eye on assisting the physically challenged and workers carrying out physically demanding jobs.Earlier this year Toyota Motor unveiled similar robot-assisted suits and has been testing them at factories in Japan with workers who have to lift large or heavy sheets of metal or car parts.
Tokyo Students Design a New Robotic Muscle Suit
Design – The Oboe Humanoid Robot
Here is an interesting design concept from designer Arnaud Deloustal, the Oboe Humanoid Robot.
The Oboe Humanoid Robot is designed to hang out with the elderly so that it can absorb, experiences, knowledge etc.
Robot Design Delivers Packages Through Sewers
It’s 2020, and cities are so overcrowded that it’s impossible to deliver packages. UPS trucks have nowhere to double-park, and obnoxious bike messengers can’t even ride on pedestrian-jammed sidewalks. How, then, can important parcels reach their destinations in a squalid megalopolis of the future?
Through the sewers, of course.
The brainchild of designer Phillip Hermes, the Urban Mole is a capsule that travels through existing networks of underground pipes in order to transport packages as diverse as groceries, signed documents and any title that appears on Oprah’s Book Club. The Mole frees up our streets and roads for important matters, like mobilizing armies against the cyborgs that will inevitably plague our future cities.Able to move parcels as large as a shoebox, the Mole fully encapsulates its contents from surrounding waste water. In other words, the phrase “duty free shipping” will take on a whole new meaning.
The Urban Mole placed second in the VisionWorks contest, a logistics competition sponsored by Bayer MaterialScience (yes, they spell it one word like that) that asked participants to envision transportation solutions for 2020. The Urban Mole came in second to a building that grows food on its walls. Yeah, that’s cool, but it’s no undergound robot.
According to VisionWorks, “The pipe system is structured like a road network – the more traffic, the bigger the pipe.” Electric rails within the pipes provide juice for the Mole’s motors in a system that works like a miniature subway. Still more pipes run from drop-off points to delivery centers called MoleStations (again with the one-word construction) where customers can retrieve their items locally. The designer estimates that the average cross-town delivery could take place in less than 10 minutes.We like to think of the Urban Mole as a combination of Mr. McFeeley and the Ninja Turtles, skulking through sewers only to emerge when it can be of use to human civilization. But we pity the poor guy who has to open those capsules.
Democratizing Robot Design
Beneath the white paperboard petals of a robotic flower--which can open and close in response to changes in light, or catch a thrown ball detected by infrared sensors--lies a new standardized robotics platform called Qwerk. Developed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Qwerk is designed so that almost anyone can use it to build his or her own custom Internet-enabled robot. It's a platform that CMU computer scientist Illah Nourbakhsh hopes will launch an open-source robotics movement and "democratize robot design for people intimidated by current techniques and parts."In contrast to current kits--most of which require a prefabricated set of parts--Qwerk is, according to the CMU robotics team, the first easy-to-use, low-cost robotics controller to house, in one place, power regulators, motor controllers, and hardware and rewritable software for a Wi-Fi Internet connection and simple programming. In the flower robot, the platform sits inside the blue wooden flowerpot. The CMU team has also developed some robot recipes for easy-to-build machines--like the paperboard flower--that can be assembled in a few hours with off-the-shelf parts. Together, the recipes and platform make up the Telepresence Robotic Kit (TeRK).
Why build a robotic flower? Well, beyond opening, closing, and catching things, it can play music, read the news aloud from its Internet connection, and strike poses according to its maker's mood. But the point is that you don't have to build the flower. "Ultimately, we hope people will riff on the recipes, making unusual and unexpected changes that take on a life of their own," thereby helping bring robotics into the mainstream, says Nourbakhsh.
With Qwerk and its catalogue of design recipes, the TeRK project joins the wider effort to create a greater variety of robots beyond the traditional walkers and rovers. "In the past, designers haven't paid enough attention to creating nonmobile robots that engage users' imaginations," says Mitchel Resnick, director of the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at MIT's Media Lab. Resnick's group has developed LEGO Mindstorms and PicoCrickets, two construction kits similar in purpose to the TeRK.
Human-Centered Robotics
In recent years, there has been great interest generated in the emerging fields of service and medical robots. These applications are part of a growing area of human-centered robotics. This area involves the close interaction between robotic manipulation systems and human beings, including direct human-manipulator contact. In such applications, traditional figures of merit such as bandwidth, maximum force and torque capability, and reachable workspace, do not fully encompass the range of metrics which define the requirements of such systems. Specifically, human-centered robotic systems must consider the requirement of safety in addition to the traditional metrics of performance. Thus, it is the challenge of human-centered robotics to successfully blend often competing requirements of safety and performance.
The Stanford Robotics Laboratory has initiated a research effort to design a human-centered, inherently-safe robotic manipulator. While the design and development effort include all aspects of manipulator design, the primary focus has been on addressing the limitations of the mechanical system and its impact on safety and performance. We have focused on efforts to reduce the manipulator weight and inertia to improve its inherent safety characteristics while maintaining performance levels expected of modern manipulators.
DECMMA Actuation Approach
A critical component to this work has been the development of a new actuation approach that seeks to relocate the major source of actuation effort from the joint to the base of the manipulator. This can substantially reduce the effective inertia of the overall manipulator by isolating the reflected inertia of the actuator while greatly reducing the overall weight of the manipulator. Performance is maintained with small actuators collocated with the joints. Our approach partitions the torque generation into low and high frequency components and distributes these components to the arm location where they are most effective.
We refer to the overall approach as Distributed Elastically Coupled Macro Mini Parallel Actuation (DECMMA). The DECMMA approach is analogous to the design of robotic manipulators for use in zero gravity. Under such conditions, gravity induced torques do not exist. Joint actuators provide torques related only to the task, such as trajectory tracking and disturbance rejection, both of which are primarily medium to high frequency in content. We achieve the zero gravity analogy by compensating for gravity torques and low frequency torques using the low frequency actuator located at the base of the manipulator. With the effects of gravity and low frequency torques compensated, joint torque requirements become similar to those encountered by a zero gravity robotic manipulator. However, unlike robotic manipulators designed for space applications, the DECMMA joint actuators do not require a large gear reducer to achieve the required torque and power densities. Thus, the impedance of DECMMA approach, and its resulting safety characteristics, is superior to that of current space robotic manipulators.