The curious looking gripping mechanism above draws inspiration from geckos. Large surface area on a gecko’s feet allows it to climb vertical walls by taking advantage of electrostatic forces. For example, the video below shows a robot with an electrostatic “foot” that climbs up a vertical wall
This new project uses the same premise to grab objects.The biggest advantage cited by SRI: reversible adhesion to a number of surfaces with extremely low steady-state power consumption.
+50Jamming Gripper + Elephant Trunk = Awesome 
still in the early stages of development, this concept is trying to combine one of the more dexterous animal manipulators with the jamming technology we have seen popularized through the coffee ground filled balloon grippers.
The arm is made up of a bunch of different jamming segments stuck together at the ends, with separate vacuum valves to each segment and a set of four control cables spaced at 90 degree intervals around the outside of the entire thing. As the control cables pull on the arm, the segments smoothly flex, but by jamming selected segments and turning them rigid
The following video shows the beginnings of what seems like a very promising concept.
+50Check out this cool open hardware project developed by two MIT alums!
The MaKey MaKey is a “simple invention kit for beginners, experts, and everything in between.” It works like a circuit board that allows the user to create devices through simple alligator clipping, but can also be used as an Arduino. This video demonstrates some fun and creative ways for this device (though at the end it becomes a bit of an advertisement)!
+60Roombo Robot vacuum cleaners are back, and they’re playing one of the most classical games in the history of video games: Pac-Man.
Several students from Colorado University programmed five robots to efficiently play a game of Pac-Man. They play on a virtual maze, with position tracking that eliminates the need of any sensors for walls. There is one Pac-Man, four ghosts. The ghosts can sense each other, so they never collide, and the ghosts work autonomously. When Pac-Man is running around, they go into chase mode, trying to catch the yellow blob. As soon as Pacman grabs one of the four power pellets on the field, however, they do everything to evade the monster trying to eat them. All the while, Pac-Man is controlled by a human player on a joystick.
Overall, it’s an amazing physical remake of an awesome game.
+10Biological robots are pretty common for what they’re worth, but this is perhaps one of the cooler ones. It’s a robot that can react similarly to a certain kind of caterpillar, which rolls itself into a loop and can roll and launch itself at incredible speeds. The caterpillar is truly is an example of nature’s engineering, and the robot is a comparable human replica of it. About 10 cm long, made of shape-memory alloy, when electricity is jolted through the robot, the memory metal heats up and pulls the robot into a loop, and propels it forward. In less than 200 milliseconds, the robot can go from standstill to over 50 cm/sec, with over 200 rotations per minute.
Even this, however, cannot compare to the actual thing, however; a caterpillar would respond extremely quickly to stimuli, whereas the robot takes 50 milliseconds after being stimulated by electricity to begin moving.
00Imagine if a robot that looked something like a snake was making it’s way through your intestines and vital organs. It’s not the prettiest thought, but it just might become reality very, very soon.
Developed at Carnegie Mellon University, this robot snake is equipped with a powerful camera, multiple sensors, and tools that allow it to move through an animal with less intrusion than regular surgery. This will hopefully make surgery easier and better for a patient, and lower costs by making complex surgeries simpler. So far, scientists and doctors have used the snake robot to perform surgery on hearts, prostate cancer, and other diseased organs.
The future is bright: hopefully, the size of such robots will get smaller and smaller, and become the rumored “nanobots.” These will be able to perform surgery with almost no extra damage and the least intrusion, improving safety and efficiency.
+20What is so attractive about a robot that mimics a jellyfish? Well, it’s theoretically immortal, has a simple repetitive movement that cycles slowly and easily, and it can travel deep underwater.
RoboJelly is a robotic jellyfish that does all of this. Based on the moon jellyfish, it has a bell as a body, and pulses slightly to push itself over short distances. Its power source is hydrogen, using catalyst powder that reacts to hydrogen and oxygen to control the contractions of the body. Thus, the robot can harvest as much hydrogen from the water as it needs, and theoretically could go on forever.
The RoboJelly is designed to work as a search and rescue or surveillance robot for the U.S. Navy. Scientists are still testing it with a tether on a water tank, and hopefully in the future it will be able to traverse the vast oceans.
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