OmniTouch turns any surface into a touchscreen interface

OmniTouch displays interface on user's hand Had Shakespeare been born several centuries later, he might have said "All the world's an interface," especially if he'd had a chance to play with the recently-developed, wearable OmniTouch system. While interactive interface projectors are far from new, this innovative concept design utilizes a different approach that promises to turn just about any solid surface into a touch-sensitive input device. Books, tables, walls, hands and other body parts, it's all fair game. In its current proof-of-concept iteration, which was prototyped at idea-rich Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, by PhD student Chris Harrison and his team, the rough-hewn shoulder mounted device resembles...

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Robot that can climb Wall

The TBCP-II can transfer from horizontal to vertical surfaces over inside corners (as seen here) and outside corners Researchers have used a variety of technologies to give robots the ability to climb walls, such as magnets, rolling seals and electro-adhesive properties. But when it comes to wall-climbing robots its hard to go past the humble gecko for inspiration. The gecko's specialized toe pads containing hair-like structures that allow it to scale smooth vertical surfaces have already provided inspiration for the four-legged Stickybot and now researchers at Canada's Simon Fraser University Burnaby (SFU) claim to be the first to apply the gecko's wall-climbing technique to a robot that operates like a tank. The researchers...

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World's fastest laptop GPU Title

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580M Claims  Alienware M18x is the first gaming laptop to offer GTX 580M GPU and has the option of combining two in SLI mode Hardcore mobile gaming fans have a powerful new graphics processing option in the form of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580M. Billed as the world's fastest notebook GPU and capable of playing the latest games at 1080p in 3D, the new chip can be found under the bonnet of the Alienware M18x and is soon to be featured in the Alienware M17x. The card features 384 CUDA cores with a processor clocked at 1240MHz and up to 2GB GDDR5 memory clocked at 1500MHz. NVIDIA says that Alienware M17x equipped with GTX 580M using NVIDIA Optimus technology can deliver up to 100fps in Call of Duty: Black...

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Robot Solves Sudoku

Sudoku Solver This little robot solves a sudoku puzzle all by itself. It scans the sudoku puzzle using a light sensor. It calculates the solution to the puzzle and then writes the digits. ScanningIt first performs a quick scan to determine which cells are empty. It sweeps the light sensor over the sudoku puzzle while continuously reading the sensor values. Each non-empty cell is then handled. An image of the digit is created by scanning the cell line by line moving the robot forward a tiny bit for every line. ThresholdingThe scanned image is very noisy and blurred. To make it more sharp the image is transformed to a binary image (black and white). Each pixel with a value below a threshold value is set to black. And the rest of the...

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The 300kW Varley evR450 Electric Sportscar

The Varley evR450 Another high-performance electric sportscar broke cover last week from an unlikely source. To be built by a 125 year-old Australian company specializing in aerospace, defense and electric vehicles, the less-than-US$215,000 gull-winged Varley evR450 was on display at the Third Annual Australian Electric Vehicle Conference. Composites will enable the evR450 to be "featherweight" and development relationships with other EV specialists Tritium and Ultramotive have yielded some significant advantages for the vehicle, though we're unlikely to see those advantages announced until 2012. The evR450 is believed to be running two Ultramotive CARBON motors, each with a peak power rating of 150kW (and 522...

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Amazing Robot With Eyes

You've seen robots in the form of alpha dogs and insect swarms capable of military deployments but the next wave of robotics also includes a special breed of "sociable" robots for use in medicine, eldercare, and education. These are the robots that demand scientists’ skills toward making robotic parts that can mimic their human counterparts, and be responsive to social cues. Noopy 2-Wheel Robot Kit - Open source arduino-powered robot kit from Japan - www.inmojo.comSmall wonder that human heads were turning last month at the IROS (Intelligent Robots and Systems) 2011 event in San Francisco where visitors met the most sociable humanoid head around, attached to a torso and arm...

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Chinese Bots Play TT

    Last week some oohs and ahhs were in order as two ping-pong playing robots made their debut at Zhejiang University in China. The two robots played against each other and with humans. True, this was not the first time the world witnessed robots playing table tennis. There was Topio, a robot made by Vietnamese robotics firm, TOSY. Topio was a Terminator-looking robot with a chiseled torso and formidable size. Its processors and artificial neural network were able to analyze the ball’s path. There was elsewhere a show of flying quadrocopters whacking the ball back to a human player at the Swiss Federal Institute...

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Next-generation charging technology for environmentally friendly vehicles

APEI's high performance SiC power module technology for increased efficiency and power density. Credit: Arkansas Power Electronics International, Inc. Plug-in electric vehicles represent a new direction for environmentally friendly transportation. Unfortunately, plug-in electric cars are currently grid-tie power electronics that can require large quantities of energy -- and time -- to charge. As plug-in cars become more and more widely used, large amounts of power will be required to quickly charge these vehicles. Arkansas Power Electronics International (APEI) is one of the companies working on a solution to this challenge....

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Venus Flytrap Robot

Mohsen Shahinpoor, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Maine has created a robot version of the infamous bug eating Venus Flytrap, using a material he invented himself several years ago. Named ionic polymeric metal composite (IPMC), it's a nanomaterial that can be  used to mimic muscle function. Shahinpoor describes in his paper published in Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, how he used this material to recreate the sensing and closing abilities of the Venus Flytrap. To make the robot, Shahinpoor fashioned two “leaves” out of the material he’d created to mimic the mouth-like appearance of the Flytrap. He then created a spine from a roll of copper. Then to copy the tiny hairs on the Flytrap that function as...

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