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Handbot Climbs Shelves, Has Rope Launcher
Handbot was designed at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. A part of the Swarmanoid project, handbot is designed to retrieve books from bookshelves. It has specialized arms for climbing and grabbing books.
(Handbot shelf-climbing video)
Even more amazingly, it has a rope launcher.
(Handbot magnetic rope launcher video)
In its climbing mode, Handbot reminds me of the surgeon-hand robot from Philip K. Dick's 1955 short story War Veteran:
From time to time V-Stephens examined his wristwatch and then turned his attention back to the object crawling up and down the sealed edges of the entrance-lock.During the last hour it had cut its way throught the rexeroid surface to within an inch of the terminals. The crawling, exploring object was V-Stephen's surgeon-hand, a self-contained robot of precision quality usually joined to his right wrist.
(Read more about PKD's robot surgeon-hand)
Update: Hey - R2D2 also had a cable launcher. End update.
From Handbot at EPFL via Botjunkie via Frolix_8.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 8/24/2009)
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