Science Fiction
Dictionary
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
 |
Obrero Robot Has The Soft Touch
Obrero is a prototype robot built to explore the concept of sensitive manipulation; its grasp is very soft because it uses sensors in its robotic hand when manipulating objects, rather than just relying on machine vision.
(Obrero robot with sensitive manipulation)
Obrero has 8 force sensors, 5 position sensors, 5 motors and 7 high resolution tactile sensors in its hands.
The hand was designed to be compliant. It has postion and force control of the fingers. Additionally, it has very sensitive tactile sensors. Each of the fingers has series elastic actuators in its joints. A finger has two mecahnical coupled links. However they can decouple to conform to an object. The thumb and the middle finger can also rotate using series elastic actuator. The tactile sensors were custom made for doing manipulation task.
Take a look at a just a few seconds video showing Obrero picking up a very flexible object - a bag of my favorite cookies! This is a compilation video; the Obrero robot portion is just from 2:40 to 3:15.
(Obrero robot video [starts at about 2:40])
Obrero is a robotic project being worked on by Eduardo Torres-Jara and supervised by MIT Professor Rodney A. Brooks. Dr. Brooks is a co-founder of iRobot; he left his post of CTO a year ago to found his own robotics company, Heartland Robotics.
On his website, he states that "I want to effect a powerful evolution in the world's labor markets, and my current focus is to develop low-cost robots that will empower American workers." Obrero is where he is starting to do this work.
As it turns out, science fiction fans have been in good (robotic) hands as far as imagining robot hands that are controlled both by touch and by sight. Read what sf Grandmaster Robert Heinlein writes in his 1956 story The Door Into Summer.
Hands I could order from the atomics-engineering equipment companies who supplied Hired Girl's hands, only this time I would want the best, with wide-range servos and with the delicate feedback required for microanalysis manipulations and for weighing radioactive isotopes...The ears I could buy from any of a dozen radio-TV houses - though I might have to do some circuit designing to have his hands controlled simultaneously by sight, sound, and touch feedback the way the human hand is controlled.
(Read more about Heinlein's robotic hands)
Take a look at the Obrero homepage; not much to see yet at the Heartland Robotics company website. Via NextBigFuture.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 10/6/2009)
Follow this kind of news @Technovelgy.| Email | RSS | Blog It | Stumble | del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit |
Would
you like to contribute a story tip?
It's easy:
Get the URL of the story, and the related sf author, and add
it here.
Comment/Join discussion ( 3 )
Related News Stories - (" Robotics ")
Unitree CEO Wang Xingxing Runs With His G1 Robot Army
'Does thinking you're the last sane man on the face of the Earth make you crazy?'
Blue Collar AI Goes To Work To Mine Its Own Crypto
Blue collar bot.
HandelBot Helps Two-Handed Robots Learn Piano
'I request that you feed the correlation between those dots and the levers of the panel into my memory banks.'
Woven Fiber Electronic Skin For Robots
'... all the feel and appearance of human flesh and epidermis.' - Harl Vincent, 1934.
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
Science Fiction
Timeline
1600-1899
1900-1939
1940's 1950's
1960's 1970's
1980's 1990's
2000's 2010's
Current News
Grok And The City Fathers From 'Cities In Flight' By James Blish
'Chris, the City Fathers are not interested in your welfare; I suppose you know that. They're interested in only one thing: the survival of the city.'
Why Not Move A Warehouse District?
'Did you never see a moving house before?'
Will An AI Found A New Religion?
'You must decide how you will worship Me.'
Terraformer Industries Make Methane
'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
I Need An Outdoor Spherical Display
'Usually a spherical display hovered in the centre...'
Worm Disrupts Physics Simulations Undetected For A Decade
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
Muxcard Redditor's DIY Credit Card-Sized Computer
It's a computer, but just barely.
'Soft Assembly' Fashions That Fashion Themselves On The Wearer
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
Orwell's Nightmare Of AI-Written Novels Comes To Pass
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
ISS Plagued By Leak - Again!
'There were perhaps a dozen bladder-like objects in the tunnel...'
Ridiculous 'Ghost Murmur' Tech Still Science Fiction
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
Outdoor Video Screens Can Be Arbitrarily Large
The Shape of Things To Come
Infrared Contact Lenses To See In The Dark
'I can see in the dark, Case.'
What'll You Have? Extinct Animals Returned, Or Synthetic Eggshells?
'...a new plastic with the characteristics of an avian eggshell.'
Sunbird Pulsar Fusion Like Leinster's Space Tug
'It was a pushpot, which could not possibly be called a jet plane because it could not possibly fly. Only it did.'
RentAHuman App Lets AI Agents Hire Humans
'She wouldn't stop until Antar had told her everything he knew about whatever it was that she was playing with on her screen.'
