Today the LHC performed one of its atomic collision test. The goal was to validate the results of the last test run. During this test the Large Hadron Collider produced a never seen amount of energy. Therefore many skeptics said that the results where totally wrong because of the uncertainty principle. So this last test run tried to validated the results by using subatomic robots inside of the LHC to observe the collision and measuring the energy directly instead of indirect.
The approach failed by destroying the robots at four o’clock and one minute this afternoon. One of the robots collided with the atom instead the other proton. Its remains where found 4,1 kilometer outer the the two thousand and tenth epipolar collider shield.
For a detailed report on this robotic accident take a look here.
John Robinson Pierce was born in March 27, 1910 Des Moines – Iowa and died at April 2, 2002 in Sunnyvale – California. During his life time was he an expert in the fields of radio communication, microwave technology, computer music and psychoacoustics. His team developed in the year 1949 the first transistor. This pioneer work allowed the building of modern digital computers and robots, as well as nearly all digital components of our every day life.
For those that would like to learn more about this pioneer we recommend flowing artikels:
Robot rescue is one, if not even the one, upcoming field for robotics. It is not new, but at present many teams and projects around the world are showing up with new ideas and solutions (e.g. NIFTi, CRASAR). So I will start to collect a few interesting approaches, and present them here on RoboBlog.
So our first candidate is the „Bari-bari II“ robot. It is developed by the Tokyo institute of technology and designed to help rescue workers by lifting heavy boulders / plates.
The capabilities are shown in the following video:
The interesting point is not that the robot can lift heavy material. That can be performed by many robots. The most robot systems that can lift material make usage of either a physical manipulator (hand or arm like) or of a blade (like we have presented earlier on this Blog: RoboPlow). But as fare as i know there is not a single one that is designed i such a way that the hole system itself if part of the lifting unit.
By side of all enthusiasm, some questions are still open:
The „Bari-bari II“ is presented as a tool to crawl under a plat or similar stuff. To do so it makes some maneuvers of lifting and singe off. What is about preventing against more collapses?
If there is now a victim below the plate, he or she will also fell the pressure of the lifting and singing. But as fare as i know, this is not wise. Victims, which are stuck should only be moved as much as needed and you shout never remove the pressure from him or here if you can not eminently support him/here by medicine. During the suck time the blood can often not circulate freely. This causes clumps of blood component. If the pressure is released the blood starts to circulate freely trow the whole body and the clumps can jam haemals. This can causes thrombosis which can lead up to death.
Für alle deutschsprachigen Aibo Besitzer, die auch unter dem Problem fehlender Ersatzteile, mangelnder Informationen oder schlappen Akkus leiden hier ein Tipp:
As we have already reported is the „Fraunhofer Autonomous Intelligent Robotics Devices“ Library now open source and available at the sourceforge project „OpenVolksBot„. In addition we can know report some more details on it.
The FAIRlib is now organized as several Eclipse-Project (fairAlgorithm, fairCore, fairDevices, fairGraphics, fairTestAlgorithm, fairTestCore, fairTestDevices and fairTestGraphics). This allows an easy extending and compiling the projects and minimizes the cross dependencies.
The dependences are listed in the ReadMe and can be auto installed by using the script „apt-get-fair“
A way of easy installing is given by the script „install-fair„
The current version is tested on the Ubuntu 9.10 (64-Bit) , but will also work on other OS (by side of auto solving the dependences)
Everybody who has ever designed and built a robot by him self knows about the difficulty by building special components like sensor holders, adapters or axes bearings . Either you have to pay a huge amount of money to a company that is willing to build small product series on it or , which is more common you build them by your self and spend a lot of time on prototyping and manufacturing tasks, and then build it by hand. For the last option the usage of a 3D-printers can speedup the process.
Generally spoken is a 3D-Printer an industrial robot with several degree of freedoms, that is moving an extruder and injects either plastic or metal in a way that a plastic or metal object (the prototypes) are created. This technology allows therefore to print physical objects. By using this technology, the coast of one object/prototype are dramatically shrinking. More or leas the coast of one object is given by the material coasts and the time which is needed to build a CAD-Design of the object.
The major drawback of 3D-Print is the acquisition costs. Professional printer can easily coast more then 20.000€. But there is hope. The open source project RepRap allows us to build our own 3D-Printer by coast round about 500€. RepRap stands for Replicating Rapid-prototyper and is a hardware open source project. Like the big industrial machines does this project support a easy way do build your first prototypes.
Mendel’s improvements over Darwin from Rep Rap on Vimeo.
Of course there is also darkness. The RepRap-hardware is currently on the state of the industrial machines from 5 years ago. For example does the open source version not support to printing two type of material simultaneously. But this is extremely usefully if you have to build object with huge holes, which would collapse if there is no filling material inside that will be removed later.
But still this technollogy makes prototyping that easy and quick that it is worth to give it a try.
Updated:
The „Elektrischer-Reporter“ (German) has a reportage of the background and the ideas for the close future on 3D-Printing and homemade products. The basic stadement is an upcoming change of production lines. Every customers will be also a small factory and an upcoming market of „digital construction plans“ will showup.
