Technabob » purdue

Rube Goldberg Machine Sets World Record

Conner Flynn — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 17:30:59 +0000

We’ve seen all kinds of crazy Rube Goldberg machines, but this one is breaking records (and bursting balloons.) In fact Purdue University’s Society of Professional Engineers and the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers broke their own world record this past Saturday with a machine that has 300 steps. The previous record was 244 steps.

Not content with breaking their own record, this machine is also pretty compact. They were able to get it so compact by creating rotating contraptions that fold out only when needed. Yes, this is a lot of work just to blow up and pop a balloon, but that’s the whole point of a Rube Goldberg machine.

It took the team over 5,000 hours to build the machine, and in the end it did things like peeling an apple, juicing an orange, toasting bread, making a hamburger, changing a light bulb, loading a CD and sharpening a pencil before it reached its balloon-popping goal. Check out the video above to watch it all happen.

[via The Awesomer]

Robot Can Predict New Surroundings

Technabob — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 00:26:57 +0000

A team of researchers at Purdue University have devised a method to teach robots to navigate foreign environments by themselves. Using some very complex artificial intelligence, this robot can make educated “guesses” about what it might next encounter in its surroundings.

Rather than trying to just deal with differences in surfaces and obstacles as the robot approaches an area, the ‘bot can actually take data from its recent surroundings to predict what might be next and store that information in its internal map. By doing this, the robot can better prepare to navigate ahead of time, reducing the likelihood of getting stuck or slow progress through challenging obstacles.

Currently, the algorithm does add a bit of processing overhead to the robot’s software, meaning that it can’t cover as much ground as less intelligent robots. In future, the researchers plan to link up multiple robots to share their knowledge and to improve prediction capabilities.

[via softpedia via robotster]