Tag: Robots

Robots can do some pretty amazing things these days. Sure, there are concerns about humans losing their jobs to automation, but you have to remember that there are lots of high-paying jobs created for engineers and roboticists to design, build and program the robots themselves, and many of the jobs robots take on are laborious tasks that can be harmful or stressful to humans anyhow.

ZeGoBeast’s eponymous mechanical creatures are based on Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests and are delivered as a flat pack kit. The company now aims to give its creations more life-like qualities by equipping them with electronics. The ZeGoBeast Electric are scorpion-like creatures that are powered by an Arduino microcontroller and come with an array of sensors.

In the DARPA Robotics Challenge, the idea is to create a robot that can navigate an obstacle course, using skills that could help save humans in an emergency. On the flip side, we may also be creating robot overlords that will one day decide to rule us meat sacks.

When I was a kid, we didn’t have much in the way of competitions or anything to encourage the use of mechanical skills and engineering. I think one of the coolest contests a kid could do is something like this one – when kids from 9 to 14 years old in Los Angeles, Ventura, and Santa Barbara counties came together to compete against each other building LEGO robots.

UK-based Shadow Robot recently showed off their Shadow Dextrous Robot Hand at the International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo Japan. The hand “provides 24 movements, allowing a direct mapping from a human to a robot.” This means that the robot can be as precise or as delicate as a human hand: it can insert thread into a needle’s eye, or pick up eggs or strawberries without crushing them.