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Category: robotics/AI – Page 1151

The wearable robot helps patients who are afraid of needles.

A recent study in Japan has revealed that a hand-held soft robot can improve the experience of patients while undergoing medical treatments, such as injections and other unpleasant therapies or immunizations.

Inspired by vaccinations during Covid

The research was inspired in part by the numerous needles people had to endure while being vaccinated against Covid-19. Some people had an aversion to these needles, which led to less people getting vaccinated, reducing the rates. Although there have been numerous studies explaining patients’ pain and anxiety during treatment, there have been few solutions studied or discussed to help patients.

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A titanium robotic exoskeleton is helping an eight-year-old boy in Mexico learn to walk after being wheelchair-bound for most of his life.

The boy, David, suffers from cerebral palsy, a group of neurological disorders that surfaces during early childhood and hinders a child’s ability to control their muscle movements. In effect, it makes it extremely difficult for an affected child to walk and maintain their balance and posture.

As you can imagine, rehabilitating a child with cerebral palsy is a long and arduous process. But now, David’s speeding up his rehabilitation with the help of the battery-powered Atlas 2030 exoskeleton, developed by award winning Spanish roboticist Elena García Armada.

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California produces about 90% of the nation’s strawberries, but severe drought and worker shortages are threatening the fruit. One company is hoping to change that with the power of robots.

Eric Adamson’s company is behind a strawberry robotic revolution. He said they’re programmed to think on their own, with cameras that sense texture and color.

“People think robots have been around forever, but they’re actually very, very new, especially robots that make decisions and are autonomous,” Adamson said.

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If you’ve ever played the claw game at an arcade, you know how hard it is to grab and hold onto objects using robotics grippers. Imagine how much more nerve-wracking that game would be if, instead of plush stuffed animals, you were trying to grab a fragile piece of endangered coral or a priceless artifact from a sunken ship.

Most of today’s robotic grippers rely on embedded sensors, complex feedback loops, or advanced machine learning algorithms, combined with the skill of the operator, to grasp fragile or irregularly shaped objects. But researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have demonstrated an easier way.

Taking inspiration from nature, they designed a new type of soft, robotic that uses a collection of thin tentacles to entangle and ensnare objects, similar to how jellyfish collect stunned prey. Alone, individual tentacles, or filaments, are weak. But together, the collection of filaments can grasp and securely hold heavy and oddly shaped objects. The gripper relies on simple inflation to wrap around objects and doesn’t require sensing, planning, or feedback control.

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Retail AI is everywhere this holiday season — even if you don’t realize it.

Say you’re a fashion retailer. You’ve always had to try to predict trends — but now with a slowed supply chain, you have to look 12 months out instead of six.

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“We got a thousand times improvement [in training performance per chip] over the last 10 years, and a lot of it has been due to number representation,” Bill Dally, chief scientist and senior vice president of research at Nvidia said at the recent IEEE Symposium on Computer Arithmetic.

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For proper operation, drones usually use accelerometers to determine the direction of gravity. In a new study published in Nature on October 19, 2022, a team of scientists from Delft University of Technology, the CNRS and Aix-Marseille University has shown that drones can estimate the direction of gravity by combining visual detection of movement with a model of how they move. These results may explain how flying insects determine the direction of gravity and are a major step toward the creation of tiny autonomous drones.

While drones typically use accelerometers to estimate the direction of , the way flying achieve this has been shrouded in mystery until now, as they have no specific sense of acceleration. In this study, a European team of scientists led by the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and involving a CNRS researcher has shown that drones can assess gravity using visual motion detection and motion modeling together.

To develop this new principle, scientists have investigated optical flow, that is, how an individual perceives movement relative to their environment. It is the visual movement that sweeps across our retina when we move. For example, when we are on a train, trees next to the tracks pass by faster than distant mountains. The optical flow alone is not enough for an insect to be able to know the direction of gravity.

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A robot fish that filters microplastics has been brought to life after it won the University of Surrey’s public competition—The Natural Robotics Contest.

The robot fish design, which was designed by a student named Eleanor Mackintosh, was selected by an international panel of judges because it could be part of a solution to minimize plastic pollution in our waterways.

The competition, which ran in the summer of 2022, was open to anyone who had an idea for a bio-inspired robot, with the promise that the winner would be turned into a working prototype.

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MELBOURNE, Australia — The Japanese Coast Guard has started operations with a newly delivered MQ-9B SeaGuardian drone, while more airborne early warning aircraft have arrived in the country by ship.

The UAV’s manufacturer, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, said in a news release that the Coast Guard commenced flight operations with a SeaGuardian from the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force Air Station Hachinohe on Oct. 19.

The American company said the high-altitude, long-endurance unmanned aircraft “will primarily perform Maritime Wide Area Search (MWAS) over the Sea of Japan and the Pacific Ocean. Other missions will include search and rescue, disaster response, and maritime law enforcement.”

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