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Category: robotics/AI – Page 1186

Underwater robots are being widely used as tools in a variety of marine tasks. The RobDact is one such bionic underwater vehicle, inspired by a fish called Dactylopteridae known for its enlarged pectoral fins. A research team has combined computational fluid dynamics and a force measurement experiment to study the RobDact, creating an accurate hydrodynamic model of the RobDact that allows them to better control the vehicle.

The team published their findings in Cyborg and Bionic Systems on May 31, 2022.

Underwater robots are now used for many marine tasks, including in the fishery industry, underwater exploration, and mapping. Most of the traditional underwater robots are driven by a propeller, which is effective for cruising in at a stable speed. However, underwater robots often need to be able to move or hover at low speeds in turbulent waters, while performing a specific task. It is difficult for the propeller to move the robot in these conditions. Another factor when an is moving at low speeds in unstable flowing waters is the propeller’s “twitching” movement. This twitching generates unpredictable fluid pulses that reduce the robot’s efficiency.

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In recent years, roboticists have developed a wide variety of robotic systems with different body structures and capabilities. Most of these robots are either made of hard materials, such as metals, or soft materials, such as silicon and rubbery materials.

Researchers at Hong Kong University (HKU) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have recently created Aquabots, a new class of soft robots that are predominantly made of liquids. As most are predominantly made up of water or other , the new robots, introduced in a paper published in ACS Nano, could have highly valuable biomedical and environmental applications.

“We have been engaged in the development of adaptive interfacial assemblies of materials at the oil-water and water-water interface using nanoparticles and polyelectrolytes,” Ho Cheung (Anderson) Shum, Thomas P. Russell, and Shipei Zhu told TechXplore via email. “Our idea was to assemble the materials that the interface and the assemblies lock in the shapes of the liquids. The shapes are dictated using external forces to generate arbitrary shapes or to use all-liquid 3D printing to be able to spatially organize the assemblies.”

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Most materials—from rubber bands to steel beams—thin out as they are stretched, but engineers can use origami’s interlocking ridges and precise folds to reverse this tendency and build devices that grow wider as they are pulled apart.

Researchers increasingly use this kind of technique, drawn from the ancient art of , to design spacecraft components, medical robots and antenna arrays. However, much of the work has progressed via instinct and trial and error. Now, researchers from Princeton Engineering and Georgia Tech have developed a general formula that analyzes how structures can be configured to thin, remain unaffected, or thicken as they are stretched, pushed or bent.

Kon-Well Wang, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the research, called the work “elegant and extremely intriguing.”

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Summary: A new robotic system can learn directly from human interaction videos and generalize the information at the task being completed. This makes the robot well suited to learn household chores effectively and efficiently.

Source: Carnegie Mellon University.

The robot watched as Shikhar Bahl opened the refrigerator door. It recorded his movements, the swing of the door, the location of the fridge and more, analyzing this data and readying itself to mimic what Bahl had done.

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3D printing technology continues to add innovations to the scientific world day by day. The Southern University made a new development in 3D printing technology this time of Science and Technology.

Researchers succeeded in a 3D printing strategy to construct flexible and stretchable light-emitting devices that can be integrated with soft robots.

SUSTech is constantly adapting, attracting more and more young students with its constantly burgeoning range of programs and opportunities for research for all levels of study.

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Musk seems frustrated with the delays in Neuralink’s progress.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest person has reached out to a competitor Synchron Inc. about a potential investment after his own biotech company Neuralink has lagged in developing an implantable brain chip, Reuters reported.

Launched in 2016, Neuralink was co-founded by Musk to develop implantable brain-chip interfaces to connect humans and computers. Like his ambitious projections about his electric vehicles, Musk had ambitiously claimed in 2019 that Neuralink was aiming for its product to receive regulatory approval by the end of 2020.

Later in 2021, when the company had not even begun human trials, Musk claimed at a Wall Street Journal conference that he expected them to begin by 2022, but the company has failed to get the regulatory nod to do so, even at the time of writing this. Contrastingly, a startup, Synchron, received the necessary approvals last year.

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The system uses neural networks to predict solar storms up to 48 hours in advance.

A multi-institutional research group based out of China has put together an “early warning” system that could aid in the accurate prediction of space weather, a press release said.

Every 11 years or so, the magnetic field of the Sun flips completely so that its north pole becomes south, while the south pole becomes north. The changes in the magnetic field of the Sun lead to visible changes on the solar surface, where regions of intense magnetic activity temporarily stop the convection process.

The drop in temperature of that region can be observed by telescopes on Earth as they appear darker than the rest of the solar surface and hence are called sunspots. At times, sunspots end up giving out giant eruptions of energy and material, which are called solar flare and coronal mass ejections (CMEs), respectively.

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An art collective is trying to get an AI-supported candidate into Danish Parliament in 2023. Could we have a fully virtual candidate one day?

With all the political rancor that has become a part of our everyday reality, maybe it’s time to admit that humans may not be the best at forging agreements. Our egos are always in play, and emotions often rule our political choices more than reason. Maybe artificial intelligence (AI) could do a better job, or at least that’s what the creators of The Synthetic Party, the world’s first AI-based political party, think. The party hopes to run an AI candidate in Denmark’s general election in 2023.

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Imaginima/iStock.

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