All right, the cheetah-bot might not be as
fast as the real life animal, nor does it look as gracious. But, it is the
fastest legged robot in the world, surpassing an impressive 29 mph (46 km/h).
Can you run at that speed? I didn't think so. Although it will take us much
longer to imitate animal species like the cheetah, they are
the inspiration for a lot of research and developmental robots.
Just as the cheetah has a flexible
back when running, the cheetah bot does as well. Because the whole body moves fluidly when
running, it is able to reach incredible speeds. The only limitation is that it is still
attached to a hydraulic arm to keep balance. It cannot yet run independently
and, as you can see in the movie, the robot really struggles with its
balance. Unfortunately it is hard to get any more technical information on the
cheetah bot, but actually that comes as no surprise is that the U.S. government is
very interested in these types of innovations. Why? To obtain world dominance, prepare
for an alien invasion, military advantage, who knows?
As the cheetah is so much faster than any
human being, it presents a lot of possible applications in the field of war. It can outrun
enemies and tackle them without any difficulty, just like an attack dog.
But, dogs can be easily defended when they eventually catch up to you.
With these robots you stand no chance. Running more than 29 mph? Snapping a
robots neck? Enemy forces will have to find a whole new way to fight the U.S.
army when similar robots come into play. That’s why these new robots are so
valuable. And, as we know, many innovations in business originate from
inventions used in the army, so maybe in the future we will be seeing more from
the cheetah bot.
They are everywhere if you consider your privacy, they can see it all? What are they? Why are they up in the skies like UFO's? Who controls them?
These are some of the few questions that pop up in our mind every time we hear about drone strikes somewhere in the world. They are actually unmanned flying machines controlled remotely at a military base, mostly thousand of miles away. They are equipped for tactile missions and have equipments such as hi-resolution cameras and even missiles at times. They are a new breed of warriors employed in the battlefields today, actually almost all of the news agencies are mapped with news about some or the other drone strikes somewhere in the world.
But are these mean machine so really mean? Can they just be used as weapons of mass destruction?
The answer to the above questions is NO.Drones are capable of much much more. They can be used in various circumstances where human intervention on board an aircraft is actually dangerous or tedious. Such situations can be weather observation, surveillance for pattern recognition in agricultural fields, or perhaps even traffic monitoring to understand several factors for different studies.
They are much much more than Killers they were designed to be much more. It's their use that makes them deadly yet the power behind the technology is immense. They are the frontrunners of unmanned aircrafts which perhaps in the future could also be extended to totally autonomous machines to do things even out of the earths atmosphere...
The next generation bots are coming... You can't see them, touch them or feel them around you but they would do things that would entirely change the course of perception of the human race. Imagine a chronic tumour in the human body in a place inaccessible even to the best of the medical terms. What is the cure?
Pop a pill containing these miracle workers which would be electronically programmed to target the tumour in a manner as quick as one can think without any risky procedures or long waits in the hospital. This is the future with bots being made at the nanoscale i.e. a nanometer scale which is equal to 19^-9 metres. So small as to be not even seen by the human eye yet so powerful to accomplish tasks through coordinated swarms.
Thought the creation of these minuscule is not very easy because of the fact of creation of motors, sensors and the matrix board for the controller, the size of lesser than even a nanometer and this is possible but not so very in the current period. These wonders have the power to work in a coordinated manner as a swarm to accomplish tasks not only in the medical field as mentioned above but they could be also used in emergency situations such as a war or on aircrafts to control in many real time features of the rudders for example.
These bots would enable us in the future to perform functions which today owing to the inability to create objects on such a scale factor are impossible.
The various approaches of formulation of these organisms are as follows:
1. Biochip
2. Nubots
3. Positional Nanoassembly
4. Bacteria Based
5. Open Technology
6. Nanorobot Race
These bots if implemented on this scale have tremendous potentials. They can even help us to decode the human genome on a much better scale as the DNA molecules are also at the same factor level. Though evidently they are of primary importance and are needed as soon as possible yet there is a lot to be learnt on the way before putting them into actual usage or over the production facility.
Robots are able to traverse where humans dare not, into disaster areas, both
natural and man-made. Governments, universities, and corporations across
the globe have been investing significant resources in developing robots to
deal with the repercussions of floods, mining collapses, oil spills, nuclear outbrakes, and other industrial and natural disasters since the 90's.
Robots, in essence, have no need of environmental comfort. Their chassis unite forged metallic alloys with synthesized polcarbonates that empower them to resist tremendous physical exposure to heat or steam (no air circulation), direct force or high frequency radiation, while being flexible enough to move around conveniently.
The limit of TID (total ionizing dose - deterioration of electric/electronic equipments because of temporally accumulated amount of radioactive exposure - absorbed dose [Gy]) for
human workers is legally defined as 100 - 250 Milli-Sievert [mSv]. If the safety factor is set
to 0.1 Gy, 50 [Gy] and 20 [Gy] (the admissible limit of a robot) are 20-50
times and 8-20 times larger the admissible limit of human workers
respectively.
Robotic devices have been employed in response to multiple Radioactive disasters: Three Mile
Island, Chernobyl and recently in Fukushima, Japan. In Fukushima, Packbots were used to measure radiation levels and take pictures safely (see video below). As for chemical and oil refinement disasters, robots have been vital in managing environmental damages. Clean-up robots, with huge, deployable arms, are able to analyze and collect chemical leakages within disaster areas.
Robots entering Fukushima Reactor Building for the very first time:
In the medical field, robots have been developed to identify, analyze, and combat terminal diseases, such as cancer. Nano-robots, robots scaled to 10-9 meters, are being developed to access and cure malignant cells through magnetic field targeting. A big advantage of this robotic technology is that it targets only the infected cells, without damaging healthy tissue (like chemotherapy).
Robots are morevover used to explore active volcanos, which is just
another example of how robots have extended humanity's learning
horizons.
Below (left), a Hurt Locker-like bomb-disabling robot is pictured. Another example of how robotics has extended humanity's practical reach without endangering human lives. All of these robots have broken down environmental barriers, allowing humans to access realms previously inaccessible. Now just imagine what barriers robots will be able to overcome in the future.
This tactical hazardous operations robot, also know as THOR, is considered to be the robotic disaster response challenge (DRC) robot, par excellence. It not only facilitates the accomplishment of certain milestones in the prevention of disasters, but also pushes the entire field of robotic technology to its utter limits. At the end of the challenge, THOR should be able to perform the following tasks:
Get into and drive a utility vehicle
Walk across a rubble field
Clear rubble blocking an entry
Open doors and enter a building
Climb a ship’s ladder
Manipulate a power tool to break through a wall
Locate and close a valve
Carry and connect a fire hose
The business value of this technology manifests in the increasingly growing market and research & development found in this area. It seem that this technology not only provides a pruduct with respect to social responsibility or business ethics, but also from a pure return on investment point of view it seems to be beneficial.
There is a constant deliberation amidst the Robotics community: can humanoid bots be really developed? If they can be, would they be capable of emulating human behavior or even perhaps match the competencies displayed by the human brain to some extent?
The answer to these questions can be further explored through the development of the first Android based humanoid bot by Professor Oh Jun-Ho, on behalf of Korea Advanced institute of science and technology, with the lower body of a bipedal frame, that of a robot, while keeping the head of a human(Albert Einstein in this case). The capabilities of this humanoid bot, though limited, include features such as independent eye movements on both the eyes, facial gestures, voice recognition and synthesis apart from movement freedom on more than 3 independent axes. There has also been a development of the HUBO 2 by the same organisation on similar scales as the upgraded version to HUBO also known as Albert HUBO.
The robot is specially known for its facial gestures which are closely matched to the more than 1000 facial gestures that the human face is capable of. Also another remarkable feature of this bot is the capability to produce a synthesized voice on the patterns of the voice of the famous physicist Albert Einstein. The bi-pedal frame is capable also of matching the human type walking movement though it is still at very slow speeds, which in turn are a remarkable feature for such a frame.
The technicalities of this bot are also a benchmark in this industry with various motors and special sensors put in place to monitor and to react to situations on real time basis. It uses two on-board PC104 processors and solid state drives for faster instruction processing power and retrieval. The left one can control the entire robot, taking care of functions such as walking and overall stabilization; the right one on the other hand is normally empty and one can load speech, vision, and navigation algorithms.
Such humanoid bots are a great leap in terms of human based interactions because such bots can be very readily deployed in the future in places of public interest to interact with live humans and perhaps provide more options and benchmarks in terms of the human-bot interaction in a more informal manner.
The advancements in technology have amazed everyone world wide, and the most astonishing developments over the past few years were in Atlas. Atlas are humanoid robots which are developed mainly to assist or carry out search and rescue tasks. Boston Dynamics, an American company, are developing the Atlas to assist The United States army.
The Atlas was developed from Boston Dynamics first version which was called Petman. The design are somehow identical in terms of the limbs (4 hydraulic limbs), material (Aluminium and Titanium), height (1.8 m) and weight (330 pounds). The vision system that is implemented in the Atlas is a laser rangefinder and stereo cameras.
Huge progress was made in the past 2 years, and with billions of dollars being funded to Boston Dynamics by the Unites States Defense Advanced Research Projects Team (DARPA), we are to expect these Robots to carry emergency services in search operations or even rescue. The Atlas is mainly being developed to carry out operations where humans can not survive due to the environment. Atlas is still in the beginning of the development stages as a lot of advancements and improvements are still needed to be made. One of the issues that they still face till now is that Atlas still falls down a lot, but by time more and more developments are improving its balance.
