Waltham, MA —Hod Lipson, a mechanical engineer, and Jordan Pollack, a computer scientist, want to make robots so affordable that an average person could own 100 of them. The two Brandeis University researchers believe that they are a step closer to their goal because they developed an experimental robot that designed and constructed another robot.
"If we eliminate the human engineers, we can do for disposable robots what Bill Gates did for software releases," says Pollack. He and Lipson believe that the solution to the high cost of robotics is removing the human costs.
The researchers' work included developing software that simulated and designed truss structures. "Trusses are well understood engineering structures," says Lipson. "We replace fixed points with ball joints and added variable length motors driven by artificial neurons to act as the muscles and brains."
The motor used in the application is a 20 mm Z-Series bi-polar motor from Hayden Switch & Instrument, Inc. (Waterbury, CT). It uses rare earth neodymium magnets for making the motor more efficient without putting more voltage into it.
Andrew Morris designed a circuit that could detect a stroke victim's groan and convert the sound into a signal so caregivers would know when help was needed.
New disc magnet motors fit into the design trend of stepping up to closed loop performance while maintaining the cost advantage of stepper motor technology.
At the Design News webinar on June 27, learn all about aluminum extrusion: designing the right shape so it costs the least, is simplest to manufacture, and best fits the application's structural requirements.
On April 21, NASA launched a novel project, putting into orbit three satellites that employ an off-the-shelf commercial smartphone as the control system.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
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For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
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