Engineers at The University of Manchester have unlocked the secrets to designing a robot capable of jumping 120 meters—higher than any other jumping robot designed to date.
Using a combination of mathematics, computer simulations, and laboratory experiments, the researchers have discovered how to design a robot with the optimum size, shape, and arrangement of its parts, allowing it to jump high enough to clear obstacles many times its own size.
The current highest-jumping robot can reach up to 33 meters, which is equivalent to 110 times its own size. Now, researchers have designed a robot that could jump more than 120 meters in the air—or 200 meters on the moon, which is more than twice the height of Big Ben's tower.
The advancement, published in the journal Mechanism and Machine Theory, will revolutionize applications ranging from planetary exploration to disaster rescue to surveillance of hazardous or inaccessible spaces. READ MORE...
A team of roboticists at the University of Tokyo has taken a new approach to autonomous driving—instead of automating the entire car, simply put a robot in the driver's seat. The group built a robot capable of driving a car and tested it on a real-world track. They also published a paper describing their efforts on the arXiv preprint server.
Virtually all efforts to build a self-driving car have focused on making the car itself autonomous—humans sit in the passenger seat or in the back. These efforts involve adding a host of sensors in addition to processing power. They have also been met with mixed results.
In this new effort, the research team wondered if it might not be easier and cheaper simply to build a robot that can be taught how to drive a car and put it in the driver's seat of a normal vehicle. To find out if that might be possible, they built such a robot and tested it on a track at the University of Tokyo's Kashiwa Campus. READ MORE...
