The students which made RoboSwift based the project on the findings of their supervisor, David Lentink of Wageningen University. In April 2007, with several co-authors he published a about the aerodynamic properties of the swift. During its lifetime, single swift flies a distance comparable to five roundtrips to the Moon and can remain in the… »
Cecilia Laschi, of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, and her colleagues are attempting to build a robot with arms that work in the same way that octopuses’ tentacles do. Having no solid skeleton, it will be the world’s first entirely soft robot. Their goal is to use the knowledge related to the principles that give… »
Fukitorimushi is an autonomous floor-cleaning robot that crawls like an inchworm and uses a super-absorbent nanofiber cloth to wipe up microscopic dust and residue that ordinary vacuums leave behind. Unveiled at the recent Tokyo Fiber Senseware (page in Japanese language) exposition in Milan, Fukitorimushi (scrubbing bug) is designed by Panasonic and incorporates nanofiber technology developed… »
Insects’ agility in flight is unmatched. It’s been an inspiration to many inventors as in inventing helicopters or other flying machines. Instead creating robots which resemble insects, a few groups of engineers decided to develop technology which controls insects. An unquestioned fact is that nature developed the insects far better than humans are trying to… »
Folks from German company Festo keep creating bionic marine animals which float in air. Penguins are fascinating creatures which have lost their ability to fly in the course of their genetic development as marine birds, but Festo engineers managed to create an artificial penguin and taught it “autonomous flight in the sea of air”. Named… »
The Stenzel Ltd. from Poland is a unique commercial-scientific venture in the Central Europe area. They are developing HeXoR, a mobile didactic robot which has been designed as a teaching aid for schools and research institutions. It can be lots of fun if you are an enthusiast, who is keen on robotics, informatics and electronics… »
Besides being cute, penguins are amazingly good swimmers. In their search for food, penguins often travel more than a hundred kilometers per day; they are able to dive in depths up to 700 meters. They are fast n the water, have a great deal of endurance and are astoundingly agile and can reach a top… »
Remember “Star Wars” and Luke’s artificial hand? Our reality isn’t too far away because Scottish company called Touch Bionics developed a “bionic hand” for amputees, called the i-LIMB. i-LIMB is one of the most sophisticated prosthetic hand commercially available, as it lets the wearer assume different grips by sensing electrical impulses in the muscles in… »
