Transformer Robot Cell Phone

At Pakoz Hardware there’s a concept cell phone which design is come from the robot movie ‘Transformer’. The cell phone can be transform to complete mini robot with two minigun and a litle bi-pedal bot.

The cell phone Transformer concept really cool and make me not patient to have and get one of them. I like the Transformer movie since when I still 7 years old I watch the cartoon and really love it. Now in cinema I can see the movie with the spectacular effect. Hopefully the movie have the second series.

Pino Robot the best robot in the world :

Pino the robot loves to play games and the more you interact with Pino, the more he learns.

Say hello to your smart robotic friend. He's so cool, you'll never want to put him down! The more you interact with Pino, the more he does.

Pino lost his memory after his space ship crashed to earth. Now he's alone and needs your care and attention. Look after Pino and be rewarded with fun and friendship as his personality grows.

Pino the robot loves to play games and the more you interact with Pino, the more he learns. Pino will learn to walk and sing and responds to sound and your voice. Pino has realistic emotions: he can be happy, sad, angry or sleepy.

Leave your bedroom and Pino will guard your room from any unwanted intruders! Put two Pinos together and watch them talk and interact with each other.

Our verdict: The best Toy robot in the world!

Voyage of the Bacteria Bot :

Self-propelled microbots navigate through blood vessels.

The 1966 science-fiction movie Fantastic Voyage famously imagined using a tiny ship to combat disease inside the body. With the advent of nanotechnology, researchers are inching closer to creating something almost as fantastic. A microscopic device that could swim through the bloodstream and directly target the site of disease, such as a tumor, could offer radical new treatments. To get to a tumor, however, such a device would have to be small and agile enough to navigate through a labyrinth of tiny blood vessels, some far thinner than a human hair.

Researchers at the École Polytechnique de Montréal, in Canada, led by professor of computer engineeringSylvain Martel, have coupled live, swimming bacteria to microscopic beads to develop a self-propelling device, dubbed a nanobot. While other scientists have previously attached bacteria to microscopic particles to take advantage of their natural propelling motion, Martel's team is the first to show that such hybrids can be steered through the body using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

To do this, Martel used bacteria that naturally contain magnetic particles. In nature, these particles help the bacteria navigate toward deeper water, away from oxygen. "Those nanoparticles form a chain a bit like a magnetic compass needle," says Martel. But by changing the surrounding magnetic field using an extended set-up coupled to an MRI machine, Martel and his colleagues were able to make the bacteria propel themselves in any direction they wanted.

The bacteria swim using tiny corkscrewlike tails, or flagella, and these particular bacteria are faster and stronger than most, says Martel. What's more, they are just two microns in diameter--small enough to fit through the smallest blood vessels in the human body. The team treated the polymer beads roughly 150 nanometers in size with antibodies so that the bacteria would attach to them. Ultimately, the researchers plan to modify the beads so that they also carry cancer-killing drugs.

A Robot that Navigates Like a Person :

A new robot navigates using humanlike visual processing and object detection.

European researchers have developed a robot capable of moving autonomously using humanlike visual processing. The robot is helping the researchers explore how the brain responds to its environment while the body is in motion. What they discover could lead to machines that are better able to navigate through cluttered environments.

The robot consists of a wheeled platform with a robotic "head" that uses two cameras to capture stereoscopic vision. The robot can turn its head and shift its gaze up and down or sideways to gauge its surroundings, and can quickly measure its own speed relative to its environment.

The machine is controlled by algorithms designed to mimic different parts of the human visual system. Rather than capturing and mapping its surroundings over and over in order to plan its route--the way most robots do--the European machine uses a simulated neural network to update its position relative to the environment, continually adjusting to each new input. This mimics human visual processing and movement planning.

Mark Greenlee, the chair for experimental psychology at Germany's University of Regensburg and the coordinator of the project, says that computer models of the human brain need to be validated by experiment. The robot mimics several different functions of the human brain--object recognition, motion estimation, and decision making--to navigate around a room, heading for specific targets while avoiding obstacles and walls.

Ten different European research groups, each with expertise in fields including neuroscience, computer science, and robotics, designed and built the robot through a project calledDecisions in Motion. The group's challenge was to pull together traditionally disparate fields of neuroscience and integrate them into a "coherent model architecture," says Heiko Neumann, a professor at the Vision and Perception Lab at the University of Ulm, in Germany, who helped develop the algorithms that control the robot's motion.

Robo Crawler Monitors Underground Power Cables :

Researchers have developed a robot that senses damage in cables before they fail.

Often before a power cable goes, it gives off a few subtle signs of distress. Unfortunately, many critical distribution cables are underground, which makes them difficult for people to access and monitor. But now a new cable-crawling robot, developed by researchers at the University of Washington (UW), Seattle, could provide much-needed insight into the health of subterranean power systems.

"Monitoring cable systems is one of the holy grails of the electricity industry," says Don Von Dollen, program manager for the IntelliGrid Program at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), in Palo Alto, CA. "When you get a cable failure, it's a real pain to find it, dig it up, and fix it. Coming up with good diagnostics has been a longtime challenge, and it's a tough nut to crack."

For decades, researchers and utilities have been working on various ways to monitor power grids. A traditional method, which has been used for 50 years, is called a high-potential test, says Von Dollen. "You basically disconnect the cable and send a big voltage spike across it," he says. "If there are any problems, this is going to cause the cable to fail." It's a brute-force method, he says, but if the cable fails, at least it's in a controlled setting. More recently, people have used radar to detect malfunctions.

But these methods require a fair amount of human interaction. The UW researchers approached the challenge by designing a robot that can autonomously traverse underground cables buried in pipes and tunnels. The robot, which rolls along on small neoprene wheels and is powered by a battery pack, hugs the cable tightly as its three onboard sensors scan for signs of wear and tear. Only about 10 percent of underground cables are found in pipes or tunnels (the rest are buried directly in the ground). But these cables are often the ones that "experience unexpected conditions" such as water drips, says Alexander Mamishev, professor of electrical engineering at UW and project leader, which makes them more susceptible to failure.

Monitoring these underground power systems is a two-part problem, Mamishev says. First, the terrain is difficult for a robot to navigate autonomously. Miles of cables consist of twists, turns, brackets, and overhangs that can impede progress. These considerations were integral to the design, he says. The robot has a gyroscope to help maintain its balance and stabilizing arms to help right it if it slides off track. The robot is built in segments, somewhat like a train with multiple cars, and it sits three inches above a cable. One segment is devoted to the robot control, and the other one houses the sensors and data-processing units.

A Tiny Robotic Hand :

An ultrasmall grabbing gadget might someday become a new tool in microsurgery.

Early this winter in a University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), laboratory, a mechanical hand less than one millimeter wide deftly plucked a single fish egg from a gooey underwater clutch, demonstrating a new technology that could one day make it into surgeons' tool kits.

"It is the world's smallest robotic hand, and [it] could be used to perform microsurgery," says Chang-Jin Kim, the lead researcher at UCLA, who says the device is safe for biological applications. Since it runs on gas pressure instead of electricity, it can be used in both dry and wet environments.

The "microhand" measures one millimeter across when closed into a fist. It consists of four "fingers," each of which is made from six silicon wafers, with polymer balloons doing the work of "muscles" at the wafers' joints.

Each balloon is connected with narrow channels through which air is pumped in or out. When a balloon is inflated, the distance between two joints decreases, and the finger flexes inward. Upon deflation, the fingers relax. And with selective inflation and deflation, researchers are able to manipulate the fingers into clasping or releasing an object.

"I must say that the microhand is a wonderful [micro-mechanical] achievement," says Albert Pisano, a mechanical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, and a leader in such research. "The field of microsurgery and minimally invasive surgery is currently dominated by grippers and tools that are mounted at the end of long, rigid aluminum rods. Certainly these are adequate for many purposes, but now that functional microhands have been developed, one can visualize a new set of minimally invasive surgical tools that allow the surgeon additional dexterity in complicated procedures."

Robo Bird-Watcher :

An intelligent video system in an Arkansas bayou searches for an elusive bird.

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and from Texas A&M University have developed a new kind of bird-watching system that automatically identifies birds in flight and records their movements in high-resolution video. Preliminary results and video clips from the ongoing project were presented on Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in San Francisco.

Ultimately, the researchers hope the cameras catch a glimpse of the ivory-billed woodpecker. The search for the woodpecker, long thought to be extinct, was revitalized in 2004 when a bird resembling the species was caught on video in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge of eastern Arkansas. The video was too blurry, however, to allow a definitive identification. Field biologists sat in canoes for hours, waiting for an ivory-billed woodpecker to fly by so they'd have more-conclusive evidence.

"It's incredibly difficult and tedious," says Ken Goldberg, one of the lead researchers on the project and a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. "Even if they see something, getting the camera focused [quickly] is very tricky." Some birders were using motion sensors to trigger video cameras, but Goldberg says the equipment wasn't sensitive enough to detect the relatively small creatures.

Intrigued by the problem, Goldberg and colleagueDezhen Song, an assistant professor of computer science at Texas A&M University, designed a special system to aid in the search. Known as the Automated Collaborative Observatory for Natural Environments(ACONE), the two-camera system scans a patch of sky (measuring roughly 300 feet by 900 feet) above the Cache River refuge. Goldberg says it's an ideal location because it's a high-traffic area for birds and clear of treetops, so the cameras get a relatively unobstructed view. The cameras are mounted on a power-line pole, along with a computer, in the middle of a bayou.

As the cameras scan the sky, each one captures images at 11 frames per second. Those frames are temporarily stored in a buffer. Software on the computer analyzes each frame immediately, looking for things that roughly match the speed and size of an ivory-billed woodpecker. When a bird is detected, Goldberg explains, the system permanently records and stores the previous seven frames and the next seven frames of video on the hard drive. Each frame has a resolution of 1,600 by 1,200 pixels. To save storage space, frames that the software deems irrelevant are automatically deleted.

The software also saves time. The fewer images collected, the fewer canoe trips are required to replace the hard drive in the middle of the bayou. More important, the automatic identification system means that human eyes are spared from watching endless hours of empty sky.

Amoebalike Robots for Search and Rescue :

A novel form of locomotion inspired by the way amoebas move could help robots get in places other robots can't reach.

Roboticists at Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg, VA, have developed a novel form of locomotion for robotics based on the way the single-celled amoeba moves. Unlike any other robots, the Virginia Tech ones are designed to use their entire outer skin as a means of propulsion.

Toroidal in shape--a bit like an elongated cylindrical doughnut--robots of this new breed differ from wheeled, tracked, or legged bots in that they move by continuously turning themselves inside out, says Dennis Hong, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech. "The entire outer skin moves," he says.

This novel type of locomotion is particularly suited to search-and-rescue applications, says Hong: "They can squeeze under a collapsed ceiling or between obstacles very easily." Indeed, preliminary experiments show that the robots, with their soft, contracting bodies, are able to push themselves through holes with diameters much smaller than their normal width, Hong says. And because the robots are able to use their entire contact surfaces for traction, they can move over and through very uneven environments with ease.

The actual motion is generated by contracting and expanding actuator rings along the length of the robot's body. By contracting the rings at the rear of the robot and expanding them toward the front, they are able to generate movement.

This is very much akin to the principle of the pseudopod used by single-celled organisms such as amoebas, says Hong. This principle consists of a process of cytoplasmic streaming, in which the liquid endoplasm within the cell flows forward inside a semi-solid ectoplasmic tubular shell. As the liquid reaches the front, it turns into the gel-like ectoplasm, forming an extension to this tube and moving the organism forward. At the same time, the ectoplasm at the rear of the tube turns into the liquid endoplasm, taking up the rear.

To produce a similar sort of motion, Hong's initial experiments have used robots consisting of flexible toroidal membranes lined with propulsion rings of either electroactive polymer or pressurized hoses. But now, with funding from a new National Science Foundation grant, Hong has forsaken the use of elastic membranes in favor of more-rugged designs. He declines to discuss these designs in detail because of intellectual property issues. However, he says that this latest work involves rigid mechanical parts that are linked in such a way as to enable this sort of motion. "It's like a 3-D tank tread," he says.

"It's an interesting idea," says Henrik Christensen, professor of robotics and director of Robotics and Intelligent Machines at Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta. "We really need better locomotion mechanisms for robots." Wheels and tracks work fine until the terrain becomes very uneven, while legs are slow and terribly inefficient, he says.

This is not the first time that toroids have been proposed as part of a propulsion system, says Andrew Adamatzky, a professor of unconventional computing at the University of the West of England, in Bristol, U.K. But using electroactive polymers to produce propagating waves of contractions makes this latest research very interesting, he says. "These experimental designs open new and exciting perspectives in soft-bodied robotics."

However, with soft bodies come new challenges. For example, it is not clear how one would integrate a power supply, computerised controllers, and sensors. "The principles here are good, but the engineering really needs to be worked out," says Christensen.