movement

Humans naturally perform numerous complex tasks. These include sitting down, picking something up from a table, and pushing a cart. These activities involve various movements and require multiple contacts, which makes it difficult to program robots to perform them.

Celera Motion, a business unit of Novanta, announced its launch of what it claims is the world’s smallest servo drives. The compact servo drives are designed for service robots, surgical robots, industrial grippers and lab automation applications.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science and the University of California, Berkeley, have designed a robotic system that enables a low-cost and relatively small legged robot to climb and descend stairs nearly its height; traverse rocky, slippery, uneven, steep and varied terrain; walk across gaps; scale rocks and curbs; and even operate in the dark. 

Researchers at North Carolina State University have created a ring-shaped soft robot capable of crawling across surfaces when exposed to elevated temperatures or infrared light. The researchers have demonstrated that these “ringbots” are capable of pulling a small payload across the surface – in ambient air or under water, as well as passing through a gap that is narrower than its ring size.

Celera Motion, a business unit of Novanta, announced the introduction of the world’s smallest and, it claims, fastest servo drive.  The Everest S, the latest addition to the Everest Series, is about 30% smaller than its predecessor, making it the world’s smallest servo drive. It also delivers bus latency reduced to 1 cycle, which according to Celera makes Everest S the fastest servo drive on the market today.  

A four-legged robot trained through artificial intelligence has learned the same lesson as the Apollo astronauts – that jumping can be the best way to move around on the surface the Moon. An update on LEAP (Legged Exploration of the Aristarchus Plateau), a mission concept study funded by ESA to explore some of the most challenging lunar terrains, has been presented at the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) 2022.

After several year of research and development Delft start-up IMSystems is ready to present its patented speed reducer to the market. This high precision gearbox uses rollers instead of gear teeth. At Automatica in Munich it will demonstrate its first product, a development kit for robot companies to test the system.

Researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) developed a new approach to model the dynamics of underwater stingray-like robots using Machine Learning. This approach can enable more efficient swimming in complex underwater environments by accurately predicting required flapping motions for a set of given propulsive force targets.

Steep sections on slippery ground, high steps, scree and forest trails full of roots: the path up the 1,098-metre-high Mount Etzel at the southern end of Lake Zurich is peppered with numerous obstacles. But ANYmal, the quadrupedal robot from the Robotic Systems Lab at ETH Zurich, overcomes the 120 vertical metres effortlessly in a 31-minute hike. That’s 4 minutes faster than the estimated duration for human hikers – and with no falls or missteps.