Made from steel and brass, this unusual prosthetic arm articulates in a number of ways. The elbow joint can be moved by releasing a spring, whereas the top joint of the wrist allows a degree of rotation and an up-and-down motion. The fingers can also curl up and straighten out. The leather upper arm piece is used to fix the prosthesis to the remaining upper arm. The rather sinister appearance of the hand suggests the wearer may have disguised it with a glove. Among the most common causes of amputation throughout the 1800s were injuries received as a result of warfare.

via Warlach & Commuter Dirge

Like the Grand Theft Auto RC missions come to life, this helicopter can grasp objects for transport. They don’t have to be a special size or shape, and it can lift them even if they are not centered. This is thanks to a load-balancing hand (originally developed as a prosthesis) that relies on flexible joints and a tendon-like closing mechanism. As you can see in the video, the light-weight chopper has an on-board camera so that the operator can see what is being picked up. This little guy has no problem lifting objects that are over one kilogram while remaining stable in the air.

Link and photo from hackaday.com.

See also:

• Parrot – an AR drone you can pilot from your iDevice
• MikroKopter – HexaKopter
• Lockheed Martin’s Samurai Monocopter
• Robotic Shotgun Autocopter
• Killer robots to get silent-running whisper mode

Click here to view the embedded video.

“Owning the Weather” is a documentary about geo-engineering by Robert Greene. It’s about whether or not we should engineer the weather and the different impacts that this has. And not only because we can, but also because actually we are already doing so.

Words and video via Next Nature.

See also:

Head of Weather Manipulation

Click here to view the embedded video.

From the looks of it, they’ve just got a prototype built and that snazzy video.

Yo, guilty Billionaires (yeah, you Gates and Buffett) sink some dollars into this and start dropping them around the world.  Kenya, Africa might be a good place to start.

From Wired UK:

The gecko’s toe hairs interact with the wall in a molecular attraction called “van der Waals force“. Using this force, a gecko can hang and support its whole weight on one toe. It only sticks when you pull in one direction.

…

For this reason geckos have rotational ankles to ensure that they stick at whatever angle they are running. Their rear feet turn backwards when they are upside down or walking down a wall head first — otherwise they’d fall.

Such one-way adhesives are important for climbing because they require little effort to attach and detach a robot’s foot. Otherwise you have to press the foot down firmly to attach it and then work just as hard to pull the foot off. Directional adhesion is more like hooking and unhooking yourself from a surface.

With this in mind, Cutkosky and his team began asking how to build artificial materials that create the same effect. They came up with a rubber-like material with tiny polymer hairs made from micro-scale mould and attached it to a robot. The research was described in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

A layer of the adhesive was cut to cover a mechanical lizard’s foot. The newest versions of the adhesive have a two-layer system, similar to the gecko’s lamellae and setae, and allow Stickybot to climb smooth surfaces such as metal and glass. The scientists hope to develop the material to allow humans to climb walls like geckos, using technology called Z-Man.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Chauncey Graetzel and colleagues at ETH Zurich’s Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems started by building a miniature IMAX movie theater for their fly. Inside, they glued the insect facing a LED screen that flashed different patterns. These patterns visually stimulated the fly to beat its left or right wing faster or slower, and a vision system translated the wing motion into commands to steer the robot in real time.

The fly, in other words, believed to be airborne when in reality it was fixed to a tether, watching a virtual-reality simulation and controlling a robot at a distance.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The key component in their setup was a high-speed computer vision system that captured the beating of the fly’s wings. It extracted parameters such as wing beat frequency, amplitude, position, and phase. This data, in turn, was used to drive the mobile robot. Closing the loop, the robot carried cameras and proximity sensors; an algorithm transformed this data stream into the light patterns displayed on the LED screen.

In a paper in the July 2010 issue of IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, they describe the vision system’s latest version. It uses a camera that focuses on a small subset of pixels of interest (the part of the fly’s wings responsible for most lift, for instance) and a predictive algorithm that constantly reevaluates and selects this subset. The researchers report that their system can sample the wings at 7 kilohertz — several times as fast as other tracking techniques.”As autonomous robots get smaller, their size and speed approach that of the biological counterparts from which they are often inspired,” they write in the paper, adding that their technique could “be relevant to the tracking of micro and nano robots, where high relative velocities make them hard to folow and where robust visual position feedback is crucial for sensing and control.”

The ETH group, led by professor Bradley Nelson, head of the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems, performed their main Cyborg Fly experiments two years ago. It’s not the only “flight simulator” for flies, and other research groups have used insects to control robots. But still, the ETH project stands out because of its high-speed vision component. This system could be useful not only for biology research, to study insect flight and track fast movements of appendages or the body, but also for industrial applications — for monitoring a production line or controlling fast manipulators, for example.

Which this Doonesbury strip captures:

(Click thru for higher rez)

This via Rob ‘Eyeborg’ Spence, who is seeking a suitable female volunteer to create a real-life Cherry Darling from Death Proof.

So when this most recent episode of Futurama, The Prisoner of Benda, did some genuine SF for once, exploring the relationship between body and identity, I thought it deserved props. Also, because it was hilarious, and peaked with this insane scene (SPOILER):

This is what I want from my SF; crazy human, alien, robot body-swapping action. (Versus lame iPhone/Twitter satire.) See io9 for a more in-depth review.

In other Identity news, Orkut (the SNS that we are constantly told is “huge in India and Brazil”) are now letting you split your personality; or more accurately easily control what aspects of your life you share to different groups of ‘friends’.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Facebook have a clumsy implementation of this, but Orkut seems to be the first to tackle this big problem in Social Network design properly: do you want your boss, co-workers and friends getting the same information? More details over on Read Write Web.

Note: requires old school blue/red 3D glasses for optimal viewing pleasure.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The architecture of the contemporary city is no longer simply about the physical space of buildings and landscape, more and more it is about the synthetic spaces created by the digital information that we collect, consume and organise; an immersive interface may become as much part of the world we inhabit as the buildings around us.

via BLDGBLOG | Chris Arkenberg

Biometrics R&D firm Global Rainmakers Inc. (GRI) announced today that it is rolling out its iris scanning technology to create what it calls “the most secure city in the world.” In a partnership with Leon — one of the largest cities in Mexico, with a population of more than a million — GRI will fill the city with eye-scanners. That will help law enforcement revolutionize the way we live — not to mention marketers.

“In the future, whether it’s entering your home, opening your car, entering your workspace, getting a pharmacy prescription refilled, or having your medical records pulled up, everything will come off that unique key that is your iris,” says Jeff Carter, CDO of Global Rainmakers. Before coming to GRI, Carter headed a think tank partnership between Bank of America, Harvard, and MIT. “Every person, place, and thing on this planet will be connected [to the iris system] within the next 10 years,” he says.

Leon is the first step. To implement the system, the city is creating a database of irises. Criminals will automatically be enrolled, their irises scanned once convicted. Law-abiding citizens will have the option to opt-in.

When these residents catch a train or bus, or take out money from an ATM, they will scan their irises, rather than swiping a metro or bank card. Police officers will monitor these scans and track the movements of watch-listed individuals. “Fraud, which is a $50 billion problem, will be completely eradicated,” says Carter.

This video, taken from GRI’s website, shows how the system works:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Touching on the rather obvious privacy issues, Fast Company write:

For such a Big Brother-esque system, why would any law-abiding resident ever volunteer to scan their irises into a public database, and sacrifice their privacy? GRI hopes that the immediate value the system creates will alleviate any concern. “There’s a lot of convenience to this–you’ll have nothing to carry except your eyes,” says Carter, claiming that consumers will no longer be carded at bars and liquor stores. And he has a warning for those thinking of opting out: “When you get masses of people opting-in, opting out does not help. Opting out actually puts more of a flag on you than just being part of the system. We believe everyone will opt-in.”

…

When I asked Carter whether he felt the film was intended as a dystopian view of the future of privacy, he pointed out that much of our private life is already tracked by telecoms and banks, not to mention Facebook. “The banks already know more about what we do in our daily life–they know what we eat, where we go, what we purchase–our deepest secrets,” he says. “We’re not talking about anything different here–just a system that’s good for all of us.”

So there you have it. Facebook and all those loyalty cards are now being used as a precedent to create a complete panopticon.

via Gizmodo | thanks for the tip-off Cat Vincent!