For people confined to wheelchairs, the proliferation of ramps has greatly enhanced their mobility. Unfortunately, opening doors remains an omnipresent, and frustrating, challenge. Oddly enough, opening doors also presents a serious impediment for anthropomorphic robots. Now, robotics engineer Erin Rapacki has solved both problems with a single stroke.

Continuing a student project she began at University of Massachusetts, Lowell, Rapacki has created a cheap robot arm that can serve as a door-opening assistant to wheelchair bound humans, or as the primary arm for mobile robots. The trick was finding the right material for the fingers, something hard enough to grasp the handle, but supple enough fit a range of shapes.

Rapacki created the arm to use only one motor, utilizing a slip clutch to allow the arm to twist and push (or pull) at the same time. Altogether, the arm only cost $2,000 to build.

Now if only she could do something about the height of elevator buttons...

[New Scientist]

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Since budget cuts and the inability to overcome problems like boredom and high radiation doses have ruled out any manned mission to Mars in the foreseeable future, NASA has shifted gears back towards a program of robotic exploration. To that end, NASA now wants a rocket-powered airplane to fly around the Red Planet, photographing the surface.
The plane, repetitively named ARES (not to be confused
with NASA's shuttle replacement, also named ARES), would fly to Mars in a regular rocket. Once it reaches the fourth rock from the Sun, it would pop out of the capsule, deploy its wings, and fire the rockets for an hour-long flight through the Martian sky. During that flight, ARES would cover about 373 miles, which is a little less than 100 times the area covered by
the Spirit rover over the last five years.
Any aircraft flying on Mars would need some serious horsepower. The Martian atmosphere is 169 times thinner than the air here on Earth, so generating lift over ARES's wings may prove tricky. NASA has already devoted five years to initial design, but still has a long, long way to go before this thing takes flight. Of course, when the end product is a Martian rocket plane, the wait is worth it.

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A Case for Reverse Innovation?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRAL_QRDORQ

Quoting from Technology Review " This year's Tourist Trophy eXtreme Grand Prix" (TTXGP) was billed as the first zero-emissions motorcycle race. The winner would not just be the fastest in the most dangerous race (It was so dangerous that even the Federation Internationale de Motocyclisme decertified the race in 1976) but the front-runner in the greater challenge ahead: creating an electric bike that can compete in the $50 billion world motorcycle market.

The winner was a four man team from Agni Motors in Gujarat India. It was four week's of four men working out a garage in India.

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Adding a new wrinkle to the 'droid versus iPhone debate, a project at Keio University in Tokyo have created iPhone software specifically designed to control androids. More specifically, they've created an interface that puts control of a humanoid robot right at your fingertips.
"Walky" takes advantage of an iPhone or iPod's touchscreen to create an intuitive interface that requires virtually no learning. Your fingers simulate the robot's legs: a walking motion using the index and middle fingers makes the robot walk, tapping the screen makes it jump up and down, and a flicking motion with one finger elicits a kicking motion.

The idea is to make the robot's motion as intuitive as possible. Most controller commands, like joysticks, paddles and buttons, don't have any natural relation to each other. That's why you keep getting fragged in Modern Warfare; until you become very familiar with the controls, your knee-jerk reactions aren't necessarily the ones programmed into the game. By making the robot respond to commands that the user already knows, they've created a sort of universal remote that anyone can pick up and start using.
On that note, the team at Keio thinks their software could also be employed in controlling digital characters -- think on-screen avatars in video games -- but for now it's best suited to bipedal robots. While it won't be integrated into gadgets this holiday season, it will debut officially in December at SIGGRAPH Asia in Yokohama.

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Combining the output of Dr Steven Thaler , Professor Hod Lipson, Professor Simon Colton, Professor John Koza, and Assistant Professor Kenneth O. Stanley to come up with novel and innovative concepts and paradigms in Automated Invention, computational intelligence etc would be a good idea.
Dr Steven Thaler's work is available at http://www.imagination-engines.com. Professor Hod Lipson's work is outlined at http://www.mae.cornell.edu/Lipson/, Professor Simon Colton's output is available at http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~sgc/ Professor
John Koza's work is available at http://www.genetic-programming.org, and Assistant Professor Kenneth O. Stanley discusses his work at http://www.eecs.ucf.edu/~kstanley/.
Dr Steven Thaler has invented the Creativity Machine, which in turn invented the Self Training Artificial Neural Network Object.
Professor Hod Lipson has produced Bio-inspired robotics. Professor
Simon Colton specialises in Computational Creativity, Professor John Koza's work is in genetic programming as human competitive intelligence, Assistant Professor Kenneth O. Stanley works in Evolutionary Complexity.
Use all their outputs in a joint research and study program to synthesize something new, whatever it may be. Study their websites, literature and patents and from it all, generate something novel. You might as well use the artifacts that they invented and created to assist in the process.

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