LinkNotes: engineering

Robert J. Lang

Dr. Robert J. Lang 1961 (age 47–48) is an American physicist who is also one of the foremost origami artists and theorists in the world. He is known for his complex and elegant designs, most notably of insects and animals. He has long been a student of the mathematics of origami and of using computers to study the theories behind origami. He has made great advances in making real-world applications of origami to engineering problems.

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Like a musical composer, the origami artist works with patterns and relationships within the paper and arranges those patterns into something that touches a human aesthetic. And while complex figures must be designed according to fixed, fundamental principles (design), there is always some spark of sponteneity and serendipity (creation) in the realization.

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The intersections between origami, mathematics, and science occur at many levels and include many fields of the latter. We can group these intersections into roughly three categories:

Origami mathematics, which includes the mathematics
that describes the underlying laws of origami;

Computational origami, which comprises algorithms
and theory devoted to the solution of origami problems by mathematical
means;

Origami technology, which is the application of
origami (and folding in general) to the solution of problems arising
in engineering, industrial design, and technology in general.

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Sources:

2008-12-08

Robots that are "self-aware"

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Hod Lipson: Robots that are "self-aware"

http://www.ted.com - Hod Lipson demonstrates a few of his cool little robots, which have the ability to learn, understand themselves and even self-replicate. At the root of this uncanny demo is a deep inquiry into the nature of how humans and living beings learn and evolve, and how we might harness these processes to make things that learn and evolve.

clipped from ccsl.mae.cornell.edu

Cornell Computational
Synthesis Lab (CCSL)

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Research:
Robotic Introspection: Self Modeling

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Cornell robot builds self-awareness

A video of an autonomous robot from Cornell that builds a description of its own body, and uses that description to recover from unanticipated damage.

clipped from ccsl.mae.cornell.edu