Showing posts with label Stanford. Show all posts

2010-08-27

Stanford's Gecko-like 'Stickybot Climbs Vertical Surfaces

Scaling buildings like Spiderman could be a reality, scientists claim

Walking up the side of buildings like Spiderman could soon be a reality, scientists have claimed.

Stanford researchers Paul Day (L) and Alan Asbeck with the Stickybot

Technicians have struggled over the last 10 years to create an artificial version strong enough for a vertical climb to be attempted successfully. However, researchers at Stanford University, California, have created a rubber-like material covered with thousands of tiny polymer fibres to imitate the gecko's hairs. These hairs, which are called setae, are ten times thinner than a human hair.

The material is said to be strong and reusable, and leaves no residue or damage. It has been tested on a "robotic gecko" called Stickybot which can walk up panes of glass.

Collected from: Scaling buildings like Spiderman could be a reality, scientists claim - Telegraph

Collected from: Video - Breaking News Videos from CNN.com - Geckos inspire 'Stickybots'

Secrets of the gecko foot help robot climb

The science behind gecko toes holds the answer to a dry adhesive that provides an ideal grip for robot feet. Stanford mechanical engineer Mark Cutkosky is using the new material, based on the structure of a gecko foot, to keep his robots climbing.

Wonders of the gecko toe

The toe of a gecko's foot contains hundreds of flap-like ridges called lamellae. On each ridge are millions of hairs called setae, which are 10 times thinner than a human's. Under a microscope, you can see that each hair divides into smaller strands called spatulae, making it look like a bundle of split ends. These split ends are so tiny (a few hundred nanometers) that they interact with the molecules of the climbing surface.
The interaction between the molecules of gecko toe hair and the wall is a molecular attraction called van der Waals force. A gecko can hang and support its whole weight on one toe by placing it on the glass and then pulling it back. It only sticks when you pull in one direction – their toes are a kind of one-way adhesive, Cutkosky said.

"It's very different from Scotch tape or duct tape, where, if you press it on, you then have to peel it off. You can lightly brush a directional adhesive against the surface and then pull in a certain direction, and it sticks itself. But if you pull in a different direction, it comes right off without any effort," he said.

Collected from: Secrets of the gecko foot help robot climb

Stanford Biomimetics & Dextrous Manipulation Laboratory

StickyBot

Microscope video of version 1 stalks attaching to a thin strip without normal preload.

For the latest hierarchical directional materials see ClimbingAdhesion .

Key Ideas:
Stickybot is an embodiment of our hypotheses about the requirements for mobility on vertical surfaces using dry adhesion. The main point is that we need controllable adhesion. The essential ingredients are:

hierarchical compliance for conforming at centimeter, millimeter and micrometer scales,

anisotropic dry adhesive materials and structures so that we can control adhesion by controlling shear,

distributed active force control that works with compliance and anisotropy to achieve stability.

Collected from: StickyBot < Rise < TWiki

Sources

Scaling buildings like Spiderman could be a reality, scientists claim - Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7963830/Scaling-buildings-like-Spiderman-could-be-a-reality-scientists-claim.html
Video - Breaking News Videos from CNN.com - Geckos inspire 'Stickybots'
http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/tech/2010/07/28/eod.tuchman.sticky.bot.cnn.html
Secrets of the gecko foot help robot climb
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/august/gecko-082410.html
YouTube - Stanford's 'Stickybot,' a Gecko-like robot, climbs vertical services
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5lMJtQOKSY&feature=player_embedded#!
StickyBot < Rise < TWiki
http://bdml.stanford.edu/twiki/bin/view/Rise/StickyBot?redirectedfrom=Main.StickyBot
YouTube - Stanford StickyBot
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odAifbpDbhs

StickyBotIII < Rise < TWiki
http://bdml.stanford.edu/twiki/bin/view/Rise/StickyBotIII
Gecko's hairy toes inspire climbing robot
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-08/26/gecko-robot
Stanford Robotics @ NRW: Stickybot III | BotJunkie
http://www.botjunkie.com/2010/04/15/stanford-robotics-nrw-stickybot-iii/

2009-12-14

Batteries of paper with nanotubes and nanowires

clipped from news.bbc.co.uk

Battery made of paper charges up

Batteries made from plain copier paper could make for future energy storage that is truly paper thin.

clipped from www.eetimes.com

Paper battery said to outperform lithium ion

PORTLAND, Ore. — A paper battery based on carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires could store an electric charge in a mobile device. Researchers also claim the new battery is disposable and that its shape could conform to the shape of different devices.

Bing Hu, a Stanford Univeristy post-doctoral fellow, applies special ink to ordinary paper, depositing nanotubes on the surface that can then be charged to create a battery.

clipped from www.stanford.edu

clipped from news.stanford.edu

At Stanford, nanotubes + ink + paper = instant battery

Dip an ordinary piece of paper into ink infused with carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires, and it turns into a battery or supercapacitor. Crumple the piece of paper, and it still works. Stanford researcher Yi Cui sees many uses for this new way of storing electricity.

clipped from www.stanford.edu

Nanomaterials Science and Engineering

7th of December 2009
Liangbing's paper on conductive paper battery and supercap was published in PNAS, and has been highlighted in the press, including in New York Times, Technology Review, Stanford Report, EE Times, and Scientific American.

clipped from www.youtube.com

Sources:

ROS -- An Open Source Robot Operating System

Clipped from: Could Robots Unite Under One Operating System? | Popular Science

Could Robots Unite Under One Operating System?

A common robot operating system could lead to a robotics revolution -- scientifically speaking, of course

Today's robots represent islands unto themselves that don't share either software or hardware with each other. But researchers have begun developing a common operating system that could revolutionize robotics and permit easier collaboration with less reinvention of the proverbial wheel. The change could rival that which rippled through the PC industry when Microsoft's Disk Operating System (DOS), and later Windows, burst onto the scene and became standard.

Clipped from: Robots to get their own operating system - tech - 10 August 2009 - New Scientist

Robots to get their own operating system

Bourcier sees this changing if robotics advances in a manner similar to personal computing. For computers, the widespread adoption of Microsoft's Disk Operating System (DOS), and later Windows, allowed programmers without detailed knowledge of the underlying hardware and file systems to build new applications and build on the work of others.

Programmers could build new applications without detailed knowledge of the underlying hardware

Bringing robotics to this point won't be easy, though. "Robotics is at the stage where personal computing was about 30 years ago," says Chad Jenkins of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Like the home-brew computers of the late 70s and early 80s, robots used for research today often have a unique operating system (OS). "But at some point we have to come together to use the same resources," says Jenkins.

Clipped from: ROS (Robot Operating System) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ROS (Robot Operating System)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ROS is a robot operating system originally developed (2007) in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in support of the Stanford AI Robot (STAIR) project but now (as of 2008) developed primarily by Willow Garage, a robotics research institute/incubator. It is free for commercial and research use under a BSD license. The library runs primarily on Linux but is intended to be cross-platform for Mac OS X and Windows. ROS provides standard operating system services such as hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management. It is a graph based architecture where processing takes place in nodes that may receive, post and multiplex sensor, control, state, planning, actuator and other messages.

Clipped from: ROS - Wiki

ROS -- Robot Operating System

Overview

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2008-01-11

Dryad, Stanford's 3D virtual world of trees

clipped from www.kurzweilai.net

Stanford builds a better virtual world, one tree (or millions) at a time

Stanford researchers are out to prove that object construction in virtual worlds can be sophisticated without being difficult.

clipped from physorg.com

By navigating with a mouse through an infinite number of trees on Dryad, virtual world enthusiasts can create the trees of their dreams. Credit: Stanford University

clipped from dryad.stanford.edu

Dryad lets you intuitively create beautiful trees for your virtual world or
game. In Dryad, you create a tree by visually navigating to it through a
design space: the space of all trees. This space has close to a hundred
dimensions and Dryad lets you move around it as if it were a city map. To
help you find your way, Dryads around the world communicate to share which trees were picked in the past. A collaborative mapping of the tree space emerges, which your Dryad uses to gently steer you towards high-qualityfinds. We call this collaborative design space exploration.

2007-12-21

New Nanowire batteries are ten times better

clipped from news-service.stanford.edu

Stanford's nanowire battery holds 10 times the charge of existing ones

Stanford researchers have found a way to use silicon nanowires to reinvent the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that power laptops, iPods, video cameras, cell phones, and countless other devices.

The new version, developed through research led by Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, produces 10 times the amount of electricity of existing lithium-ion, known as Li-ion, batteries. A laptop that now runs on battery for two hours could operate for 20 hours, a boon to ocean-hopping business travelers.

Photos taken by a scanning electron microscope of silicon nanowires before (left) and after (right) absorbing lithium. Both photos were taken at the same magnification.

"It's not a small improvement," Cui said. "It's a revolutionary development."

via: hotnspicy's web site reviews and blog

related:
Silicon Nanowire Battery Has 10 Times the Capacity of Existing Li-ion Batteries » Dodevice
Stanford's nanowire battery holds 10 times the charge of existing ones
New Nanowire Battery Holds 10 Times The Charge Of Existing Ones
Nanowires boost laptop battery life to 20 hours - infoSync World
Palo Alto Online : Stanford researchers reinvent laptop batteries

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