Personal Mobility to the Next Level

Improving the concept of self-balancing unicycle, Honda has introduced the brand new U3-X as their new personal mobility platform.
The regular large wheel, made up of several small wheels in a series makes the U3-X particularly interesting.
These small wheels can rotate independently, which make the device go forward, backward, side-to-side and diagonally. The user just has to lean to the direction where he wants to go.
Right now the "experimental model" of the U3-X gets a single hour of battery and weighs under 22 pounds, with a seat and foot rests that fold into the device for extra portability.

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Let’s think collectively

In the Natural History of our planet, humans and organisms have collaborated among themselves to create societies, farms, entities. We call this activity collective intelligence, and in some cases it is deliberate and in others is a consequence.

MIT is actively pursuing research in this area with the Center for Collective intelligence, where they collect a number of works for everyone to take a peek on them.

Some of the most impressive shows of collective intelligence in the world are the flying duck flocks which present beautiful forms, can you think in any other way organisms create forms that appear to be work of a higher intelligence.

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A Lost Rover Purpose is…?

As most of you should know, the mars rover, Spirit, was launched with the purpose to give us a better understanding of the mars soil and atmosphere characteristics. But now it is lost.

The Spirit Rover, one of the most famous robots of late,  was first deployed in 2004 with the simple, yet important, task of sampling Martian soil  and get important information for further missions.

Originally the rover was suppose to work for 90 days, yet the system was rather efficient and went on 20 times that time until it became stuck.

Because of that, the solar panel system used to power up the robot wont be able to be filled on time resulting in the robot cease of functions.

NASA is still suing the robot for some basic sensing functions, and they will till it becomes inoperable.

This is just an example on how robots, through expensive are also made to be recyclable, maybe in some 50 years we will be able to retrieve it, who knows, maybe sooner.

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The Smallest Robot arm

Last year at iREX 2009 Mitsubishi debuted a robot arm capable of building a lego piece in a rather fast way.

With this kind of advancements and precision, teleoperation and robotic surgery are surely deemed to become more reliable to the eyes of people.

As well more mundane tasks may be done by robots in a more efficient way and even faster than by humans.

What do you think, do robots are being built in the right direction??

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SPHERES: An approximation to the future of flight

We all have seen movies like Matrix, Star Trek and Star Wars where ships somehow land pretty much by themselves, the pilot has nothing but press a couple of buttons and the ship will land.

People at MIT in joint research with the NASA are working together to be a step closer to this reality.

SPHERES project aims to have autonomous mobile objects capable of autonomous flight and interaction, and are currently being tested in zero gravity environments in the International Space Station.

What are your thoughts on this, would you ride a vehicle knowing that most of the control is being performed by a computer.

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Writing with your brain

Hello everyone and we hope you have a good Monday.

This time at CeBIT in Hannover there was a special display that catch everyone’s attention.

The Intendix from Guger Technologies (g*tec) is a device that uses a swimming like cap to detect EEG from the brain, and it uses specialized software to translate those signals into directed information.

For example, we have some applications using Second Life and the device where the avatar is being controlled by thoughts rather than conventional input.

As well the shown application was oriented towards spelling with the brain, where you do nothing but think about the word and it will appear in the screen.

Do you think these are good technologies, we hope to hear from you, meanwhile here are some videos of the applications.

 

 

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