Visiting guest. Why not sign in? |
News, knowledge and discussion for the AI enthusiast.
FEATURES |  | COMMUNITY |  | KNOWLEDGE |  | SEARCH |
Get Creative: AI Article Writing Contest Fancy the chance of getting developer focus, improving your research skills, sharing your artificial intelligence ideas, obtaining expert feedback, getting published online AND winning a prize? Enter the AI Article Writing Contest! |

Changing the Paradigm Useful Robots
Changing the Paradigm The Daily Yomiuri has a refreshingly different, yet somewhat controversial article about an alternative approach to humanoid robot design -- Changing the Paradigm. Hiroshi Kobayashi has designed a pneumatic suit based on artificial air muscles. It can be fitted to a human or a robot, and can apply to physical therapy and prosthetics. The inventor has a unusual view of robotics, taking a rather more practical approach: ""After one month at Zurich, I realized that AI is crap. It's not useful at all."" This man likes to get stuff working, and that's useful. I can somewhat see his point, though it is possible to get AI useful... it just takes a bit of time! | Alex J. Champandard 935 posts. Thursday 28 March, 20:34 Reply
Pneumatics and servos The relative merrits of pneumatics and servos is particularly relevant in industrial robotics applications. Pneumatics are relatively strong for their weight and also pretty cheap, but the downside is that they usually require a large compressed air supply, their response rate is typically fairly slow and repeatability can be poor. With most pneumatics systems they are simple on/off type actuators having little or no control over the velocity/time profile of the movement. Servos by contrast can work at much higher speeds and accuracies with little or no change in their physical properties over time, but typically their cost is significantly higher. Over the past decade there has been a decisive shift away from using pneumatics and towards servo driven systems. The main factors influencing this change are falling costs, improved accuracy and speed. Optical encoders used on many servo motors have also seen improvements which mean that these motors may be used in extremes of heat and vibration. - Bob | motters 136 posts. Monday 01 April, 16:46 Reply