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Welcome to Cyber Dump number 68, your look at what's going on in this insane age of technology that we live in. As always, all source links mentioned are below.
ROBOTICS
Researchers at Berkeley have been testing the balancing capabilities of their Cassie bipedal robots, by putting it on two hovershoes and having it roll around on various surfaces. Apparently this whole process has helped improve the bots control feedback system, and it shows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2fKBb_0iTo
On the back of the raspberry picking bot we saw the other week, Traptic announced their own strawberry harvesting bot that sits on the back of a tractor. This one seems much faster at identifying and picking the ripe fruit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfwRDz8y7ao
https://www.traptic.com/traptic-blog/2019/5/21/announcing-traptic-strawberry-picking-robots
And in other news, the Agility Robotics uploaded another new video of their Digit robot, this time showing off it's autonomous walking capabilities, in a range of settings. The unusual centaur-like legs seems to work well for this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YrlR1iNVcQ
DRONES
NASA have tested a mini helicopter which they hope to take to Mars on future missions. As noted in their video, flying a heavier-than-air vehicle on Mars is difficult because of the air density compared to Earth, but this design was successful in experiments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdRqSSYu4K8
We keep seeing more and more interesting drone designs. This week AIR Lab at Singapore University demonstrated their hybrid design which can switch between a full body spinning hover mode, to a tail-sitter style fixed wing mode that flies horizontally.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBFndDLJKf0
And if you're getting annoyed with all these drones, this sentry turret design by Drew Pilcher will be right up your street. This open source autonomous turret successfully tracked and shot down a tiny whoop drone recently. You can view more details about this on it's Hackaday page.
https://hackaday.io/project/165350-anti-drone-gun-turret
https://vimeo.com/339815560
OPEN SOURCE
Another hackaday page I saw the other day that I thought was cool was the DLT one, or the Damn Linux Tablet, which is an open hardware tablet designed by user Prof. Fartsparkle. It's currently in early stages, and he seems to be experimenting with various System on Modules out there, but this is one to keep an eye on.
https://hackaday.io/project/164845-dlt-one-a-damn-linux-tablet
In other open source news, researchers at the University of Michigan have created an open source bionic leg, along with opensourceleg.com with full details and files to create your own.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rqla0u813r8
https://opensourceleg.com
Adam Bender on youtube uploaded a very interesting video on how to build a litium battery using 18650 cells. If you've never made one before, this could be quite useful, and these type of batteries are used in everything from laptops, to scooters, off-grid power systems, electric cars and more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JldTYkcFDM8
3D PRINTING
A team at Columbia University showed off their LayerCode technology recently, which adds optical barcodes directly into 3D printed shapes. It can do this in a variety of ways from two colour prints, to variable layer heights, and near-infrared steganography, which is invisible to the human eye, but still machine readable. Pretty cool.
http://dingzeyu.li/LayerCode/LayerCode-SIGGRAPH-2019-Maia-et-al-compressed.pdf
https://3dprinting.com/news/layercode-embeds-optical-barcodes-in-3d-shapes/
Austrian startup, PrintStones unveiled the beta prototype of their mobile concrete 3D printer. According to them, this bot can autonomously print various concrete structures in a range of colours and textures, and all while, obviously being on the move.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZZVvtAjjmM
https://umair.at/about_us/
https://3dprinting.com/news/printstones-mobile-concrete-printer-automates-construction/
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
A team headed by Ohad Fried demonstrated some crazy technology the other day. Their AI system has the ability to edit not only video visuals, but audio, enabling it to add, remove and change words from videos of people talking, all with very realistic outputs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ybLCfVeFL4
https://www.ohadf.com/projects/text-based-editing/
AR / VR
NNTC recently uploaded a video of their iFalcon facial recognition system, which marries augmented reality glasses, with a wearable mini server to capture and analyse faces on the fly. This thing can apparently hold a database of 1 million faces, and is aimed at security and policing uses. I doubt many people really think about the consequences of this kind of technology being everywhere. Rather unsettling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzBEDbXI5PA
KAT VR showed off their wearable locomotion system for virtual reality this week, while also announcing their new kickstarter. The little beacons connect to your ankles and waist, allowing you to move in various ways, through different poses and movements.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvTbB19bvIw
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/katvrsolutions/kat-loco-complete-wearable-locomotion-system-walk-into-vr
VIDEOS
Finishing with two videos this week. Scotty from Strange Parts took a look at one of the many PCB fabricating factories in China, specifically looking at the component placement and soldering stages of board creation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24ehoo6RX8w
3D Printing Nerd also released a couple of great videos where he walked through the RAPID + TCT 2019 conference, talking to many of the vendors about their various machines. Definitely check this out if you're interested in the future of personal manufacturing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obCgJQp5Yj8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTRXJkRlRuQ
Alright, that's it for this week. As always, thank you for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.
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CREDITS
Music: Xtract - Audiotool Day 2016 (CC License)
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BY NODE