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Researchers create skeleton robot with human-like muscles
If robots that mimic animal or human behavior are your nightmare fuel, turn away now. Researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology went one step further with a skeleton robot, giving it human-like muscles to help with movement. The microfilament muscle "tissues" connect to joints and expand/contract just like the real thing. In fact, the robot has the same number of muscles in its legs as we do. At this point, they're not very strong and though the strands help with smoother movements, the skeleton still requires assistance to walk.
MIT's tiny robot operates on your stomach from the inside
Imagine this: you accidentally swallowed a battery (!), and to get it out, you need to take a pill that turns into a robot. Researchers from MIT, the University of Sheffield and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed a new kind of origami robot that transforms into a microsurgeon inside your stomach. They squished the accordion-like robot made of dried pig intestine inside a pill, which the stomach acid dissolves. A magnet embedded in the middle allows you or a medical practitioner to control the microsurgeon from the outside using another magnet. It also picks up the battery or other objects stuck inside your stomach.
SOINN gets intelligence boost, uses web-based image search to ID objects
Tokyo Institute of Technology's SOINN (Self-Organizing Incremental Neural Network) bot was impressive enough during our first introduction back in 2011, but the intelligent device can now tap the web for its latest trick: accurate object identification. The updated system, which appears to utilize a database akin to Google's image search, can scour the web for similar shots, making it possible to ID objects based on comparable structures published on the web. It can distinguish a box cutter from a knife, for example, or a rickshaw from a car. For now, SOINN is limited to identifying objects in images, including those captured in realtime with a camera, but its designers imagine that future revisions could enable content recognition in video streams, and audio clips, too. Our friends at DigInfo saw the update in action -- check it out for yourself in the video after the break.
NTT DoCoMo confirms successful 10Gbps wireless test, clears a path to 5G
No, it's not the world's most conspicuous surveillance van -- it's one of the first steps toward 5G data. NTT DoCoMo has just confirmed that the gear-laden vehicle above successfully conducted a 10Gbps wireless test in Ishigaki this December with the help of the Tokyo Institute of Technology. The dry run relied on frequencies and bandwidth well outside of usual cellular service, in the 11GHz band with 400MHz of spectrum, but proved that it was possible to blow past the speeds of LTE and LTE-Advanced while moving outdoors; the test used 24 antennas to maintain the link. DoCoMo ultimately hopes for similar speed in frequencies over 5GHz, and it's not shy about hoping the technology will define mobile communication as it improves. Although we're not expecting this kind of breakneck performance in a phone for years, it's good to know that 4G isn't necessarily the end of the line.
Japanese research group concocts 3D restoration magic from regular photos (video)
Reconstructing 3D spacial data has long been possible, but convincing the average consumer of that would be another chore entirely. In the future, however, it may be simpler to believe. A crew of researchers at Tokyo Institute of Technology are hard at work developing a new system that "quickly creates 3D spacial data from photos taken with a digital camera." According to Assistant Professor Akihito Torii, the method can use JPEGs from a conventional point-and-shoot camera -- no specialized equipment needed -- which are then shot over to a PC via a wireless Eye-Fi SD card. From there, it's the magic of the software that takes over, reconstructing a 3D model in mere minutes. The goal? To save Earthlings time, naturally. As it stands, pilots shooting aerial shots usually have to land, offload imagery and see if they missed anything; in theory, this could allow a more real-time process to fall into place, enabling patch shots to be taken just minutes after they're missed. Looking for more? Hit up the explanatory video just after the break.
Humanoid bot created to analyze mechanics of swimming, replace unreliable carbon-based life forms
Meet Swumanoid. He's the replacement Tokyo Institute of Technology researchers have whipped up for pesky earthlings who can't identically repeat tests or minutely change their swimming style. The bot can reproduce a swimmer's full body movement and measure water resistance in an effort to shed some light on the forces acting on creatures like Michael Phelps. Created with 3D printed parts of an inferior human swimmer at half scale, it's attached to a drive unit and confined to a circulating water tank; Swumanoid takes two minutes and thirty-six seconds to swim roughly 300 feet, so it'll be a while before he and his kin chase you down. In the meantime, you can watch nightmare fueling footage of the bot presumably training for the Ironman Triathlon after the break.
T-rays produce 3Gbps short-range wireless, make WiFi pout in the corner
The last time we saw T-rays, they were busy scanning bodies for tumors and security threats. Six researchers from the Tokyo Institute of Technology are now aiming the terahertz-level frequencies at a less organic target: fast wireless. Running at 542GHz, a rate that makes 60GHz ultra wideband look pokey, the scientists are sending data through the ether at about 3Gbps. The speed isn't as fast as the 7Gbps peak of WiGig, and the bandwidth runs dry at just 33 feet away, but it comes out of a resonant tunneling diode measuring 0.04 square inches -- definitely small enough to fit into a smartphone. The speed could magnify using higher frequencies and power levels, too, with 100Gbps being the dream. Knowing that it can take years for academic papers to translate to real products, we're not holding our breath for T-ray routers anytime soon. Still, the technology could make wideband a realistic option for handhelds and put the mere 1.3Gbps of 802.11ac WiFi to shame. [Thanks, Andrew. Image credit: Deborah Miller and Warren Scott, Connexions]
NEC's tactile touchscreen nudges at the future (video)
A touchscreen's fatal flaw is its lack of feedback: imagine the satisfaction if you could feel those Angry Birds as they flew across the screen. NEC and the Tokyo Institute of Technology wanted a simpler solution to tactile displays than Senseg's electrostatic-field based tech. Instead, this device uses a wire (yup) anchored on each corner of the display -- when force is shown on screen, it jerks the screen in the corresponding direction. You can see it in action after the break, accompanied by the restful tones of Diginfo's narrator. If there's a better way to start a week, we don't wanna know about it.
NVIDIA's Tesla GPU powers Tsubame 2.0 to green supercomputer supremacy
The Green500 might not be quite as well known as the Top500, but it's no less of an honor to be counted among the world's most energy efficient supercomputers. NVIDIA is tooting its own horn for making it on to the list for the second year in a row as part of the "greenest" petaflop machine. The Tsubame 2.0 at the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Global Scientific Information Center is powered by Intel's Xeon CPUs, but NVIDIA's Tesla general purpose GPUs do a vast majority of the number crunching, allowing it to deliver 1.19 petaflops of performance while consuming only 1.2 megawatts. That's roughly 958 megaflops per watt, a huge increase over the most efficient CPU-only super computer, the Cielo Cray, which gets only 278 megaflops per watt. The Tsubame 2.0 isn't the greenest machine on the planet though, that honor belongs to IBM's BlueGene which takes the top five spots on the Green500. Still, number ten ain't bad... right? Check out the PR after the break.
Tokyo Institute of Technology's SOINN robot teaches itself to serve humans (video)
Robots have been replacing more and more human workers for quite some time now, but in most instances they're still just being programmed to perform specific tasks. As evidenced by this bot developed by the Hasegawa Group at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, however, there's also a growing number capable of teaching themselves some new tricks, and they're getting smarter every day. This particular one employs what's called a self-organizing incremental neural network (or SOINN), which lets it build up a base of knowledge that it can apply to new tasks and make educated guesses about how to proceed with them -- in this case, pouring a glass of water and then dropping an ice cube in it (or what's supposed to be water and an ice cube, at least). Head on past the break for a video.
Tokyo Institute of Technology announces SSD-packing, 2.39 petaflop supercomputer
IBM has announced plans to start using SandForce SSDs in its enterprise machines, and now it looks like the Tokyo Institute of Technology is doing one better, working with NEC and HP to produce Tsubame 2.0. This next-gen supercomputer will reportedly operate at 2.39 petaflops (that's a lot of flops!) and uses a new multilevel storage architecture consisting of DRAM as well as SSDs. Not only will this bad boy have thirty times the computing capacity of Tsubame 1.0 (due in part to its some 2,816 Intel Westmere microprocessors and 4,224 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs), its power draw should be some 1/25th of its predecessor's. If all goes according to plan, it should be in operation this fall, at a cost of ¥3.2 billion (approx $35.5 million). [Thanks, Dylan]
Japanese gurus unveil 50TB magnetic tape cartridges, are officially 'taking it way back'
It's comical, really -- we can't get a decently powerful Atom to save our lives, but the absolutely thrilling world of magnetic tape storage is bounding ahead at a record pace. Priorities, people. For the archivists and A-type pack rats in the crowd, you'll probably be atypically elated to know that Hitachi Maxell and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have teamed up in order to develop the world's most capacious tape cartridges. Back in January, IBM and Fujifilm celebrated a momentary victory by announcing a 35TB version of this same product, but this record shattering attempt takes areal density to spaces never before ventured into in order to hit the magical 50TB mark. 'Course, you'll probably never see one outside of your state's largest library, but at least that 3TB HDD you're drooling over for your next PC seems so much more bodacious now. Oh, wait.
Mitsubishi and Tokyo Institute of Tech pair up to stop wasteful late-night windmills
Ever see a windmill spinning at night? Probably not, since it's usually quite dark, but if you ever do, you could be looking at wasted energy. Utility companies often won't purchase evening wind power because the low demand is easily met by idling traditional facilities. Mitsubishi and the Tokyo Institute of Technology are devising a means to take that otherwise unwanted wind power and shove it straight into your electric car's battery, detecting which vehicles are plugged into the grid and ducting that juice straight to 'em so that they're bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the morning. Don't have an EV yet? That's okay -- this tech is at least a few years off, too.
Yoichi Yamazaki's latest bot has hungry eyes, nothing else
A quick glance can say a lot, but sometimes its meaning can get lost in translation. For example, there's not a lot of difference between a dirty look and a, uh, dirty look, but Yoichi Yamazaki and cohorts at the Tokyo Institute of Technology hope to quantify that (and many more) by creating a so-called Eye Robot. It's a pair of disembodied eyeballs that create expressions in concert with pink eyelids; a user views each expression and then indicates how it makes him or her feel. At this point it seems like something of a scatter-shot affair, throwing out expressions at random and seeing which elicit a reaction, but hopefully in the near future Yamazaki's metrics will help make the vacant gaze of other bots a little less disconcerting. [Via Engadget Poland]
