whiskers
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ICYMI: Smart coats, robot whiskers and vaporizing lasers
Today on In Case You Missed It: Google and Levi's team up to make a smart Canadian Tuxedo jacket, the University of Bristol teaches a whiskered robot to react to stimuli and Stanford's Linear Accelerator fries water droplets with an X-ray laser, because science!
Scientists replicate kitty whiskers to help robots 'feel'
Cat whiskers are tremendously sensitive, so much so that cats can navigate around our glassware without sending anything crashing to the floor. It's that sort of sensitivity that a team from the University of California, Berkeley, is trying to replicate to help robots of the future. Ultra-sensitive fibers, made with carbon nanotubes and silver nanoparticles are designed to respond to pressure, helping future hardware navigate difficult and low-visibility environments. Team leader Ali Javey believes that the material is 10 times as sensitive as your smartphone display, and could even be used to track your heartbeat -- so maybe we'll be seeing this stuff getting woven together to make the next generation of connected onesies.
Take a gander at Final Fantasy XIV's character customization possibilities
The team at Square-Enix has a treat for fans eagerly awaiting Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn today: several screenshots showing off the possibilities that await in the updated character creation tool. Several interesting looks are on display here, including vibrant hair color, hair styles, tattoos, long hair for females, plenty of sliders, and new colors for eyes. Check out these radical looks in the gallery below! %Gallery-188497%
Video: SCRATCHbot hunts like a rat for those trapped like one
Designed for search and rescue missions - which, let's face it, are only ever one loose word away from "search and destroy" - the SCRATCHbot uses its whiskers to detect disaster survivors in inhospitable or dangerous areas. The Bristol Robotics Laboratory developed the rat-inspired people searcher over the past 6 years and now hopes to find interest for it in underground and underwater projects where vision may be impaired. Far less heroic uses are also being contemplated, such as textile inspection and implementation inside intelligent vacuum cleaners that would be able to adjust their cleaning to the particular surface they sense. Video of the new bot coming to life is after the break.
Barrens Chat: Dibs
Hello again! This week's strip has been done in memory of Children's Week. That wonderful and joyous celebration that gets you a cute little tag along to play with, all in exchange for running everywhere in the entire world.I have somehow managed to miss out on Children's Week every year, but knowing my luck, it's for the better! It would likely lead to a catastrophe not unlike what is featured in this comic.Want to know what kind of catastrophe I'm talking about? Check out the Barrens Chat gallery for this and other comics!%Gallery-22361%
Researchers prepping robot whiskers for extra sensory input
As if cats didn't have large enough egos as it is, now they're going to be strutting around, bragging about being the inspiration for the latest sensory input being squeezed into robots. We might point out to them that other cool animals like rats and walruses have whiskers too, but we're not certain it's going to do any good. All the same, these new robo-whiskers being developed by a research team at Northwestern University are pretty dang neat. The whiskers can sense shapes or the flow of liquid, all based on a single sensor at the base of each whisker. Even more impressively, the whiskers can accurately represent the contour of an object, just by brushing across it. There are plenty of uses for the sensors, such as feeling around in the dark, supplementing cameras and avoiding obstacles. They'll also help researches understand all that fancy whisker-based neurology taking place inside of rats, which we suppose in turn should lead to better bots, which is really the point in the first place, right?
