Tribotix - News & Interesting Robotic stuff ....

In April this year I posted an article on Heartlander, "a miniature mobile robot that delivers minimally invasive therapy to the surface of the beating heart".


Over the weekend I received an email from the people who developed Heartlander letting me know that Heartlander is now being commericalised, information can now be found at the website for HeartLander Surgical's website.

Info on this website tell us that HeartLander is "currently on its third generation, the device is only 8.5mm in diameter. Enhancements could shrink HeartLander to 3mm". Pretty amazing.

I received this video in an email and thought it was too good not to share. This is the best use I've seen for an Industrial Robot .... NOT for the faint hearted.
This video is called 'Lunchtime at the Ford Factory' and it looks like the original was uploaded to FILECABI.NET.

Wonder if they did an OH&S risk assessment before starting this project.

Tribotix have been an Industry Partner of TAFE's Digi-Girl program for over 3 years now and we will be again be assisting with the delivery of the highly successful robotics program from 29th July ~ 30th July at Meadowbank TAFE. This delivery is part of National ICT Careers Week activities in NSW.

Below is a promotional video showing a sample of what happens over the 2 days.



This program is great fun, and also gives the Year 9~12 girls and insite in career opportunites in Engineering and Computer Science.

The University of Newcastle's NUManoids have won the 2-legged league in the Standard Platform League at RoboCup in Suzhou, China. The NUManoid team replaced the NUBots (Sony Aibo based team) early this year, the NUBots have retired after winning RoboCup 2006 and having finished in the top 3 at RoboCup since entering (2002~2007).


After reaching the semi-finals Stephan Chalup, one of the Academic supervisors with the team, said "this is a very good result given this year’s short preparation time and selection of strong competitors". Stephan went on to say that "tomorrow the NUManoids will play in the final match of the league against a very strong American team which is a joint effort of Carnegie Mellon University and Georgia Tech".

The final was decided by Penalty shoot-out (the penalty shootout was judged based on the time to score a goal) where the NUManoids were victorious 1-0.

Full results of the competition can be viewed here.

The NUManoid team is lead by Naomi Henderson, this is the first year Naomi has had this responsibility. As well as being a 'robot soccer playing programming guru' Naomi describes herself as "a post graduate uni student who programs robots to play soccer by day and a 'cupcake ninja' by night".

Naomi's hidden talent was brought to our attention by a Blog on CNET.com. Have a look for yourself at Naomi's work, an example of which is shown below.


Everyone at Tribotix would like to pass on our congratulations to all associated with the NUManoids - they continually achieve excellent results through simple hard work, congratulations ....

Last Month I attended TechGirls, an event organised by Youth Connections, to promote Engineering and IT options for girls. At this event I was lucky enough to meet Pia Waugh, Pia's is a very active person in the Australian Linux & Open Source communities being:

• appointed Research Co-ordinator of the Australian Service for Knowledge of Open Source Software project (ASK-OSS),
• a former President & (2003~2004) and Vice President (2005-2007) of Linux Australia, and
  
• Project Leader for the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project in Australia.
  

Pia has put together a case study for HyKim on Australian Service for Knowledge of Open Source Software (ASK-OSS) web site. It's great that people in the open-source community are starting to take an interest in our work.

Just a quick post to let everyone know that we now have a Tribotix Wiki which we will be using for our User Manuals for HyKim (21DOF Robot Bear) & HyInt (powerful robotic processing system). All the information, such as schematics, source code, firmware and component datasheets for these two products/projects are available from this wiki.

Any questions or comments are most welcome.

This is a pretty amazing robot, "HeartLander is a miniature mobile robot that delivers minimally invasive therapy to the surface of the beating heart" - this quote is taken from the HeartLander web page.

Heartlander was designed at The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon. The Heartlander lists the major media coverage for this robot, the New York Times has a really good diagram showing the Heartlander and explaining how it works - the HeartLander "uses suction to adhere to a beating heart. Moving like an inchworm, it can reach areas that now require doctors to deflate a patients lungs".

There are some really impressive video's as well - amazing that something so small can be controlled like this to make surgery less invasive.

Yes, we finally have added information about our Robot Bear, named Hykim, on our web site - sorry this took so long but we have so much going at the same time it's hard to get everything done quickly (I'm sure you'll understand). Anyway, the collage from our home page is shown below - be sure to have a look at ALL Hykim's features.


The processing system used in Hykim has been named HyInt, an acronym/abbreviation for Hykim's Intelligence. This will be sold as a stand alone processing system that can be used in any system where Dynamixels (AX, DX & RX) are used. The picture below shows a HyInt fitted to the University of Newcastle's (Australia) CycloidII - they have 2 of these which have been fitted with HyInt for research being done by post-graduate students.


Anyway, have a look at our website - there's lots of detailed information. User Manuals, in the form of Wiki's, are currently being finalised for both Hykim and HyInt.

Interesting article online today in The Australian, Mining bonanza drives robot boom.

I remember there used to be some short documentaries on TV (long time ago) where the CSIRO would show of some of it's research. I remember seeing a story once about underground autonomous vehicles - in the short documentary they had unmanned machines navigating through 'tents' that simulated the walls underground. If my memory is correct, then maybe this is one of the items that CSIRO is claiming as it's "robotic mining plans first hashed out in the early 1990s" .

Doing a Google search for 'CSIRO robot mining' uncovers 2 articles written in 2000 on CSIRO's work:

1. May 04 , 2000 Robots to invade our mines, and
2. Sep 04 , 2000 Robots make mines safer.

In the first article it says "Within five years, robots will operate large parts of Australia's underground mining industry, CSIRO's deputy chief executive for minerals and energy, Dr Bruce Hobbs said today." Well maybe now the mining companies have plenty of money things may move a little quicker - good for Australian Robotic R&D.

I stumbled across these videos on YouTube the other day, there are very very good ....

Have a look at:
1. Real Transformer - Bioloid -
2. Real Transformer Upgrade Version -Humvee Bioloid-
3. Robot Soccer (Bioloid)

Amazing what you can do with LOTs of time.