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.

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 ....

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.