Video Friday: PowerGloves, MAVs, and Self-Assembling Robots

Our video mix this Friday includes little flying robots, little reconfigurable robots, a little robot controlled by a glove, and a movie trailer with a not-so-little amount of robot carnage

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Video Friday: PowerGloves, MAVs, and Self-Assembling Robots

This very cool demo comes from a company called AnthroTronix. Their AcceleGlove uses accelerometers to detect hand movements, and it's precise enough to get a little robot to pick up a ball in its gripper:

AirBurr, or the original AirBurr at least, is from 2009. It's got a rotor like a helicopter plus control surfaces like an airplane, and since the whole thing is completely enclosed, it can bounce off walls and land and take off on its own, ideal for indoor flying:

Any doubts that AeroVironment's hummingbird MAV could fly outside of a staged demo were erased when it took off from a table at an AUVSI press conference:

Noisy little bugger, but very clever.

This TEDTalk from MIT's Skylar Tibbits shows several examples of how robots (and structures in general) can be programmed to be self-assembling and self-reconfiguring:

We've seen a few things like this before, and those chains at the end of the talk remind me of Cornell's stochastic self-reconfiguring robots from a few years ago.

And finally, the week would just not be complete without a video about robots going nuts and killing all the humans they can get their steely claws on. Behold, Robotropolis!

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