Massage-giving robot rubs people the right way

As our population continues to get older, physiotherapists are going to be needed more than ever. It was with this in mind that Emma – or Expert Manipulative Massage Automation – was created. The one-armed robot is designed to help physiotherapists handle an increasing workload, by conducting massage therapy on their human patients.

Emma is the product of Singaporean startup AiTreat, and was developed by Nanyang Technological University graduate Albert Zhang. It's currently undergoing clinical trials at the Kin Teck Tong medical institution, and has already been used on 50 patients to successfully treat conditions including tennis elbow, lower back pain, and stiff neck and shoulders.

Therapists start by physically guiding Emma through the type of massage that needs to be done.

From there, the robot can continue the motion on its own, using a combination of a 3D stereoscopic camera system and a 3D-printed pressure-sensitive "massage tip." That tip is able to assess patients' responses, such as changes in the stiffness of the muscle or tendon that's being worked on. This data is uploaded to the cloud, so that therapists can monitor patients' progress over time, and alter the treatment as needed.

Additionally, if Emma's massage tip detects responses associated with pain, it will ease up on the pressure.

Once the current trials are over, plans call for a second-generation robot to be built, which will be more compact and mobile than the current model. There's no word on when a final commercial version may be available.

"This will be one of the first robots out in the market specifically for use by sports therapists and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) physicians," says Zhang. "Our aim is not to replace the therapists who are skilled in sports massage and acupoint therapy, but to improve productivity by enabling one therapist to treat multiple patients with the help of our robots."

Source: Gizmag, Nanyang Technological University

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Geek Speak: Suryaprakash

In this pressure cooker-esque world of education and competition, it is a never ending battle between fun and scholastics for children. The ever increasing burden of the curriculum always tends to knock the timeslot of play out of children’s routines. Sometimes even hobby and passions get caught in the crossfire of rigorous learning. These get flung out as well. The more kids move through high school, the more play-time loses its turf to tuitions, coachings and other study-related activities. With this being the case, even edutainment loses its turf to mainstream education. Let’s discuss one such curious case.

Meet Suryaprakash, a ninth grader from DAV School, Adambakkam. His tale is one that is getting increasingly regular in today’s high intensity education system. Suryaprakash, who recently graduated from Kidobotikz, is an old student. Surprisingly it has taken him 3 years to complete his robotics course from commencement to finish. I ask him why and he immediately cuts a sorry figure. He says his schedule is jam packed with schooling and classes that he hardly got any leisurely weekends in the last 3 years to take up robotics and finish it in a stretch. He completed his courseware somewhere towards the end of 2014, but couldn’t spend enough time on his passion thanks to his rigorous schooling. Suryaprakash, who feels his school could do a little bit more to encourage science fairs and contests on the premises, has not displayed any robotic experiments at school. Nor do his friends and teachers know that he is learning robotics at such a young age. On the other hand, he has been quite active in all of Kidobotikz conducted robotic events. He says he has participated in robotic events all the way back to Kidobotikz Robo Games 2014 where he participated in the December edition. In all these events, he has fielded a variety of projects ranging from “feed the fish” in the dec-2014 edition to a “Home Automation” concept in April 2015. He was also a part of the Kidobotikz team which visited NIT Calicut to take part in the events there. It all started when he accidentally discovered about Kidobotikz courses when he was in the vicinity to buy a Solar panel for his own project.

After completing his Graduation recently, he is now taking up Raspberry Pi classes at Kidobotikz where he is learning programming, his favourite area of interest. However, luck isn’t always on his side. The weekend classes that he takes here are now clashing with his IIT-JEE coaching classes which also fall on the weekend. So, he had to request the Kidobotikz management to allow him to take compensatory classes. His trainers, sympathetic to his cause and appreciative of his interest to learn, now take separate classes for him on Saturday evenings after he visits Kidobotikz on his way back from IIT-JEE classes. One cannot help but feel awe for this 15 year old who shuttles his way across the city to balance academics and passions. He dreams of doing a Bachelors degree in Mechatronics at one of the IITs.

Happy Roboting ! !       

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Lockheed Martin's Spider bot skims blimps to plug holes

Lockheed Martin's Hybrid Airship is one beast of a heavy hauler. Naturally, maintaining a vehicle almost as long as a football field takes a lot of man hours, but the company has a new little helper on deck. Its Spider robot combs the surface of the aircraft on the lookout for tiny holes before patching them up, thereby automating one of the staff's more tedious tasks.

At present, locating tiny pinholes in a gigantic airship takes crews of workers on the inside and out, armed with a bright light to identify the parts of the surface in need of attention. But Lockheed Martin's Spider (Self-Propelled Instrument for Damage Evaluation and Repair) does much the same thing, entirely on its own.

The robot is actually split into two halves, which lock in magnetically on either side of the airship's outer skin. The half on the outside applies a light to the surface, which shines through to the interior in the event of a hole, where the inner half is waiting with its light sensors to pick up the breach.

When Spider has detected a hole, the robot lines up its patching mechanism and automatically repairs it. It then sends a before and after image of the repair job to a central processing unit. The company plans to use squads of Spider robots, where this central hub would manage their activity as they scoot across the airship. If one fails, it can reconfigure search patterns to make sure no hole is left unplugged. 

You can see Spider do its thing in the video below.

Source: YouTube

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The alternative box to the "Idiot Box" ! !

Parents always tend to enjoy the seemingly endless energy displayed by their Kids. They cannot stop brooding over the charming mischief that kids indulge in when they are not at school or when they are not playing outside. However, there’s a fine line between charming mischief and downright notoriety. Kids always aren’t quite mindful of the discomfort they cause when they are indoors and cannot help but bring down the roof with their pranks and play. Hence, parents have always resorted to means where they get their kids engaged or distracted in some activity that keeps them off breaking crockery or pulling each other’s hair. However, parents tend to not adopt the healthiest of distractions for children. Their go-to solution is usually the ever dependent Television and the humble smartphone with its mighty assortment of games and apps. 

But this is in itself is a very unhealthy habit. With the explosion in content availability across mainstream media, the content that is displayed on these “Media” boxes- or let’s just use the old term “Idiot Box”- is not exactly moderated or appropriated for children. The cartoons of the modern age are far more different from those of the 80s and 90s which were aimed at imparting interesting trivia and healthy knowledge to children. Today’s cartoons with their gory animations and graphicised violence isn’t exactly a smooth influence on the senses. Studies show that Kids who spend inordinate amount of time accessing such content via smartphones or watching them on the TV tend to display aggressive tendencies and are more prone to engaging in unhealthy interactions such as fistfights and aggressive pranks. 

Does this mean parents are meant to keep them off media sources completely and just get them engaged in scholastic activity? Not exactly. One’s mind would immediately race to the saying “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. Studies have revealed that kids have the urge to indulge themselves in such activities owing to excessive energies they have as a part of their growth and metabolism and they proactively find activities where they can expend their energies and time in.

However, this necessarily does not mean that kids be let in spending time on such unproductive activity. Parents as such should always encourage children to take up activity that would help in both their physical building as well as their mental upbringing. What better way to get this done than via indulging in activity that helps them both learn interesting concepts as well as provide them with the gratification of having engaged in constructive activities?

We at Kidobotikz strive to put the unspent energies of Kids to better use. This we believe is helpful for the child in his upbringing as he spends his fun time in activities that are not only constructive but are also creative and informative. Our Kidobotikz kits have always enjoyed the flair for being interactive and informative at the same time. Time and again, this fact has been reaffirmed to us by happy parents who tell us that their ward now has a new distraction that they are happy to see him distracted with.

“The cure for boredom is curiosity; there is no cure for curiosity”

Happy Roboting ! !

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Solar powered Suli brings light to backpacks, bikes and bottles

A simple, versatile light powered by the sun, the Chilean-born Suli brings light to everyone from outdoor lovers to those living off the electrical grid. It meets that diversity of needs by screwing onto a bottle to create a simple lamp, mounting to a bicycle to serve as a safety light, hanging from a backpack, suctioning to a window and more.

There are plenty of compact, solar-powered lights, lamps and lanterns out there at this point, the LuminAID inflatable lantern and the Waka Waka Light among them. A company has to do more than just slap a solar panel on a compact light to make an impression, like power its light with gravity or salt water.

Suli Labs sticks with good, old-fashioned solar, but it packages it inside an ecosystem that's much more versatile than others. Out of the box, the light disc offers up to 25 lumens and up to 60 hours of runtime through five modes. Power to the light is supplied by three AAA batteries recharged via the solar panel on the back. Suli Labs estimates 6 to 12 hours for charging under the sun.

The Suli gets a bit more interesting when you find out it has a threaded bottle mount that screws onto a common plastic bottle to create a lantern. Still, that just puts it on par with other solar bottle lanterns, like the Lightie and Sollight Lightcap.

Where the Suli really develops a personality all its own is in the accompanying lineup of 3D-printed accessories. The basic ring secures to the outside of the light, allowing you to strap it to a backpack, hang it up and otherwise get creative with how you position it. Suli Labs also offers a bike mount to fit the light to your handlebars, a suction mount to stick it to a window, and a transparent stake to light up the garden, yard or other soft ground.

Suli Labs held a successful Indiegogo campaign a year ago. Part of Suli Lab's business plan is to work with the open source community to develop additional accessories and uses for its light, so it also offers a free DIY 3D printing file.

The video shows the Suli being put to its multiple uses.

Source: Gizmag, Suli Lab

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Kidobotikz kits: A Gateway to STEM learning

Over the course of the past decade, the demand for STEM learning in the country has gained commendable traction. STEM, which is an abbreviation for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math is a form of learning wherein all the aforementioned subjects are converged into a single practical-oriented curriculum rather than being taught as separate subjects. This union of the individual subjects into a single form is aimed at improving the thought processes of students as it claims to provide students with a learning environment that keeps them engaged in problem solving and finding solutions. While this is an ideal approach to revamping the course structures that students currently engage in, the concept of STEM in itself has remained Idealistic and its accurate implementation has still remained a distant pipe dream. This situation needs to be addressed with.

Today, promoters of STEM claim to have created learning environments that allow students to be more active.Their belief is that with the creation of an environment using new age gizmos such as tablet or smartphone based apps , students are engaged in their own learning. They emphasise that students get active with the courseware with no manipulation.. However, in cases more often than not, the truth is a different reality. STEM courses as engaging as they claim to be are still inherently complex for young students. The concepts of Science and Technology can be a major leap for the primitive perception of students. It is highly imperative that they are encouraged to get in the mould of visualising concepts and remembering them the right way so that the foundation upon which their further learning happens remains strong. However, contemporary techniques of STEM education fail to capture the imagination of students. Kids, as much as they love to watch animated videos, still are not completely capable of assimilating concepts from just videos. They need a much better tool that helps them experience the physical manifestation of a concept. It also aids when this physical experiments provides them with the instant gratification of learning a concept and experimenting with it in-situ.

We at Kidobotikz looked at this problem of niche and aimed at solving it. The culmination of this problem solving exercise was the birth of the Kidobotikz kit. The Kidobotikz kit offers an overall learning experience for kids in the core concepts of STEM through an online platform that is not only engaging and interactive but is also gamified to promote healthy competition among peers. The kits which are perused by the kids while learning on the platform provide the instant gratification for Kids that other products have been found wanting. Both the Kids and the Kits associated with Kidobotikz are rarely left exhausted in their intellectual elements, all thanks to the efforts spent in developing this kit. If the reader still needs help finding convincing, we suggest you to visit our centres along with your wards to try out a kit today ! !

Happy Roboting ! !

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Walkera’s new superzoom camera drone can spot you a mile away

Walkera has beefed up its prosumer level flagship camera drone with two killer new features. The Voyager 4 has a gimbal-stabilized, 360-degree camera with a 16x optical zoom lens capable of a maximum 1500mm focal length. Plus, with both the drone and the controller connected to 4G wireless internet, there's no limit on control range, so you could literally fly this thing from the other side of the world.

When consumer camera drones like the DJI Phantom were first launched, people worried about the privacy implications of airborne cameras that could see over fences and into bathroom windows. But truth be told, most every drone on the market shipped with such a wide angle lens that your average backyard sunbather would amount to just a few pixels in the final image unless you flew very close indeed.

It was only a matter of time before somebody came out with a drone that packed in serious telephoto zoom capabilities – and in the last week, two have launched. One is DJI's Zenmuse Z3 Zoom camera for the Inspire One, which offers a decent 7x zoom from a 22mm to a 77mm lens equivalent. The other is much more powerful: the Walkera Voyager 4. It blows the DJI camera's zoom capabilities out of the water with a 16x optical zoom that gives you the equivalent of a 10-1500mm lens.

In practical terms, maximum zoom lets you get a similar frame to what a typical Phantom 4 now shoots from much, much further away. As much as a kilometer (0.62 mi) away, according to the manufacturer. 

Telephoto zoom is significant from a filmmaking point of view, because consumer-grade aerial cameras have generally only ever had very wide angle lenses. This made them easier to fly, but harder to film with. For example, when shooting a car, you had to get very close. 

Of course, there's also privacy implications, because a superzoom drone can presumably map every pimple on your backside from a few blocks away, which is far enough that you can't hear it flying. You – or perhaps more pertinently, your local celebrity – will never know it's there. Mind you, this is such an early effort and the zoom range is so wide that we're not expecting any sort of optical excellence from the lens.

Walkera is offering the zoom camera as an option, and at this stage the gimbal-stabilized superzoom camera only shoots 1080p vision, while the fixed wide lens can shoot 4K. Like the DJI Inspire, the Voyager allows the camera to rotate to shoot in any direction, independent of which way the drone is facing. The landing gear also lifts out of the way to keep out of the shot.

Along with the camera, the Voyager 4 has another killer feature, particularly from a surveillance standpoint. It can be configured to operate using its own Wi-Fi network, which has a range around 1.5 km (0.9 mi) in the air, or the drone and the controller can use 4G wireless internet to communicate, giving it virtually unlimited control range.

Using 4G control, you could literally fly a drone in New York, controlling it from Beijing, if the data transmission is quick enough. That's an extraordinary new capability, although many countries have laws that specifically prevent pilots from flying unmanned aircraft beyond line of sight.

Voyager 4 is launching with a new controller, the Devo F18, which has dedicated flight mode switches. The Devo series controllers have typically been a little confusing and unrefined, so hopefully this iteration will make things clearer for non-hobbyist users.

Take a look at the product video below.

Source: Walkera, Gizmag

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