Pizza and Robot

The robots have many advantages, but when it comes to the manipulation of objects, they can sometimes all fingers and thumbs. Now, a team of Japanese engineers who are not can be a source of inspiration to the robots' dexterity: Pizza Lounge.

The robots have many advantages, but when it comes to the manipulation of objects, they can sometimes all fingers and thumbs. Now, a team of Japanese engineers who are not can be a source of inspiration to the robots' dexterity: Pizza Lounge.

"An Italian chef handles dextrously pizza in the oven with a tool called a pizza peel," said Makoto Kaneko, head of the team from Osaka University. A pizza peel is made up of a little more than a flat blade at the lower end of a long pole, but the boss to waive Pizza surprising degree. Kaneko team design a robot based on the pizza peel, with the robot, together with the control.

A pizza peel can be head with two degrees of freedom - and forth and twisting of the rod. However, in a combination of the two movements can be used, degree of freedom and play the horizontal pizza. Osaka, the team of robot "hands" has the same capacity, a robot for handling objects with precision. This study will be published in IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

Apart from the simple mechanical fingers, this approach has the advantage that none of the needs of electronic or mechanical manipulator itself. This should be done for robot manipulators that must be used with little space or difficult environments.

Nanoyarn

Carbon nanotubes at the entrance to the show in 1991, visionaries and futurists have one day. The structure, heat, electricity, and this feature cylindrical molecules of carbon, which is, in theory, they can be used to build a strong structure of the unusual, like the space elevator, which is 62,000 miles Earth, or exceptional, compact and fast digital computers. In practice, however, is difficult to mass-produce nanotubes are long enough for engineers to do something extraordinary. Now NANOCOMP Technologies, headquartered in Concord, New Hampshire, tried to order the immediate future of the manufacturer, in bulk, and son of films of carbon nanotubes.

At the atomic scale, such as carbon nanotubes, rolled-up tube of chicken wire, and not just metal, the tube is made of hexagonal lattice of carbon atoms. Each tube is about one nanometer (billionth of a meter) in diameter, then the name. Today, the nanotubes are generally in a segment about 10,000 nanometers in length, black powder. This powder is only a small fraction of the properties of nanotubes. NANOCOMP said he could TEN nanotubes to a hundred times, the son of training and sheets of carbon (up to one kilometer length of wire, the best tensile strength of steel, and scores in the 18-square feet).