Top TechTop Tech #55: Flying men, Gel robots, Seeing-eye cane
Promising products and interesting innovations
By Paul Worthington
Today’s Top Tech:
• Jetpacks above Dubai
• Robot made from gel
• Seeing-eye cane
Jetpacks above Dubai
Not just one, but two men in tandem took to the skies over Dubai, held aloft only by the packs on their backs.
Jet-powered wings, that is, propelling them at up to 125 miles per hour.
The pack has a seven-foot wingspan and four kerosene jets.
Forbes has details on who’s who here.
Better yet, watch the HD video of the flight.
Flexible Robot made from Gel
A new synthetic gel not only changes shape — it can move.
And so we have a robot cover not in metal, but in soft polymer created by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh.
They mimicked a single-celled organism which expands and contracts its shape to move, and used polymer gels containing spirobenzopyran which can be morphed into different shapes using only light.
The result has “greater dexterity and mobility than conventional hard robots,” reports Kurzweil AI.
Seeing-eye Cane
A new cane for the blind adds sensors and processing to also provide facial recognition features.
It may enable blind people “to instantly identify friends and family, reports Birmingham City University, where it’s being developed.
The ‘XploR’ mobility cane uses commodity technology made for smartphones to recognize familiar faces from up to 10 meters away, the report adds. The cane also features GPS functionality to aid navigation.
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