Top TechTop Tech #72: • Feeling foot, detecting drunks, sword-swinging robots
Promising products and interesting innovations
By Paul Worthington
Today’s Top Tech:
• Patient feels through artificial sensitive foot
• Tech to stop drunk driving
• DARPA challenges robots, robots swing swords
Patient feels through artificial sensitive foot
Scientists have crafted an artificial leg and sensitive foot through which the amputee can feel lifelike sensations.
The team at the University of Linz in Austria fit six sensors to the sole of the artificial foot, the BBC reports, to stimulate nerves at the base of the stump (in which surgeons had rewired nerve endings).
The patient says he “no longer slip on ice, and I can tell whether I walk on gravel, concrete, grass or sand. I can even feel small stones.”
Tech to stop drunk driving
The Driver Alcohol
Detection System for Safety is using technology to prevent alcohol-impaired
drivers from operating their vehicles while under the influence.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports alcohol-impaired driving crashes kill nearly 10,000 people annually.
One demonstrated test vehicle detects alcohol levels by touch — that is, near-infrared tissue spectroscopy on the would-be drivers finger. Another tests the driver’s breath non-invasively. With both, if the driver’s blood alcohol content is above 0.08, the car’s engine won’t start, the Christian Science Monitor reports.
DARPA challenges robots, robots swing swords
“Robotic technology will become crucial for national needs ranging from manufacturing and security to agriculture and care of the elderly,” says DARPA. As competition is one way of advancing the field to meet those needs, the agency once again held its annual combat.
Among the tasks robots competed at were driving, walking through rubble, and climbing stairs.
One winner: Team KAIST from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, which “included extensive field tests on a beat up parking lot under varying weather conditions to prove out the capability of its DRC-Hubo robot.” The team was awarded $2 million.
Also: a workshop with five high-school students’ “Robots4Us” videos, DARPA adds here, “revealed a rising generation of boys and girls with optimistic expectations that a maturing robotics technology will improve the human condition in many ways, from helping farmers feed an ever-growing population to enabling older workers to stay on the job longer. At the same time, these roboticists-in-the-making expressed concern that hackers, faulty robots, and even robots with their own new kind of intelligence could pose threats to society that would have to be managed.”
Meanwhile:
Sword-wielding robots in Japan are learning to duel humans
and slice peapods, Popular
Science reports. “Japan’s Nimiki laboratory gave a robot arm a foam sword,
paired it with high-speed mechanical eyes, and taught it how to duel a human.”
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