Drone Fly and Swims

A quadcopter that can fly like an aerial drone, but also splash down into water and operate like a submersible, could be used for search and rescue missions or engineering inspections. This drone can fly in the air or swim underwater using a dual-speed gearbox for each of its four motors.

The prototype device called Mirs-X, which weighs 1.63 kilograms and is 38 centimetres wide. It can hover for 6 minutes in the air or dive underwater for around 40 minutes. Mirs-X is waterproof at depths of up to 3 metres and moves at up to 2 metres per second in water.

More information:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2357125-diving-drone-can-switch-between-flying-and-swimming/

Sound Waves Create 3D Models

Scientists from the Micro, Nano and Molecular Systems Lab at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research and the Institute for Molecular Systems Engineering and Advanced Materials at Heidelberg University have created a new technology to assemble matter in 3D. Their concept uses multiple acoustic holograms to generate pressure fields with which solid particles, gel beads and even biological cells can be printed. These results pave the way for novel 3D cell culture techniques with applications in biomedical engineering. 

Additive manufacturing or 3D printing enables the fabrication of complex parts from functional or biological materials. Conventional 3D printing can be a slow process, where objects are constructed one line or one layer at a time. Researchers in Heidelberg and Tübingen now demonstrate how to form a 3D object from smaller building blocks in just a single step. Using high-frequency ultrasound, which is inaudible to the human ear, the wavelengths can be pushed below a millimeter into the microscopic realm, which is used to manipulate very small building blocks, like biological cells.

More information:

https://techxplore.com/news/2023-02-3d.html

Collaborative Art Between Robot and Humans

FRIDA, a robotic arm with a paintbrush taped to it, uses AI to collaborate with humans on works of art. Ask FRIDA to paint a picture, and it gets to work putting brush to canvas. FRIDA, named after Frida Kahlo, stands for Framework and Robotics Initiative for Developing Arts. Users can direct FRIDA by inputting a text description, submitting other works of art to inspire its style, or uploading a photograph and asking it to paint a representation of it. The team is experimenting with other inputs as well, including audio. They played ABBA's ‘Dancing Queen’ and asked FRIDA to paint it.

The robot uses AI models similar to those powering tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, which generate text or an image, respectively, in response to a prompt. FRIDA simulates how it would paint an image with brush strokes and uses machine learning to evaluate its progress as it works. FRIDA's final products are impressionistic and whimsical. The brushstrokes are bold. They lack the precision sought so often in robotic endeavors. If FRIDA makes a mistake, it riffs on it, incorporating the errant splotch of paint into the end result.

More information:

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/2023/frida-robot