Day: January 31, 2019

Four-Legged Walking Robot Is Smaller Than an Ant’s Face

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As far as we know, this is the smallest legged robot in existence A few years ago, we wrote about the tiniest little quadruped robot we’d ever seen—a mere 20 millimeters long, with a hip height of 5.6 mm and weight of about 1.6 gram. The designer, Ryan St. Pierre from Sarah Bergbreiter’s lab at the University of Maryland, also showed us a picture of an even smaller version that weighed just 100 mg. When we saw these things at ICRA 2016, we asked Ryan about going even smaller: “It’s always a fun challenge to try to make robots as small as possible,” he told us. “Currently, I am working on making a robot, of the same design, that would be 2.5 mm long, an order of magnitude smaller than the ones we presented at ICRA. Smaller robots can more easily go places that later robots can’t, and having them in various Continue reading Four-Legged Walking Robot Is Smaller Than an Ant’s Face→

A Smart Stethoscope Puts AI in Medics’ Ears

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Engineers from Johns Hopkins reinvent the humble stethoscope to save lives Video: Johns Hopkins University Tech for a Noisy World: Researchers simulated an extremely noisy environment in the lab (the sound meter shows levels of around 70 decibels). They compared the audio heard through a top-notch commercial stethoscope, in which the breathing sounds are mixed with ambient noise, to that heard through the Johns Hopkins smart stethoscope, which uses active acoustic filtering to isolate the breathing sounds. You wake up one morning to discover that your child is ill: His forehead feels hot to the touch, and his rapid breathing has a wheezing sound. You live in Malawi, where your health care options are few. When the local clinic opens, you wait for your turn with the solitary clinic worker. She’s not a doctor, but she’s been trained to identify and handle routine problems. She puts on a stethoscope and Continue reading A Smart Stethoscope Puts AI in Medics’ Ears→