Category robotics

A battery works on the basic principle that electrons tend to move from where they are abundant, or in excess, to where they are scarce. This can happen, if there is a medium that will allow the movement of these electrons.

The part of battery with too many electrons is called the anode which means it is the negative electrode (remember, the charge of an electron is negative). The part of the battery where electrons are scarce is called the cathode, which means it is the positive electrode, which means, there is net positive charge there.

Let’s present Anode and Cathode characteristics as lists, to make things more understandable:

Anode:
• Abundance of electrons
• Negatively charged
• Chemical reaction during discharge: Oxidation
• Material example: Zinc

Cathode:
• Scarcity of electrons
• Positively charged
• Chemical reaction during discharge: Reduction
• Material example: Manganese Dioxide (MnO2)

Between anode and cathode is a barrier material which prevents their direct contact but still allows passing of ions. If this direct contact was not prevented, there would be a short circuit in the battery and it would deplete very rapidly and be useless.

And there is the electrolyte material, such as an alkaline Potassium Hydroxide (KOH) in an alkaline battery.

An ion is an atom where the number of electrons and protons are not equal, therefore it is an atom with a net electrical charge. If electrons are more than protons, it is a negative ion, and if protons are more than electrons it is a positive ion.

When the battery is not in use, there is no flow of electrons. But when an external circuit is connected to the battery, the electrons are released from anode (i.e. Zinc), which travel through the external circuit, does its work in the circuit (such as turning a motor, illuminating a lamp, making a microprocessor work and so on…), and then they arrive at the cathode, which is able to accept those electrons as it was positively charged. But this is not all. For current to keep flowing, the loop of flow must continue, in other words, be closed. This means, inside the battery, there must also be a path to complete this loop. This is where the electrolyte material comes in which serves as this path. It makes possible for ions (see description above) to travel between cathode and anode, in order to complete this loop and keep the current running. Through this electrolyte inside the battery, positive ions travel from anode to cathode (so that cathode can keep being positive and continue to accept electrons when they arrive from external circuit), and negative ions travel from cathode to anode (so that it can keep sending electrons to the external circuit).

The figure above illustrates this process. This is how a battery works. In the figure, electrons traveling inside the battery electrolyte actually represent the free electrons of the negative ions that move from cathode to anode. And for clarity of the figure, positive ions that go from anode to cathode were not shown.

According to a recent study in Scientific Reports, Turing patterns can be used to develop a new method for designing and producing fabric-based soft pneumatic actuators (FSPAs).

The robotic micro-factories developed by AUAR are a breakthrough technology for an industry struggling with a lack of skilled labour and low productivity; the two Micro-Factories shipped to the US can each produce up to 180 homes a year

Claire chatted to John Leonard from Massachusetts Institute of Technology about autonomous navigation for underwater vehicles and self-driving cars.

John Leonard is a Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research addresses the problems of navigation and mapping for autonomous underwater vehicles, self-driving vehicles, and other types of mobile robots. He has a degree in Electrical Engineering and Science from the University of Pennsylvania and PhD in Engineering Science from the University of Oxford. He is a Technical Advisor at Toyota Research Institute.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, have proved to be highly effective systems for monitoring and exploring environments. These autonomous flying robots could also be used to create detailed maps and three-dimensional (3D) visualizations of real-world environments.

Robotic grippers have become essential across many industries, including manufacturing, packaging, and logistics, mainly for pick-and-place tasks. Recently, the demand for robotic grippers has also expanded into agriculture, where they are used for harvesting and packaging tasks.

Conventional robotic grippers struggle to adapt to complex shapes and sizes, such as those found in crops. This has created a demand for more adaptable robotic grippers that can be utilized in agriculture. In a new study, researchers introduced an innovative soft robotic gripper named ROtation-based Squeezing grippEr (ROSE) and optimized its unique wrinkling-based grasping mechanism using simulations. ROSE's soft yet secure grasp can make it a vital tool for agriculture.

Our AI method has accelerated and optimized chip design, and its superhuman chip layouts are used in hardware around the world.

Our AI method has accelerated and optimized chip design, and its superhuman chip layouts are used in hardware around the world.

The aim of the MHP study was to demonstrate the advantages of process-integrated charging points using inductive point charging systems such as Wiferion over conventional charging zones using a real-life optimization scenario in a medium-sized production company.

How to apply classifier-free guidance (CFG) on your diffusion models without conditioning dropout? What are the newest alternatives to generative sampling with diffusion models? Find out in this article!

Augmented reality (AR) takes digital images and superimposes them onto real-world views. But AR is more than a new way to play video games; it could transform surgery and self-driving cars. To make the technology easier to integrate into common personal devices, researchers report how to combine two optical technologies into a single, high-resolution AR display. In an eyeglasses prototype, the researchers enhanced image quality with a computer algorithm that removed distortions.

Ultra Accuracy feature increases accuracy by ten times in GoFa™ cobot family vs. other cobots on the market. Path accuracy of 0.03 mm supports accurate production in electronics, automotive, aerospace, and metal fabrication industries

While engineers have developed increasingly advanced bio-inspired systems over the past decades, the sensing capabilities of these systems are typically far less advanced than those observed in humans and other animals.

Humans can grab a book from a shelf with little obvious thought. But it's a complex process for the brain that involves planning and navigating around obstacles, like other books or knickknacks. Robotics researchers have struggled to replicate this kind of human movement when their systems perform similar tasks. Known as motion planning, the process of training a robot to get an object from one point to another without hitting any obstacles takes time and resources because the robot can't react dynamically like humans in unknown environments.