Innovation

Singapore kicked off a global rush to develop a contact tracing apps for the novel covid-19 when the city-state launched an apparently new system in March. But the project actually drew inspiration from a 2014 U.S. high school project that won an international prize but found no backers – until now. It all started when Rohan Suri created an app at Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria, Virginia, to tell his mom to leave home for the bus stop when he was seven minutes away. As the Ebola epidemic ravaged western Africa at…

This itsy-bitsy robot can’t climb up the waterspout yet but it can run, jump, carry heavy payloads and turn on a dime. Dubbed HAMR-JR, this microrobot developed by researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Harvard Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, is a half-scale version of the cockroach-inspired Harvard Ambulatory Microrobot or HAMR. About the size of a penny, HAMR-JR can perform almost all of the feats of its larger-scale predecessor, making it one of the most dexterous microrobots to…

Inspired by the biomechanics of cheetahs, researchers have developed a new type of soft robot that is capable of moving more quickly on a solid surfaces or in the water than previous generations of soft robots. The new soft robotics are also capable of grabbing objects delicately — or with sufficient strength to lift heavy objects. “Cheetahs are the fastest creatures on land, and they derive their speed and power from the flexing of their spines,” says Jie Yin, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina…

One Robot makes cocktails from 25 bottles hanging upside-down from the ceiling, another carves perfect ice balls in the fraction of the time it takes a human with a knife and an ice pick. Robo-bartenders are shaking up South Korea’s cafe and bar culture as the country transitions from intensive to make social distancing to what the government calls “distancing in daily life.” And they look snazzy doing it too. In a tailored vest and bow tie, six-foot-tall Cabo narrates his actions as he carves ice for a whisky on…

The robot was jointly developed by SK Telecom and industrial automation specialist Omron Electronics in South Korea. It is intended to help enforce remaining public health measures to help prevent the transmission of Covid-19, such as temperature checks & enhanced hygiene. The upright white robot is equipped with cameras and an LED screen to show thermal images and transmits data in a real-time over SK Telecom’s 5G network. In a demonstration at the headquarters of SK Telecom, the robot greeted visitors, dispensed hand sanitiser and disinfected its surroundings using disinfectant…