I love my partner’s cute little electric Fiat, but it’s honestly a total nightmare keeping it charged enough to get around our sprawling city! Just today, we ran out of juice and had to camp out at a Whole Food Market just to make it home! If only we had the Wheel Battery. Forget regenerative braking, this harnesses energy created by the turning wheels during operation.
This means you’re less likely to get stranded and won’t be in a bind if you just happen to forget to plug in one night! Better yet, you can see exactly how much charge each in-wheel battery has directly on the face so you’ll always be able to tell how much supplemental power you have available in case you need to make a longer than average journey.
Designers: Kim Kun Hyung, Hwang Ki Nam, Hong Ji Hee & Park Yonghwa
By now we are all familiar with Boston Dynamics’ menagerie of impressive, yet frightening robots. From self-balancing, self-correcting robot “dogs” that are walking nightmares, to weird looking humanoids. Now meet Handle, another creepy robot. This one runs around on two legs and two wheels. It is faster and more agile than conventional robots, and it will not stop until we are dead. That last part is just an educated guess.
Handle is lightweight, and instead of walking on all fours, the robot can stand up and roll on its two wheels. It is designed to carry a heavy load, and much like a Segway, it can keep its balance despite standing on just two wheels. It’s scary fast and has obstacle detection, and can even jump over some low objects. It can spin around and jump with ease too.
Along with some of Boston Dynamics’ other cool robots, you can see Handle in action in the presentation video below at about the 3:41 mark.
In some ways it is scarier than their dog models, because of it’s speed and agility mostly. God help us all.
Be sure to watch the video before it gets taken down, since, Boston Dynamics apparently asked the guy who posted it to blur it out from the video clip he posted on YouTube.
[via Slashgear]
The post Video Surfaces of Boston Dynamics’ Handle 2-Wheeled Robot appeared first on Technabob.
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Putting suspension systems on your skateboards is the kind of feature you never really knew you wanted. It’s not like most skateboarders are ever complaining about how rough their ride is. But now that we’ve come across the Avenue Trucks, we’re left wondering what took so long.
Unlike some other suspension skateboard trucks (such as those made by Seismic), Avenue Trucks don’t incorporate coil-type shock absorbers. Instead, they utilize a simpler leaf spring-like design, where the magnesium main body of the truck is mounted on a folded-over metal baseplate that can flex by up to half an inch (12.7 mm).
The body is able to pivot relative to that plate and unlike traditional trucks, it features a “floating” pivot point that reportedly results in smoother turns and more control.
Considering a very reasonable $45 pledge will net you a pair of these trucks, we think it’s a great idea, assuming of course that it results in a more comfortable ride with no drawbacks. It’ll be interesting to see the feedback from the skateboarding community once these hit the market, which should happen in September, assuming they reach their funding goals.
[ Project Page ] VIA [ Gizmag ]