They also built the robot for the “Bionic Man” documentary on channel 4 from a couple of years ago.
Either Rich or one of his crew are going to bring their toys along to the space to show them off and for people to have a play. The dextrous hand is just worth seeing on its own, but their expertise and the air muscles may be of genuine use to SLMS members.
Excellent evening enjoyed that a lot. Thanks to Rich and chums for coming down and Tom N for arranging it. Only slight downside for me was the lower than expected turnout.
I agree with @matt! Excellent stuff. Only 6 SLMS members though.
I get the feeling we need to get the regular newsletters going again. I’m getting anecdotal evidence that members just don’t see stuff on discourse. For me, using Gmail, @Dermot just goes into my ‘promotions’ folder…where it really doesn’t bother me. Personally I like it like that, but it means I’d miss most of what is going on here if I didn’t come and check.
So: Rich, Armando and Nick from Shadow Robotics all turned up. The kettle was boiled, with @sarahbarber providing an array of gourmet biscuits…
We got a whirlwind potted history of Rich’s adventures in robotics going back to his tech adventure holidays as a schoolkid in the 80’s, via robotic: endoscopy, mastercheffing and strawberry picking…not all with the same robot hand, I should add.
We had a couple of guests too: Gus who is studying art at CSM and interested in the possibilities of incorporating robotics into his work, and Merrick(probably misspelled?) who’s working in medical robotics at Imperial. @RichM@matt@sarahbarber@AussieFred Lucas and myself made up the SLMS contingent. Needless to say Lucas had already used the Robot Operating System (ROS), but didn’t think to mention it…
The hand itself is quite a thing to behold: exquisitely machined, black-sheen-finished, it stood in the centre of the big table reaching up into the air, emerging from a short forearm that would make Popeye’s eyes pop out. Endowed with dozens of sensors and most of the flexibility of a human hand we saw it perform rudimentary grips and flexes when controlled via Armando’s laptop, and watched a monkey with a brain implant control a hand remotely. The bit with the monkey was in a video link, and profulsely apologised for by Rich. We were taken through an impressive range of applications: both autonomous, human controlled and mixtures of the two…though apparently it’s not able to play banjo (thanks to @matt for asking that question, I think it might have been a deal-breaker for him).
I really wanted to handle it: the hand, but couldn’t even bring myself to ask permission to. We were told it was pound for pound worth more than platinum. I think they were being coy: I’d say it was up there with printer ink. Each hand takes about 1000 human hours to build.
