INDUSTRY News
UK tech team ‘teleports’ humans into robots
UK robotics company Cyberselves has developed a “telepresence” technology that allows humans to teleport into a robot and control it in an intuitive, immersive way. The human operators can see, hear and feel through the robot, allowing them to perform tasks from vast distances. The technology can provide remote support in hazardous environments, telemedicine and space exploration. “Our Teleport app makes the remote operation of robots both powerfully eff ective and functionally simple,” said Daniel Camilleri, Cyberselves’s co-founder and chief technology offi cer. “With a smart phone, browser or VR headset, the user can take remote control of any robot in a way that is intuitive to the human body. The system has already been integrated with underwater ROVs, land-based UGVs and humanoid social robots.” A combination of cloud robotics, VR, AI
and haptic feedback makes the long- distance immersion possible. A two-way communication between operator and robot is achieved over a Cyberselves’s cloud- based, low-latency communications platform called Animus. The company’s versatility of its ‘teleport’ application allows it to be used on any hardware- and operating-system- compatible robot. Cyberselves recently received funding for two projects managed by DASA: the TEL-E3 project that integrates UGVs with immersive control and haptic feedback,
The Cyberselves team
and the TEL-SUBSEA project that is developing telexistence technologies for underwater robots, alongside partners Resolve Robotics and the National Robotarium, hosted by Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University.
Robotic exoskeleton to assist stroke patients
A strategic partnership between the University of Essex and TWI is working on developing an exoskeleton for those who have suff ered a stroke and have impaired moibility. Working with fellow consortium members Generic Robotics Limited and Castalia Innovation, the team’s NeuRestore solution uses relatively inexpensive EEG (electroencephalogram) devices (see right) to monitor and record the brain’s electrical patterns while simultaneously receiving trigger feedback or an action output. To achieve a comprehensive picture of cerebral activity, motor imagery
(imagining a movement) is employed. With the repetition of mental images of movements, an algorithmic model is calibrated to identify and classify when the
A new microscope gains insights into ‘superbugs’
A new super-resolution microscope uses laser light to study the inner workings and behaviour of superbugs, to glean how they cause disease. Current technologies don’t match this resolution or cannot analyse live specimens: electrons can easily be defl ected by molecules in the air, so bacteria under inspection must be held in a vacuum. Thus, super- resolution microscopes are far
6 February 2022 | Automation
patient shows true intention of movement. The trained model is then paired with a robotic hand exoskeleton so that action outputs are generated from classifying the brain signals, and the movement of the robotic fi ngers is synchronised with them. The whole process becomes even more immersive when the patient enters a virtual 3D environment where they can see their hand move, providing a more realistic visual output of their imagined movement. This VR dimension can greatly help with building a stronger link between brain signals and subsequent real-life physical movements.
more superior for biological analysis. “We expect our new microscope to be a next-generation super-resolution system, making it possible to image cellular proteins marked with fl uorescence emitters (fl uorophores) with a ten-fold higher resolution than with any other fl uorescence microscopy technique,” said Professor Jerker Widengren, NanoVIB project coordinator. “The goal of the NanoVIB project is to retrieve information, which is not within reach by any other microscopic or photonics-based technique. We will demonstrate how cellular nanoscale protein localisation patterns can be resolved, which will help us reveal bacterial disease mechanisms, likely to be of considerable relevance for many other diseases.”
automationmagazine.co.uk
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