Month: February 2013

Robot Acrobats and Balancing a Broom on Your Chin

Robot Acrobats and Balancing a Broom on Your Chin

You may have seen this video go viral this week. It’s exciting to watch and marvel at. So, why is this inverted pendulum thing so challenging? Go find a broom and balance it on your chin. Notice how often you have to move to keep the broom stable above you. arch institutions to accomplish incredible tasks.

The Institute for Dynamics Systems and Control at ETH Zurich has experience with multirotor interactions with inanimate objects. In the past, they’ve had quadrotors juggling a ball, assembling structures, and balancing an inverted pendulum. Now an ETH Zurich student has taken their work with pendulums and multirotors to the next level.

Power Tools Retrofitted for the Amish

Power Tools Retrofitted for the Amish

There was an interesting piece on NPR this morning about power tools for the Amish. The Amish have traditionally been farmers, but land has become prohibitively expensive to purchase, so many are turning to woodworking to earn a living. Since their homes are not wired with electricity, their table saws, drills and sanders are retrofitted with gas engines and compressed air tanks.

Ping Fu Stands Her Ground

Ping Fu Stands Her Ground

Last month I wrote about Bend Not Break, a memoir written by Ping Fu. Fu is the founder of Geomagic and now chief strategy officer at 3D Systems. In her book, Fu wrote about her life as a young girl in China and her experiences living under Mao’s Cultural Revolution. She described being forcibly removed from her family by the Red Guard at 8 years old and spending the next ten years living with her younger sister in a government dormitory under brutal conditions before ultimately emigrating to the U.S. For me, it was a harrowing, but ultimately uplifting story about overcoming adversity.

But that’s not how many people reacted to the book.