That’s Hemispherical Omnidirectional Gimbaled wheel. As an idea it’s at least as old as 1938, but it’s lately been re-discovered by Curtis Boirum, an MS Mechanical Engineering student at Bradley University in Peoria, IL.
Yes, OK, I know that the weapons in Iron Man’s palms are technically *repulsor* beams, which, at least as I understand them, are a kind of wholly sci-fictional counterpart to the equally sci-fictional “tractor” beam. But this terrifying device from German laserhacker Patrick Priebe, who previously has produced a handheld Nd-YAG pulse laser that will punch holes in, is “working” in the sense that it is a dangerous, if not deadly, directed energy weapon that you can wear on your palm and use to work great evil…
Jonathan Kuniholm of OpenProsthetics.org wanted something to make using his iPad a little easier, so he came up with this sleeve design while spending time with his son at his local TechShop. Constructed of soft leather, the sleeve can either be warn with a glove and strap or easily held in place by an arm.
I first wanted to call this post “When ‘Bots Attack” or something similarly FOX-esque, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. There’s been plenty of alarmism about robots recently, and swarming robots are particularly juicy targets for people looking to stir up controversy since there seems to be something particularly loathsome and/or frightening to us about swarming creatures in general.
This Nissin 3D bender is kind of like a PlayDoh Fun Factory, except it squirts out 1.25″ steel pipe instead of soft non-toxic-but-funny-tasting dough. Looks like much of the magic is in the bending-die head.
Well, sort of. In practice, the rings persist just long enough to make out a single letter. But you get the idea. Chicagoan Mitchell F. Chan’s THE INGENIOUS GENTLEMAN DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA is slowly evaporating the text of Cervantes’ famous novel into the air, one letter at a time.
Shown here is a later-stage prototype in engineer and hobby roboticist Xander Soldaat’s development of a Lego holonomic drive platform using native Lego system components for the omnidirectional wheels.
