Nazca Lines

The Nazca Lines are a series of ancient geoglyphs located in the Nazca Desert in southern Peru. The Nazca Lines were created by the Nazca culture between 400 and 650 AD. The hundreds of individual figures range in complexity from simple lines to stylized hummingbirds, spiders, monkeys, fish, sharks, orcas, llamas, and lizards. The largest figures are over 200 metres (660 ft) across. Scholars differ in interpreting the purpose of the designs, but they generally ascribe religious significance to them.

Machipicchu

Machu Picchu is a pre-Columbian 15th-century Inca site located 2,430 metres (7,970 ft) above sea level. It is situated on a mountain ridge above the Urubamba Valley in Peru. Lost City of the Incas", it is perhaps the most familiar icon of the Inca World. Machu Picchu was built in the classical Inca style, with polished dry-stone walls.In 2007, Machu Picchu was voted one of the New Seven Wonders of the World in a worldwide Internet poll.

Peruvian cuisine

Peruvian cuisine is among the most diverse in the world, as evidenced by the fact that Peru has the largest number of dishes (491) and according to several understandings, has a level equivalent to the French food, Chinese and Indian food, and accoring to most experts, Peru has the best food in the world.

Restaurant The Rosa Nautica

The most representative tourist restaurant and important in Peru. It is a beautiful building built in white wood above the sea with a gateway to the sides of shops. La Rosa Nautica is one of the most important tourist symbols that have been in his memory the thousands of tourists.

Uros Island

Titicaca is notable for a population of people who live on the Uros, a group of 42 or so artificial islands made of floating reeds (totora, a reed that abounds in the shallows of the lake). These islands have become a major tourist attraction for Peru, drawing excursions from the lakeside city of Puno.

Paracas, Ballestas Islands

The Ballestas Islands are a group of small islands near the town of Paracas located within the Paracas District of the Pisco Province in the Ica Region, on the south coast of Peru. These islands are an important sanctuary for marine fauna like the guanay guano bird, the blue-footed booby and the tendril. Other notable species include Humboldt Penguins and two varieties of seals (fur seals and sea lions), amongst other mammals.

Lima, Plaza de Armas

Arequipa city

The city has many colonial-era Spanish buildings built of sillar, a pearly white volcanic rock...

Huascarán

The highest southern summit of Huascarán (Huascarán Sur) is the highest point in Peru, the Amazon River watershed, and all the Earth's Tropics.

Huanchaco beach

Huanchaco is famous for a few things but particularly for being a surfer's dream spot and its caballitos de totora.

Inti Raymi

The Inti Raymi ("Festival of the Sun") was a religious ceremony of the Inca Empire in honor of the god Inti.

Lord of Sipan

It is considered to be one of the most important archaeological discoveries in the last 30 years, because the main tomb was found intact and undisturbed by thieves.

Chavín de Huantar

Archaeological site containing ruins and artifacts constructed beginning at least by 1200 BCE.

Saturday, May 21, 2011

kiva robot for warehouse automation

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Kiva Systems creators of kiva robot, is a company that makes order fulfillment systems that use robots for warehouse automation. Its material handling systems are used by Staples, Walgreens, Zappos, and GAP, among others.

Traditionally, goods are moved around a distribution center using conveyors, or by human operators with tow racks or forklifts. In Kiva's approach, goods are kept on portable storage units. When an order for an item arrives, it is transmitted wirelessly to a robotic platform, which navigates the warehouse to find the storage unit containing the requested items, lifts the unit up by sliding under it, and brings it to a human worker at a work station. The worker picks the items needed to fill orders, while the robot returns the storage unit to the warehouse. This turns out to be much more efficient and accurate than having human operators traveling around the warehouse locating and picking items.

A Kiva robot is typically orange in color, 2 feet by 2.5 feet, and one foot high. Each robot weighs around 250 pounds, and can carry four times its weight. The maximum velocity of a robot is 1.3 meters per second. The robots navigate around the warehouse using an onboard camera to read barcode stickers on the warehouse floor. They communicate wirelessly to computer servers that run order-processing software and deliver directions. Kiva's relatively new approach to automated material handling systems for order fulfillment is gaining traction in eCommerce fulfillment, retail restocking, parts distribution and medical device distribution operations.

 





Robotics startup Kiva Systems of Woburn, MA, and medical device giant Boston Scientific (NYSE: BSX) said that Kiva’s robots will be used to automate order fulfillment in two Boston Scientific warehouses, one in New England and one in the Netherlands.

It’s a big win for Kiva, whose shelf-toting robots are increasingly common in the warehouses of consumer goods distributors like Zappos, Staples, and Diapers.com, but which has never before landed a customer in the health or medical sectors, where there’s less room for error.

In conclusion, this Kiva robotic system is a really cool and complicated way to help pickers pack boxes for shipment.





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Friday, May 20, 2011

Robot Suit HAL Demo at CES 2011

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A man turned into a cyborg at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas when he stepped into a powered robot suit that moved in response to nerve signals in his legs.

Technology journalist Evan Ackerman became the first person in the United States to test the robotic exoskeleton Hybrid Assistive Limb, or HAL, created by Japanese company Cyberdyne [see photo above].

Several companies and labs in the United States and Japan are developing robot suits to help disable and elderly people regain more mobility -- or to give soldiers super human strength.

Professor Yoshiyuki Sankai, head of the Cybernics Lab at the University of Tsukuba, founded Cyberdyne to commercialize the suit, which he started developing more than a decade ago.

Cyberdyne is conducting several patient trials in Japan, where it also rents its device to hospitals and clinics for about U.S. $1500 per month. The company also said it was contacted by the U.S. military, which is apparently interested in testing the exoskeleton.

The HAL suit, which weights 10 kilograms, consists of a lightweight frame that straps to the body. Its electric motors act as artificial muscles that provide powered assistance to the wearer's limbs.

Cyberdyne has publicly demonstrated its exoskeleton several times but previously only the company's engineers or patients were allowed to wear the robot suit.

At demo, Ackerman got a taste of the future by becoming a man-machine hybrid. Though the tried just the robot legs (the company also makes a full suit includes powered arms), he said the experience was "incredible."







To use the suit, Cyberdyne employee Takatoshi Kuno first attached sensors to Ackerman's legs. The sensors monitor the electrical activity of nerves to control the suit's dc motors.

The suit works on intent: the user needs only to "think" of moving his or her legs -- the suit does the rest. That's because the brain sends signals to the muscles of the legs, and the sensors detect them.

"Once I figured out how to stop trying to walk in the suit and just let the suit walk for me, the experience was almost transparent," Ackerman said.

The suit includes a pouch with a computer, Wi-Fi card, and battery, and it sends data about its operation to a remote PC. Cyberdyne's Kuno said he set the suit on "level 1," because Ackerman's legs had normal strength; for people with weaker muscles, the suit could go to level 4.

Ackerman walked around the room and also climbed stairs to go up and down the stage. At first he appeared to struggle to move its legs, but after just a few minutes he was feeling comfortable in his new robot body.

"I didn't try to kick anything to pieces Iron Man style," Ackerman said, "but going up stairs was definitely all the suit doing the work and not me."

Link: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/medical-robots/robot-suit-hal-demo-at-ces-2011
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Sunday, May 15, 2011

SmartBird of FESTO, bionic bird

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Aerodynamic lightweight design

SmartBird is an ultralight but powerful flight model with excellent aerodynamic qualities and extreme agility. With SmartBird, Festo has succeeded in deciphering the flight of birds – one of the oldest dreams of humankind.

This bionic technology-bearer, which is inspired by the herring gull, can start, fly and land autonomously – with no additional drive mechanism. Its wings not only beat up and down, but also twist at specific angles. This is made possible by an active articulated torsional drive unit, which in combination with a complex control system attains an unprecedented level of efficiency in flight operation. Festo has thus succeeded for the first time in creating an energy-efficient technical adaptation of this model from nature.


New approaches in automation

The functional integration of coupled drive units yields significant ideas and insights that Festo can transfer to the development and optimisation of hybrid drive technology.

The minimal use of materials and the extremely lightweight construction pave the way for efficiency in resource and energy consumption.

Festo already today puts its expertise in the field of fluid dynamics to use in the development of the latest generations of cylinders and valves. By analysing SmartBird's flow characteristics during the course of its development, Festo has acquired additional knowledge for the optimisation of its product solutions and has learned to design even more efficiently.




link: http://www.festo.com/cms/en_corp/11369.htm
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Friday, May 13, 2011

Meka Robotics presents M1 Mobile Manipulator

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Meka Robotics M1 (Photo Published)

The robots designed to work in human environments require mobility, dexterity, and compliant force-control. The Meka M1 was created to meet these needs. The M1 is an integrated and customizable mobile manipulation platform.

The M1 was inspired by the successful design of the Georgia Tech robot named Cody. It features compliant force control throughout its body, a customizable sensor head, durable and strong grippers, and a small footprint omnidirectional base.

In robotics, innovation requires robot-on-time. The M1 has been designed for durable operation and rapid experimenation and development. It includes the M3 and ROS software stacks, including a KDL kinematics and dynamics descriptions, ROS URDF descriptions, ROS interfaces, and calibration-free startup for the upper-body.

Meka can work with your institution to find grant funding for the M1 system of your choice. We offer the M1-Standard for $340K USD. Pricing on the M1-Custom depends on the selected features and can be quoted upon request.



The M1-Standard includes:

•S3 Sensor Head with Kinect compatible interface and 5MP Ethernet camera
•Two A2 Compliant Manipulators with 6 axis force-torque sensors at the wrist
•Two G2 Compliant Grippers
•B1 Omni Base with Prismatic Lift and Computation Backpack
•Integrated Meka M3 and ROS software stacks


Meka M1 Mobile Manipulator vimeo from Meka Robotics on Vimeo.



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