robotic arm

11.09.09
Feature

Another League Under the Sea: Tomorrow's Research Subs Open Earth's Final Frontier

Armed with better batteries and stronger materials, new submersibles aim to go deeper than ever before and open up the whole of the unexplored ocean to human eyes
By Abe Streep Posted 08.05.2009 at 11:46 am 3 Comments

Flying Low: The Deep Flight II sub uses stubby wings that propel it down like an airplane goes up.  Nick Kaloterakis
By liberal estimates, we’ve explored about 5 percent of the seas, and nearly all of that in the first 1,000 feet. That’s the familiar blue part, penetrated by sunlight, home to the colorful reefs and just about every fish you’ve ever seen. Beyond that is the deep—a pitch-black region that stretches down to roughly 35,800 feet, the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Nearly all the major oceanographic finds made in that region—hydrothermal vents and the rare life-forms that thrive in the extreme temperatures there, sponges that can treat tumors, thousands of new species, the Titanic—have occurred above 15,000 feet, the lower limit of the world’s handful of manned submersibles for most of the past 50 years.

Now engineers want to unlock the rest of the sea with a new fleet of manned submersibles. And they don’t have to go to the very bottom to do it. In fact, only about 2 percent of the seafloor lies below 20,000 feet, in deep, muddy trenches. If we extend our current reach just 5,000 feet—another mile—it will open about 98 percent of the world’s oceans to scientific eyes.

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The Ultimate Roller

Hang On for Your Life! (Forget Your Lunch)Cross a robot with virtual reality, and What do you get? A thrill ride Guaranteed to blow your mind
By Jill Davis Posted 05.04.2005 at 8:55 pm 0 Comments

You are dangling like bait at the end of a 22-foot-long robotic arm, and it looks and feels exactly like you're zooming through space. It's tempting to gaze at distant planets, except that an asteroid as big as a house is hurtling toward you. Just before impact, you blast it with a phaser cannon while executing a series of buttery barrel rolls to avoid the debris. The asteroid bits pelt your ship, rattling you to the marrow. Then, without warning, you're sucked through the blackness of a wormholeback into reality.

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Best of What´s Next: The Ultimate Roller Coaster


Posted 05.03.2005 at 6:00 pm 0 Comments

The key to the thrill ride of the future is a robotic arm that replaces the traditional roller-coaster car. British engineer Gino De-Gol adapted the Kuka KR 500, a 5,000-pound aluminum robotic arm, by attaching a passenger seat to the free end. The arm has six joints that allow it to articulate acrobatics as wild as a programmer can dream up. To make his RoboCoaster a reality, De-Gol needs to build a track that can handle the cantilevered load of the KR 500. Here´s a video of the arm in action:

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November 2009: Astronaut 3.0

Inside NASA's astronaut bootcamp and the grueling new training regimen for deep space. Plus, ten young geniuses shaking up science today, one writer's quest to analyze every man-made chemical in her body and more.

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