With its palm open, this robot is completely motionless. A split second later, it suddenly unwinds and catches all sorts of flying objects thrown in its direction - a tennis racket, a ball, a bottle and so on.
Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne have developed a bionic arm that capable of reacting on the spot and grasping objects with complex shapes and trajectories in less than five-hundredths of a second!
This arm measures about 1.5 metres long and keeps an upright position.
It has three joints and a sophisticated hand with four fingers.
“Increasingly present in our daily lives and used to perform various tasks, robots will be able to either catch or dodge complex objects in full-motion,” said Aude Billard, head of Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory (LASA) at EPFL.
Not only do we need machines able to react on the spot, but also to predict the moving object's dynamics and generate a movement in the opposite direction, he added.
This robotic arm already has a very real potential application in space.
It has been associated to the Clean- mE project carried out by the Swiss Space Center at EPFL that aims to develop technologies for the recovery and disposal of space debris orbiting around Earth.
Fitted on a satellite, the arm would have the task of catching flying debris, whose dynamics are only partially known, researchers noted.
To obtain the desired speed and adaptability, LASA researchers were inspired by the way humans themselves learn: by imitation and trial and error.
The invention has been described in an article published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Robotics.
At least 15 people were killed and 30 injured in a stampede that occurred during a football match in Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC) capital city of Kinshasa, media reported Monday.
Fans in Kinshasa were outraged Sunday evening after their local team V.Club was getting defeated by a team from the eastern town of Lubumbashi in a playoff match, Xinhua reported.
They then started throwing stones and other objects on to the football pitch, forcing the referee to stop the game several times.
By the 90th minute, the score was still 1-0 before the referee added five minutes.
It is at this point that V.Club supporters threw more stones on to the pitch.
The referee was forced to blow the final whistle even before the end of normal time.
Due to the rising tension, police officers resorted to lobbing tear gas canisters at the V.Club supporters to disperse them. This led to a stampede among the V.Club supporters who tried to reach the exit gates to leave the stadium.
In the confusion that ensued, a section of the stadium wall collapsed and a gate broke down, resulting in the deaths and injuries.
A source from DRC Red Cross said Sunday night that the death toll could rise.
"The number of deaths will certainly rise. We believe at least 20 people died and over 100 were injured," the source said.