Weekend Stories: Curiosity four years on Mars, Arduino smart gloves, and the Omnicopter

Curiosity rover report – four years on Mars

On August 5th four years have passed since Curiosity landed on the Red Planet. Even though it has endured significant wear and tear the rover is fully functional and NASA extended the exploration mission for another two years.

source MSL

Arduino Bluetooth gloves

Engineer Ivan Petrov posted a detailed tutorial on how to build a pair of smart gloves that continuously monitor and transmit positioning data of hands and fingers, with the potential of remote controlling a robot or otherwise. Potentiometers are used to sense finger movement as rotations with respect to the hand, while IMUs determine orientation of the hands. Data is aggregated and transmitted over Bluetooth by and Arduino UNO module.

via Adafruit

DJI Phantom 4 autonomously flies over iceberg

The amazing footage below was captured near Greenland with a Phantom 4 drone and the UgCS ground station software which offers advanced mission planning features such as waypoints, waypoint actions, various types of missions and more for most types of drones. I’ll cover this in detail in another article.

via DYI Drones

The Omnicopter is a 6 degrees of freedom experimental UAV

The study was carried out by Dario Brescianini and Raffaello D’Andrea at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control of ETH Zürich, and presented at ICRA 2016.

The aircraft is shaped like a cube with 45cm (17.7in) edge and driven by 8 propellers aligned in pairs in 4 different planes. The propellers are also reversible, thus the UAV can accomplish translation movements in all three planes and rotate about any of the three axes. Read more in the research paper.

via Automaton

IHMC Robotics powered exoskeleton tryouts

The exoskeleton represents the Institute’s entry at Cybathlon 2016, and will be piloted by Mark Daniel. Find out more about exoskeletons.

source IHMC

Evive electronic prototyping platform is on Indiegogo

Evive seems to be a very interesting project, let’s see if it makes it to market. At its core lies an Arduino MEGA and all required I/Os are available on the module, as well as a breadoard and it also retains compatibility with Arduino shields. Find out about the features in the second technical specs video.