Open-source robot arm meets hand tracking [📍GitHub below] It is designed with an industrial mindset but built as a 3D-printed desktop system. PAROL6 paired with a LEAP Motion controller is a nice example of how accessible robot teleoperation has become. • Hand motion is streamed to the robot at 100 Hz via UDP • A pneumatic gripper is controlled by simple fist open and close gestures • The entire robot stack is open source, from mechanics to control software Combine that with low-latency hand tracking and you get a very practical platform for learning manipulation, teleoperation, and human-robot interfaces. This kind of setup is great for experimentation, teleop, data collection, and teaching robots by demonstration All without proprietary hardware or locked software. Credit to @SourceRobotics 📍Code: —— Weekly robotics and AI insights. Subscribe free:

Nature-inspired gripper! 🦎 A chameleon doesn't grab its prey, but its tongue wraps around it. Festo built a gripper that does the same thing, and the mechanism is more elegant than it looks. The FlexShapeGripper is an elastic silicone cap sitting on a water-filled chamber. It works as a double-acting cylinder, one chamber holds compressed air, the other is permanently filled with water. Vent the air chamber, and the water-filled silicone pulls itself inwards. The cap folds over whatever is underneath and locks around its shape. The grip is form-locking, so the object's own geometry does the work of holding it. → Adapts to any shape, including delicate and irregularly shaped items where rigid jaws fail → Can pick up and deposit several objects in one operation → Pneumatic drive, minimal energy consumption → The silicone cap maps directly onto the chameleon's tongue Always good to see the mimicry developments from Festo! :) ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

NEW ROBOT: Origami wall climber! Called SPARC, it is a collaboration between Shanghai Jiao Tong University's State Key Lab of Mechanical Systems and the University of Michigan's Hybrid Dynamic Robotics Lab. The robot here is a 210 g, 160 mm soft crawling/climbing robot driven by three parallel 3D-printed vacuum-powered Kresling origami actuators, with four silicone suction cups for adhesion. A Kresling origami is a fold pattern that turns a thin cylinder into a spring-like structure of twisted triangular facets. Compressing it makes it rotate and snap between stable states, so engineers use it to build lightweight actuators and robot bodies that fold, twist, and lock without motors at every joint. Each actuator contracts under vacuum, and because Kresling origami mechanically couples that contraction one-to-one with a twist angle, a magnetic angle encoder (AS5600) at each actuator reads the twist and an inverse-kinematics model recovers the shape, giving the robot proprioception. A dual closed-loop controller (onboard encoder/PID inner loop plus an external motion-capture outer loop) steers it along horizontal and vertical paths, and two modules in series can bend about 100 degrees to cross from floor to wall. The thread pairs it with a quoted post on Festo's BionicMotionRobot, a positive-pressure pneumatic-bellows soft arm. Soft robots normally cannot sense their own configuration because stretchable strain sensors are noisy and drift. SPARC sidesteps that with geometry. Kresling origami couples axial contraction one-to-one with a twist angle, so a cheap magnetic angle encoder (AS5600) reading the twist plus an inverse-kinematics model recovers the length. Proprioception becomes a geometry problem solved with a few-dollar off-the-shelf encoder, not a stretchable-materials problem, and that is what lets a soft robot hit 0.5% trajectory error, a precision usually reserved for rigid machines. The controller is a dual closed loop: the inner loop is the onboard encoder/PID (the genuine proprioception), but the outer loop is an OptiTrack Prime41 motion-capture system feeding global position. So the 0.5% horizontal / 3% vertical figures are achieved with off-board global tracking, not self-contained navigation, strip the mocap and the robot still knows its shape but not where it is. Same external-infrastructure caveat this file keeps flagging (SMASH's table AprilTags, LadderMan's bench-side GPU): the impressive number quietly depends on lab instrumentation. Vacuum actuation needs an off-board air supply through proportional electrovacuum regulators (SMC ITV209), an OptiTrack rig provides localization, and there is no onboard power (an onboard Jetson Nano and Arduino Mega only run the valves and encoders). It is a demonstrator of the sensing-plus-actuation idea, not a deployable crawler. Each Kresling actuator contracts 60% at -80 kPa with about 3 kg of actuation force, and three of them on a 210 g body is why it climbs a vertical wall carrying 500 g, roughly 2.4 times its own weight. Vacuum actuators collapse rather than burst (inherently safe) and pack high force, whereas Festo's BionicMotionRobot inflates twelve positive-pressure bellows to bend an octopus-like arm. Same "soft robotics" banner, opposite pressure sign and opposite job (mobility versus manipulation). The ground-to-wall transition currently takes two robots, not one. A single module bends about 50 degrees; two connected in series reach about 100 degrees and double the step length, which is what lets the pair round the 90-degree floor-to-wall corner. Autonomous single-module ground-to-wall transition is explicitly listed as unsolved.

When doctors listen for pneumonia, they don’t always hear the same thing Same child, same exam—different findings based on who is listening. Read more:

Studies show the flu vaccine doesn’t reduce deaths from pneumonia and flu. A 33-year government-funded study found no link between higher flu shot rates and lower death rates. Another study of 7.6 million deaths found no drop in mortality after age 65—despite more vaccinations. Read more: #vaccines#