Tag: Robotics

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Moonwalk by R. Suresh Babu

AI tinkering lab
all the young student scientists
perform a moonwalking jig

by R. Suresh Babu

My haiku are centered on my experiences as a teacher where I observe children’s behaviour in the classroom situations, science labs and the school campus.

Science is fun. Children do funny acts. This sciku is based on moonwalking in an AI Tinkering Lab when children try to match their dance steps with a steering robot.

Further reading:

What is Tinkering Lab and Why Do We Need It? https://tinker.ly/tinkering-lab-what-is-it-and-why-do-we-need-it/

Artificial Intelligence (Wikipedia) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

Author bio:

R. Suresh Babu is a graduate teacher of English and a teacher counsellor in a Government Residential School in India. He is an alumnus of the Regional Institute of Education, Mysuru in India. His works have been published in Cattails, Failed Haiku, Wales Haiku Journal, Akitsu, Presence, Under the Basho, Poetry Pea Journal and Podcast, The Asahi Shimbun, World Haiku Series, The Mamba, Kontinuum, Haikuniverse, Cold Moon Journal, Chrysanthemum, tsuri-dōrō and The Mainichi. He is a contributing writer to the anthology, We Will Not Be Silenced of the Indie Blu(e) Publishing. He has done the art works for the Haiku anthology Bull-Headed, edited by Corine Timmer. You can follow him on Twitter @sureshniranam

Read more sciku by R. Suresh Babu: ‘Climate Change’ and ‘Language’.

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Closing the trap by Dr Hortense Le Ferrand

A feather falling –

hungry inert soul wakes up,

snaps, closing the trap.

The Venus flytrap, Dionaea muscipula, is a carnivorous plant that performs one of the fastest movements in the flora: when an insects touches the hairs inside the leaves of the trap, it closes in a few milliseconds.

Inspired by the plants and its internal microstructure, a team of researchers from ETH Zürich and Purdue University have developed a composite material mimicking the Venus leaf and able to change shape as fast as the plant (Schmied & Le Ferrand et al, 2017).

Thanks to the good match between the theoretical simulations and the experimental results, their method opens new avenues for the creation of autonomous and fast robotic devices.

Original research: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-3190/aa5efd

Dr Hortense Le Ferrand is a postdoctoral fellow at Nanyang Technical University, Singapore. Hortense’s interests are on the fabrication and design of novel materials and systems inspired by nature. Check out her other scku ‘Shrimp molting’ here.