Good morning,
It’s a day of increasing clouds ahead for Whitewater, with a high temperature of fifty-two.
Whitewater’s Common Council meets tonight, to consider the 2011 City of Whitewater municipal budget. The meeting agenda is available online. The municipal government’s budget only a part of it the greater community’s economy and well-being. I will post on the budget today, not because writing on it has the slightest chance of changing an outcome, but because a common person has a right to commentary.
Over at ScienceNews.org, there’s a story from Laura Sanders about robots entitled, Robots can use coffee as a picker-upper: Gripper made of bag of loose grains helps machines get a grip.
She reports that
A small bag filled with coffee grounds is lending robots a fingerless hand. The new kind of gripper, described online the week of October 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is capable of grasping all sorts of different objects with ease….
The simple gripper is made of a bag of coffee grounds and a vacuum, though other grains such as couscous and sand also work, says study coauthor Eric Brown of the University of Chicago. To pick something up, the bag of loose grounds first melds around the object. Then as a vacuum sucks air out of the spaces between grains, the gripper stiffens, packing itself into a hard vise molded to the outline of the object. Reducing the bag’s starting volume by just a teeny amount — less than 1 percent of the total — was enough to make the gripper latch on, the team found.
Here’s a video of the robot in action (picking up an egg and pouring water are my favorites):
QUICKER PICKER UPPER from Science News on Vimeo.