Even simple insects can generate quite different movement patterns with their six legs. The animal uses various gaits depending on whether it crawls uphill or downhill, slowly or fast. Scientists from Göttingen have now developed a walking robot, which – depending on the situation – can flexibly and autonomously switch between different gaits. The success of their solution lies in its simplicity: a small and simple network with just a few connections can create very diverse movement patterns. To this end, the robot uses a mechanism for “chaos control”. This interdisciplinary work was carried out by a team of scientists at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Göttingen, the Physics Department of the Georg-August-University of Göttingen and the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization. (Nature Physics, January 17th, 2010, advanced online publication)

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We all get distracted at times, whether it’s the UPS guy at the door, or a baby’s cry, and it takes only a brief moment to lose our focus on the task at hand. Normally, we can just pick up where we left off a few minutes later, but if you’re ironing, the smell of scorched cotton will soon remind us of what we were doing before being so rudely interrupted.

Scorched clothes could become a thing of the past with the Auto Lift iron from Ariete. This Italian stroke of genius has a sensor that knows when you’re gripping the handle, and only then will it retract the little feet that hold the iron up away from your fancy threads. Let the handle go, and the iron quickly lifts up again. There are additional benefits to this face down position, as the iron will be more stable with its heavy plate in the face down position, and you’re less likely to fry yourself by brushing against the hot surface.

The Auto-Lift is available in Europe for about $95. Let’s hope their US importer brings it in soon.

Ariete, via Appliancist

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