U.S. defense agencies, which have funded this research, are supporting the development of bug-size flyers to carry out reconnaissance, search-and-rescue and environmental monitoring missions without risking human lives. These devices are commonly called micro aerial vehicles or MAVs.

"For military missions in particular, these MAVs must be able to fly successfully through complex urban environments, where there can be tight spaces and turbulent gusts of wind," said Tiras Lin, a Whiting School of Engineering undergraduate who has been conducting the high-speed video research. "These flying robots will need to be able to turn quickly. But one area in which MAVs are lacking is maneuverability."

To address that shortcoming, Lin has been studying butterflies. "Flying insects are capable of performing a dazzling variety of flight maneuvers," he said. "In designing MAVs, we can learn a lot from flying insects."

Lin's research has been supervised by Rajat Mittal, a professor of mechanical engineering. "This research is important because it attempts to not only address issues related to bio-inspired design of MAVs, but it also explores fundamental questions in biology related to the limits and capabilities of flying insects," Mittal said.

To conduct this study, Lin has been using high-speed video to look at how changes in mass distribution associated with the wing flapping and body deformation of a flying insect help it engage in rapid aerial twists and turns.

Lin, a junior mechanical engineering major from San Rafael, Calif., recently presented some of his findings at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics. The student also won second-prize for his presentation of this research at a regional meeting of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

"Ice skaters who want to spin faster bring their arms in close to their bodies and extend their arms out when they want to slow down," Lin said. "These positions change the spatial distribution of a skater's mass and modify their moment of inertia; this in turn affects the rotation of the skater's body. An insect may be able to do the same thing with its body and wings."

Butterflies move too quickly for someone to see these wing tactics clearly with the naked eye, so Lin, working with graduate student Lingxiao Zheng, used high-speed, high-resolution videogrammetry to mathematically document the trajectory and body conformation of painted lady butterflies. They accomplished this with three video cameras capable of recording 3,000 one-megapixel images per second. (By comparison, a standard video camera shoots 24, 30 or 60 frames per second.)

The Johns Hopkins researchers anchored their cameras in fixed positions and focused them on a small region within a dry transparent aquarium tank. For each analysis, several butterflies were released inside the tank. When a butterfly veered into the focal area, Lin switched on the cameras for about two seconds, collecting approximately 6,000 three-dimensional views of the insect's flight maneuvers.

From these frames, the student typically homed in on roughly one-fifth of a second of flight, captured in 600 frames. "Butterflies flap their wings about 25 times per second," Lin said. "That's why we had to take so many pictures."

The arrangement of the three cameras allowed the researchers to capture three-dimensional data and analyze the movement of the insects' wings and bodies in minute detail. That led to a key discovery.

Earlier published research pointed out that an insect's delicate wings possess very little mass compared to the bug's body. As a result, those scholars concluded that changes in spatial distribution of mass associated with wing-flapping did not need to be considered in analyzing an insect's flight maneuverability and stability.

"We found out that this commonly accepted assumption was not valid, at least for insects such as butterflies," Lin said.

"We learned that changes in moment of inertia, which is a property associated with mass distribution, plays an important role in insect flight, just as arm and leg motion does for ice skaters and divers."

He said this discovery should be considered by MAV designers and may be useful to biologists who study insect flight dynamics.

Lin's newest project involves even smaller bugs. With support from a Johns Hopkins Provost's Undergraduate Research Award, he has begun aiming his video cameras at fruit flies, hoping to solve the mystery of how these insects manage to land upside down on perches.

The insect flight dynamics research was funded by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.

]]> Wed, 08 FEB 2012 08:47:30 AEST Waterloo, Canada (SPX) Jan 27, 2012 - Maplesoft has announced a major adoption of its products by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). JPL is implementing Maple, MapleSim, and MapleNet in its various projects.

Whether creating America's first satellite, Explorer 1, sending the first robotic craft to the moon, or exploring the edges of the solar system, JPL has been at the forefront of pushing the limits of exploration.

Curiosity, JPL's latest space rover, launched at the end of November, aims to explore Mars to investigate whether the planet could have ever supported microbial life. Current JPL projects include spacecraft missions to comets, asteroids and the edge of the solar system, as well as satellites that monitor the land, oceans, and atmosphere of our own planet.

Maplesoft products are expected to help JPL save time and reduce cost by providing more efficient and smarter methods for mathematical analysis, modeling, and simulation. Maplesoft solutions are built within a natively symbolic framework, avoiding some of the worst sources of error and computational inefficiencies generated by traditional, numeric-based tools - thus providing great tools for precision-rich projects such as those of JPL.

In addition to using Maple for advanced mathematical analysis, JPL will use MapleSim, Maplesoft's high-performance physical modeling and simulation platform, as a key tool in its engineering workflow.

MapleSim works in combination with Maple. It accesses Maple's symbolic computation technology to efficiently handle all of the complex mathematics involved in the development of engineering models, including multi-domain systems, multibody systems, plant modeling, and control design.

"Maplesoft products will allow JPL to unify their approach to mathematics, modeling, and simulation," says Paul Goossens, Vice President, Applications Engineering, Maplesoft.

"MapleSim's intimate connection to the underlying physics of the system models, combined with the knowledge capture and analysis capabilities inherent in Maple, will make project design and development faster and more accountable. JPL scientists will arrive at optimal solutions much faster, and their models will be much more reusable."

Maplesoft technology is also being used in other space robotics research. Dr. Amir Khajepour, Canada Research Chair in Mechatronic Vehicle Systems and Professor of Engineering in the Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering department at the University of Waterloo, is working with the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), to develop a full solution for the power management system of autonomous rovers. His team is using MapleSim to rapidly develop high fidelity, multi-domain models of the rover subsystems.

]]> Wed, 08 FEB 2012 08:47:30 AEST Paris (ESA) Jan 27, 2012 - School teams from Europe and America have been commanding robots competing in the Spheres ZeroRobotics tournament in space. The arena: 400 km above Earth on the International Space Station.

Student teams could send a single piece of instruction software to control the small robotic 'Spheres'. The goal of the tournament was to earn points through masterful operation via guidance and navigation control algorithms as well as choosing the best tactics to win the game. This year's winner an alliance consisting of teams CyberAvo, Ultima and Lazy, a collaboration of three schools from Turin, Italy and Berlin, Germany.

Astronauts Don Pettit and Andre Kuipers set up the individual matches in Japan's Kibo laboratory on the Space Station and enjoyed the spectacle.

The Spheres are controlled via laptops but once the software has been sent to the robot it cannot be changed.

The robots move using jets of compressed gas and are required to perform manoeuvres based on realistic situations, such as docking, formation flying or retrieving objects.

The game this year involved extracting minerals from asteroids, hence the name of the game Asterospheres. The free-floating satellites could collect tools if needed and start mining on one of two virtual asteroids.

Strategy was an important element of the game - teams could hinder their opponents or cooperate to share more points overall.

The European finalists were invited to watch how their command software performed in the finals in the Erasmus centre in ESA's scientific and technical heart at ESTEC in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.

The students were able to appreciate the delicate three-dimensional dance performed by the Spheres via video live links with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Boston, USA, and the International Space Station.

Before the finals, the secondary-school students visited ESTEC's test centre, the Erasmus High Bay and enjoyed a 3D virtual tour of the International Space Station.

Spheres ZeroRobotics was developed to teach students skills in engineering, mathematics and programming, while inspiring students to continue their careers in science and engineering.

Stefano Suraniti, the Minister of Education for the Piedmont region in Italy, told the students: "Robots do have a soul, and their soul is your imagination, your future."

Former astronaut Thomas Reiter, ESA Director of Human Spaceflight and Operations, observed it was a special event for him because he was one of the astronauts who flew an original Sphere to the Station in 2006 on a Space Shuttle mission. He noted the importance of robotics for working on the Station.

By organising the competition into teams, the students were required to cooperate and develop software and strategy together. Many teams found effective communication with their assigned international partners the most challenging part of the competition.

This was the third Spheres competition and the first time that students outside of the USA were invited. Only schools from Germany and Italy took part this year but ESA and the Spheres organisation hope to expand the tournament next year to include schools from all of Europe.

]]> Wed, 08 FEB 2012 08:47:30 AEST Washington DC (SPX) Jan 23, 2012 - NASA will join the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and high school student teams from the U.S. and abroad for the third annual Zero Robotics SPHERES Challenge on Monday, Jan. 23.

The event will take place on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Mass., and be broadcast live on NASA Television from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. EST.

For the competition, NASA will upload software developed by high school students onto Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites (SPHERES), which are bowling ball-sized spherical satellites aboard the International Space Station.

The top 27 teams from previous competitions will have their code sent Monday to the space station, where an astronaut will command the satellites to execute the teams' flight program.

During a simulated mission, the teams will complete a special challenge inspired by future satellite technologies, such as formation flight and close proximity operations.

Student finalists will be able to see their flight program live in the televised finals. The team with the highest software performance over several rounds of the competition will win the challenge.

The winning team will be awarded certificates and a SPHERES flight patch that was flown to the space station.

News media wishing to cover this event must contact Caroline McCall at MIT (cmccall5@mit.edu or 617-253-1682) by 2 p.m. EST on Friday, Jan 20. NASA officials and members of the astronaut corps will be available to speak with news media after the competition.

In addition to their use in this competition, the satellites are used inside the space station to conduct formation flight maneuvers for spacecraft guidance navigation, control and docking.

The three separate satellites that make up SPHERES fly in formation inside the space station's cabin.

The satellites provide opportunities to test a wide range of hardware and software at an affordable cost.

]]> Wed, 08 FEB 2012 08:47:30 AEST Atlanta GA (SPX) Jan 23, 2012 - Designing an all-terrain robot for search-and-rescue missions is an arduous task for scientists. The machine must be flexible enough to move over uneven surfaces, yet not so big that it's restricted from tight spaces.

It might also be required to climb slopes of varying inclines. Existing robots can do many of these things, but the majority require large amounts of energy and are prone to overheating. Georgia Tech researchers have designed a new machine by studying the locomotion of a certain type of flexible, efficient animal.

"By using their scales to control frictional properties, snakes are able to move large distances while exerting very little energy," said Hamid Marvi, a Mechanical Engineering Ph.D. candidate at Georgia Tech.

While studying and videotaping the movements of 20 different species at Zoo Atlanta, Marvi developed Scalybot 2, a robot that replicates rectilinear locomotion of snakes. He unveiled the robot this month at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) annual meeting in Charleston, S.C.

"During rectilinear locomotion, a snake doesn't have to bend its body laterally to move," explained Marvi. "Snakes lift their ventral scales and pull themselves forward by sending a muscular traveling wave from head to tail.

Rectilinear locomotion is very efficient and is especially useful for crawling within crevices, an invaluable benefit for search-and-rescue robots."

Scalybot 2 can automatically change the angle of its scales when it encounters different terrains and slopes. This adjustment allows the robot to either fight or generate friction.

The two-link robot is controlled by a remote-controlled joystick and can move forward and backward using four motors.

"Snakes are highly maligned creatures," said Joe Mendelson, curator of herpetology at Zoo Atlanta. "I really like that Hamid's research is showing the public that snakes can help people."

Marvi's advisor is David Hu, an assistant professor in the Schools of Mechanical Engineering and Biology.

Hu and his research team are primarily focused on animal locomotion. They've studied how dogs and other animals shake water off their bodies and how mosquitos fly through rainstorms.

This isn't the first time Hu's lab has looked at snake locomotion. Last summer the team developed Scalybot 1, a two-link climbing robot that replicates concertina locomotion. The push-and-pull, accordion-style movement features alternating scale activity.

]]> Wed, 08 FEB 2012 08:47:30 AEST Madrid, Spain (SPX) Jan 19, 2012 - Scientists at Universidad Carlos III in Madrid (UC3M) have presented a new technique based on Artificial Intelligence that can automatically create plans, allowing problems to be solved with much greater speed than current methods provide when resources are limited. This method can be applied in sectors such as logistics, autonomous control of robots, fire extinguishing and on-line learning.

The researchers have developed a new methodology to solve automated planning problems, an area of AI, especially when there are more objectives than it is possible to achieve in the available time. The idea is to get the system to find, on its own, an ordered sequence of actions that will allow objectives to be reached (in a final stage) given the initial situation and available resources.

For example, given a group of trucks and goods, these techniques can use automatic planning to optimize the routes and means of transport, based on timetables and products.

The methodology presented by these scientists would, in this case, allow the users to create plans in a situation in which not all the packages can be delivered, as would occur when the time that is needed to perform the task is greater than the time that is available, because of the inadequacy of the available resources. In this case, the system would attempt to find a plan by which the greatest number of goods possible could be delivered, thus minimizing the cost.

The new methodology that these scientists propose allows solutions to be found that are equivalent to or better than those provided by the other existing techniques, in addition to doing so much faster, when there are limited resources that can be used.

"With regard to time, our technique is three to ten times faster, and with regard to quality, our solutions offer similar quality to that obtained by the best technique that is currently available", states one of the researchers, Angel Garcia Olaya, of the PLG group (Planning and Learning Research Group) of UC3M's Computer Science Department.

"Now - he points out - we are making modifications that we hope will allow us to give still greater quality to our solutions".

This study has been presented at the most recent Conferencia Espanola para la Inteligencia Artificial (CAEPIA - Spanish Conference on Artificial Intelligence) in Tenerife, where it received the award for the best article. In addition, it has recently been published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science by Springer. This research at UC3M has received funding from the Autonomous Community of Madrid and the Ministry of Science and Innovation.

This new methodology can be applied in any sector in which is makes sense to implement automatic planning, as is already done in the cases of extinguishing fires, autonomous control of robots, on-line learning, logistics, etc.

In this last field, in fact, these researchers have already carried out a project with Acciona for managing their logistics division; it was subsidized by the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce. To be specific, they created a system of automatic planning for multimodal transport of goods.

The data that was provided to the system included the position of the trucks, as well as the schedules of the transport ships and trains, together with the characteristics of the clients' orders (situation of containers, route, type of merchandise).

With this information, the system first decided which truck and container should carry out each part of the service, to then calculate the route to be taken, the order in which the items would be delivered and, if necessary, to change the method of transport (truck, train and/or boat).

"What very often happens in real situations is that there is no plan that can reach all of the objectives due to the limitations of one resource, such as time, money, fuel, battery... and this is where the methodology proposed in the article can be used", explains Professor Angel Garcia Olaya.

The researchers have tested it in a series of realms that simulate real situations and that occur frequently in the field of planning; it has already been integrated into an architecture for the autonomous control of robots that the group is working on.

In fact, NASA has already used automatic planning for the autonomous control of their rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, which traveled to Mars a few years ago.

In that case, they used a mixed initiative system in which the rovers' operators used a planner to create the plans (movements, sample taking, photos, etc.) for the two automated vehicles. The planner took all of the operating restrictions into account and created a plan that could be modified by the operators.

Later the plan, which had been conveniently checked to avoid any inconsistency, was transmitted to the rovers so that they could execute it. Currently, the PLG group is applying the techniques developed in a project carried out with the European Space Agency (ESA) on the planning of observation operations in space.

Using the Relaxed Plan Heuristic to Select Goals in Oversubscription Planning Problems; Angel Garcia Olaya, Tomas de la Rosa and Daniel Borrajo; Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011. Volume 7023/2011, 183-192, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-25274-7_19

]]> Wed, 08 FEB 2012 08:47:30 AEST Santa Cruz CA (SPX) Jan 16, 2012 - Robotics experts at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of Washington (UW) have completed a set of seven advanced robotic surgery systems for use by major medical research laboratories throughout the United States. After a round of final tests, five of the systems will be shipped to medical robotics researchers at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Nebraska, UC Berkeley, and UCLA, while the other two systems will remain at UC Santa Cruz and UW.

"We decided to follow an open-source model, because if all of these labs have a common research platform for doing robotic surgery, the whole field will be able to advance more quickly," said Jacob Rosen, associate professor of computer engineering in the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz and principal investigator on the project.

Rosen and Blake Hannaford, director of the UW Biorobotics Laboratory, lead the research groups that developed the Raven II robotic surgery system and its predecessor, Raven I.

A grant from the National Science Foundation funded their work to create seven identical Raven II systems. Hannaford said the systems will be shipped out from UW by the end of January. After they are delivered and installed, all seven systems will be networked together over the Internet for collaborative experiments.

Robotic surgery has the potential to enable new surgical procedures that are less invasive than existing techniques. For some procedures, such as prostate surgery, the use of surgical robots is already standard practice.

In addition, telesurgery, in which the surgeon operates a robotic system from a remote location, offers the potential to provide better access to expert care in remote areas and the developing world. Having a network of laboratories working on a common platform will make it easier for researchers to share software, replicate experiments, and collaborate in other ways.

Even though it meant giving competing laboratories the tools that had taken them years to develop, Rosen and Hannaford decided to share the Raven II because it seemed like the best way to move the field forward.

"These are the leading labs in the nation in the field of surgical robotics, and with everyone working on the same platform we can more easily share new developments and innovations," Hannaford said.

According to Rosen, most research on surgical robotics in the United States has focused on developing new software for various commercially available robotic systems.

"Academic researchers have had limited access to these proprietary systems. We are changing that by providing high-quality hardware developed within academia. Each lab will start with an identical, fully-operational system, but they can change the hardware and software and share new developments and algorithms, while retaining intellectual property rights for their own innovations," Rosen said.

The Raven II includes a surgical robot with two robotic arms, a camera for viewing the operational field, and a surgeon-interface system for remote operation of the robot. The system is powerful and precise enough to support research on advanced robotic surgery techniques, including online telesurgery.

In addition to Rosen and Hannaford, UCSC postdoctoral researchers Daniel Glozman and Ji Ma, along with a group of dedicated undergraduate students working in Rosen's Bionics Lab, played a key role in developing the Raven II. Rosen and Glozman have also developed a Raven IV surgical robotics system, which includes four robotic arms and two cameras. The system enables collaboration between two surgeons working from separate locations and connected over the Internet.

]]> Wed, 08 FEB 2012 08:47:30 AEST Berkeley CA (SPX) Jan 06, 2012 - University of California, Berkeley, biologists and engineers including undergraduate and graduate students studied how lizards manage to leap successfully even when they slip and stumble, and found that swinging the tail upward is the key to preventing a forward pitch that could send them head-over-heels into a tree.

The scientists subsequently added a tail to a robotic car they named Tailbot and discovered that it's not as simple as throwing your tail in the air. Robots and lizards have to adjust the angle of their tail just right to counteract the effect of the stumble. Given an actively controlled tail, even robots can make a leap and remain upright.

"We showed for the first time that lizards swing their tail up or down to counteract the rotation of their body, keeping them stable," said team leader Robert J. Full, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology. "Inspiration from lizard tails will likely lead to far more agile search-and-rescue robots, as well as ones having greater capability to more rapidly detect chemical, biological or nuclear hazards."

Agile therapod dinosaurs like the velociraptor depicted in the movie Jurassic Park may also have used their tails as stabilizers to prevent forward pitch, Full said. Their tail movement is illustrated in a prescient sequence from the 1993 movie in which the animated animal leaps from a balcony onto a T. rex skeleton while chasing the lead characters.

"Muscles willing, the dinosaur could be even more effective with a swing of its tail in controlling body attitude than the lizards," Full said.

Full and his laboratory colleagues, including both engineering and biology students, will report their discoveries online on Jan. 5 in advance of publication in the Jan. 12 print edition of the journal Nature. The paper's first author, mechanical engineering graduate student Thomas Libby, also will report the results on Jan. 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in Charleston, South Carolina.

From gecko toe hairs to tails
Full's research over the past 20 years has revealed how gecko toe hairs allow the animals to climb smooth vertical surfaces and, more recently, how their tails help keep them from falling when their feet slip and allow them to right themselves in mid-air.

The research reported this week shows how the tail is used in leaping, providing inspiration for robots that can deal with tumbles that are inevitable if, for example, they are exploring rubble during search and rescue operations.

The new research tested a 40-year-old hypothesis that the two-legged theropod dinosaurs the ancestors of birds used their tails as stabilizers while running or dodging obstacles or predators. In Full's teaching laboratory, students noticed a lizard's recovery after slipping during a leap and thought a study of stumbling would be a perfect way to test the value of a tail.

In a research-based teaching lab associated with UC Berkeley's Center for interdisciplinary Bio-inspiration in Education and Research (CiBER), Full and his students used high-speed videography and motion capture to record how a red-headed African Agama lizard handled leaps from a platform with different degrees of traction, from slippery to easily gripped sandpaper.

They coaxed the lizards to run down a track, vault off an obstacle and land on a vertical surface with a shelter on top. When the friction on the obstacle was reduced, lizards slipped, potentially causing their body to spin out of control.

When the researchers saw how the lizard used its tail to counteract the spin, they created a mathematical model as well as Tailbot to better understand the animal's skills. With a tail but no feedback from sensors about body position, Tailbot took a nose dive when driven off a ramp, which mimicked a lizard's take-off.

When body attitude was sensed and fed back to the tail motor, however, Tailbot was able to stabilize its body in midair. The actively controlled tail effectively redirected the angular momentum of the body into the swing of the tail, just as with leaping lizards, Full said.

Inertial assisted robotics
Tailbot's design pushed the boundaries of control in robotics in an area researchers call inertial assisted robotics, Full said, which drew the attention of attendees at last October's meeting of the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Their paper, presented by Libby and fellow mechanical engineering graduate student Evan Chang-Siu, was one of five finalists in a field of more than 2,000 robot studies presented at the meeting.

"Engineers quickly understood the value of a tail," Libby said, noting that when he dropped Tailbot nose-down, it was able to right itself before it had dropped a foot. "Robots are not nearly as agile as animals, so anything that can make a robot more stable is an advancement, which is why this work is so exciting."

Full and his students are now investigating the role of the tail in controlling pitch, roll and yaw while running.

Full is enthusiastic about the interplay between biologists and engineers fostered in the CiBER lab, which provides undergraduate students with an opportunity to conduct cutting-edge research in teams with graduate students where each team experiences the benefits of how biologists and engineers approach a problem.

"This paper shows that research-based teaching leads to better learning and simultaneously can lead to cutting-edge research," Full said. "It also shows the competitive advantage of interdisciplinary approaches and how involvement of undergraduates in research can lead to innovation."

Last year, Full briefed the United States House of Representative's Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Education Caucus on this very topic.

"Learning in the context of original discovery, finding out something that no one has ever know before, really motivated me," wrote former UC Berkeley integrative biology undergraduate Talia Moore, now a graduate student in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. "This research-based lab course ... showed me how biologists and engineers can work together to benefit both fields."

]]> Wed, 08 FEB 2012 08:47:30 AEST Singapore (AFP) Jan 1, 2012 - Six months ago, Singaporean retiree Soon Eng Sam, 70, suffered a stroke that paralysed the left side of his body.

Bedridden for three months, he has regained some limb functions on the affected side through conventional physical therapy but now hopes to hasten his recovery with the help of new gadgets designed to make rehabilitation fun.

"This therapy is not so boring, not so painful as physical therapy, because the machine is assisting me to move my arm up and down and laterally," he said after a recent hour-long session with the "Armeo" robotic arm.

A therapist had to tell Soon to slow down as the former civil servant enthusiastically used his left hand, partly supported by the robotic arm, to catch virtual water droplets with a teacup on a colour monitor.

The machine is among the high-tech exercise stations now being used at the Centre for Advanced Rehabilitation Therapeutics (CART), described by its administrators as the most advanced facility of its kind in Asia.

Medical authorities are deploying the latest technology as fast-greying Singapore prepares for a "silver tsunami" of elderly people as a result of longer life spans and low birth rates.

In two decades, an estimated 20 percent of the population will be 65 years or older, compared to 9.3 percent at present.

To better prepare themselves for the demographic explosion, hospitals in the affluent city-state of five million people are using the latest available technology to augment its limited pool of health personnel.

Chan Kay Fei, head of Rehabilitation Medicine at the government-run Tan Tock Seng Hospital, which houses CART, said therapists on their own "cannot meet this rising need of the ageing population".

"So technology, I feel, could be the multiplier," Chan said, adding that both therapists and patients benefit from the increasing use of robotic equipment and videogame-inspired software.

"Robotics reduce or eliminate physical loading upon our therapists. It creates an interesting and interactive environment which offers consistency and objectivity to the treatment programme," he said.

Using the machines, therapists are able to precisely monitor the patient's progress and calibrate the machines accordingly.

The "Lokomat" gait trainer shows a movie-like avatar, controlled by the patient's movements, walking around a virtual world collecting medals.

Such machines are particularly suited for countries with rapidly ageing populations, said Bala Rajaratnam, a lecturer at the School of Health Sciences at Nanyang Polytechnic.

"It allows therapists to use smart technology to both empower clients to take control over their recovery as well as maximise therapy time," he said.

Future physical therapists at Bala's school also use videogame machines such as the Nintendo Wii to help patients recover more quickly than they would using conventional methods.

Other medical institutions in Singapore such as KK Women's and Children's Hospital as well as Changi General Hospital are also using videogames as part of their repertoire of therapy.

"The targeted patient population includes people with neurological conditions such as stroke, acquired brain injury and Parkinson's Disease," said Jean Tan, a senior physiotherapist at Changi.

"Any patients with balance deficits and decreased arm function will also benefit from these games."

Younger patients, including accident victims and those with congenital motor problems, also benefit from therapy robots and videogames.

Kankipati Rajan Raju, 45, an Indian banker who was paralysed from the neck down after being hit by a bus during a business trip to France in May, said technology is a boon to people like him but the human factor is still more crucial than machines.

Six months after the accident, Raju can walk on his own, shake hands and even do short jumps, a "miracle" he attributes to medical personnel as well as a healthy dose of robotics and virtual reality.

"The technology assists you, but the therapists have made the difference," he said after a session at CART.

]]> Wed, 08 FEB 2012 08:47:30 AEST Paris (AFP) Jan 4, 2012 - Jumping lizards adjust the position of their tails in mid-air to ensure a smooth landing, and certain agile dinosaurs probably did likewise.

So say a team of biomechanics who put some red-headed agama lizards (Agama agama) through their paces in a laboratory.

The scientists filmed the African reptiles as they jumped from a horizontal platform to a vertical wall.

Slow-motion footage showed that if a lizard had to hoist the front part of its body in order to land correctly, it bent its long, slender tail upwards.

By curling its tail, the lizard provided a clockwise movement that gave an anticlockwise tilt to the front of its trunk. This enabled the critter to land safely, paws-first, onto the wall.

Few lizards may have known this, but they were upholding the principle of conservation of angular momentum by exploiting the moment of inertia.

Tightrope walkers, too, use this principle. They correct their balance by using a long pole. It is tilted to make the body lean in the opposite direction to the tilt.

The team, led by Robert Full of the University of California at Berkeley, built a lizard-sized robot car, complete with a tail controlled by gyroscopes, to see whether the lizard's agility could be replicated by technology.

When the car jumped off the ramp, it started to fall nose-first, but this angle was smartly corrected by a movement of the tail, and the toy vehicle -- named "Tailbot" -- landed on its wheels.

Previous research has suggested there are several species of animals that use their tail to harness the moment of inertia, including lemurs, cats and kangaroo rats.

The paper speculates that small, two-footed carnivorous dinosaurs, including the velociraptor made notorious by the movie Jurassic Park, may also have done the same trick.

Larger dinos, though, are unlikely to have jumped far, if calculations of their bone-to-muscle ratio are right.

]]> Wed, 08 FEB 2012 08:47:30 AEST Subscribe to our daily selection of space, military, environment and energy newsletters responseText http://visitor.constantcontact.com/manage/optin/ea?v=0016gbbKsaiGSpQFojVO8ZoHw%3D%3D