Recently, engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have designed a new running robot that operates on batteries and will soon be able to run like cheetahs, the fastest land animals on Earth. It is light enough with the weight of 30 kilograms. It runs on batteries. Sangbae Kim, director of the MIT Biomimetics Robotics Lab, says the robot needs only about 700 watts of power to operate.

The robot’s limbs( 四 肢 ) and other parts were made in a three dimensional--or 3D printer. A strong, light-weight plastic material called Kevlar is used to make the robot parts stronger. Kevlar is used for modern military helmets and protective body clothing.

“The frame has to be very light and very stiff , so we designed this frame to handle these high forces and the high shock.” Mr. Kim says another special feature is the motor controller. His team at MIT designed it themselves, he says, because no other available products could handle the robots power requirements.

But the development of MITS robot is not without its own set of problems. When supporting a great amount of force, the robot’s limbs sometimes break.

Researchers say the new technologies used on this robot may be used in the making of artificial climbs and other machines. Some of those machines may help save humans from performing difficult and dangerous jobs.

Fashion house Alabama Chanin has a new line of organic cotton clothing made from its own cotton field. It’s not just an experiment in keeping production local but also an attempt to bring back to life the tradition of clothes-making in the Deep South.

Alabama Chanin, the fashion and lifestyle company founded by Natalie Chanin and Billy Reid, is best known for her flowing, made-to-order organic garments (衣服), entirely hand-made and inspired by the rural South of the 1930s and ‘40s’. “It’s not just ‘factory work’,” Chanin says. “This is a skill that’s dying out in this country. ” “It’s part of the nation’s ‘cultural sustainability to preserve these things’,” Chanin says, “to be able to make our clothes.”

Her business partner, K. P. McNeill, is the one who first thought about growing their own cotton. The ideas of going from field to garment made Chanin think of how generations ago, manufacturing was of a vertical (纵向的) affair. Could that be done today? And organically? They came up with a plan to test it. Reid says it meant no artificial chemicals. “A lot of the weeds had to be pulled by hand. It’s not just your normal cotton operation that’s automated,” Reid says.

Chanin holds a piece of ivory-colored cloth made from the hand-picked cotton grown in the Alabama field. “I’ve never seen cotton quite as clean and clear as this,” Chanin says, “I don’t think people have seen that since cotton was really a driving factor of destruction in this country.”

Chanin says this project is about transforming cotton into something more modern. “I mean, cotton has an ugly history. It has built fortunes, it’s destroyed nations, it’s enslaved people,” says Chanin. “But to me this cotton is part of making a new story for cotton.”

A robotic game of cat and mouse playing out in a lab provides a sight at future possibilities of robots carrying out search-and-rescue missions without much human guidance.

The Tianjicat robot developed by researchers at Tsinghua University in China uses a brain-inspired computing chip called TianjicX. The so-called neuromorphic chip (神经形态芯片) can run multiple artificial intelligence techniques at the same time in an energy-efficient manner. It is one example of experiments with neuromorphic systems that could allow small robots to make decisions using limited computing resources and power.

The researchers challenged the Tianjicat robot to chase (追逐) another robot that was set to move randomly in a room filled with obstacles. This required Tianjicat to track the mouse robot by using both visual recognition and sound detection, and to figure out the best path to chase down its pretend prey (假想猎物) without knocking on anything. The team says that the TianjicX chip reduced the amount of power required for the robot cat to make decisions during the chase by about. half compared with an NVIDIA chip designed for AI computing.

Performing a cat-and-mouse chase would be a step up in difficulty for most commercialized robots, which usually follow very predictable routines in warehouses or factories. Many robots that interact with more complex and unpredictable environments rely on remote control by human operators, or else must maintain wireless connections with distant data centres that have the computing power necessary for more intensive decision-making. Neuromorphic systems haven’t yet been commercialized in a big way, but their relatively low size, weight and power requirements could provide practical advantages or robotic deployment (部署).

The Tianjicat robot is worldwide acknowledged. “For robotics, this is very important because it allows the system to operate for longer durations in hard-to-reach environments with greater autonomy,” says Jeffrey Krichmar at the University of California, Irvine.