Over the past couple of decades, we have seen a total transformation in terms of ways we communication with our friends, family, colleagues or the wider world. This has gone from public interaction in which the majority of contact would be done face to face, but now with the digital transformations that we have seen, we have all become over reliant on our smartphones to get about our everyday lives and below we look at why that is. Continue Reading
What kind of robots do not exist in our time – robots that can walk, see, talk and hear, as well as manipulate various objects. There are even robots that can smell.
But what about a sense of touch? At first glance, everything seems to be simple here, and robots capable of recognizing objects through touch already exist, but there are a number of limitations in the methods used. In particular, most robotic mechanisms have only control of the force of pressing.
Everyone knows that in people’s lives, tactile sensations play a very important role. Manipulating an object, a person records not only the fact of contact, but also feels the pressure of the hand on the object through the skin and can thus regulate the compression force according to the mass and strength of this object. If the sense of touch will be present in robots to the full, then in the process of manipulating soft and fragile objects, the possibility of damage to them will be minimized or eliminated altogether.
For the quantitative determination of touch from a technological point of view, not only knowledge of the external pressure force used for the tactile sensor is required, it is necessary to have information about the exact place of pressing, its angle and the way of interacting with the manipulated object.
You also need to determine how many touch sensors the robot needs. The development of the “skin” of a robot equipped with hundreds or even thousands of tactile sensors is a very difficult technological task, in solving which it is important to understand and take into account the physical mechanisms of contact perception in the biological world.
Most often, touch is measured using a sensor capable of converting the force of pressure into an electrical signal. So, in electronic scales, with which we find out our weight or weigh products in the kitchen, a piezoelectric transducer is usually used – a device that converts the pressure force into electricity. After that, the electric current is transmitted by wire to a small microchip, which reads the current strength, converts it to weight and displays on the screen.
However, despite the fact that such electronic devices are capable of recognizing different levels of pressure force, they cannot be used for smart skin due to a number of limitations. In particular, they have a relatively slow rate of response to pressure.
There are also types of sensors based on the physical change in other electrical characteristics, such as electrical capacitance and resistance. This technology is used, for example, in the production of some models of mobile phones and computers.
In recent years, scientists have been working hard (and successfully) to create tactile sensors that can be embedded in soft and flexible materials – this is the technology that is needed for using robotic machines in smart skin.
However, most of these developments experience problems in contact with moisture (remember what happens when you touch the touch screen of a smartphone with a wet finger).
The main area of application of flexible and reliable perception of depression today is medicine. For example, smart skin can be used to restore a sensory response in patients with skin lesions or peripheral neuropathy (numbness or tingling). It can also be used for prosthetics.
Recently, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University have developed a tactile glove that operates on the basis of artificial intelligence. Like a human hand, the glove is equipped with 548 sensors located on a knitted fabric connected to a piezo resistive film (which also responds to pressure or tension) and connected by a network of conductive electrodes. This allows the glove to evaluate the characteristics of captured objects. This development opens up great prospects in the field of touch of robots and can subsequently be used to create prostheses and robotic gripping tools.
However, similar to all other touch interfaces, the technology also does not work when in contact with water.
In this regard, scientists have been working on a new type of tactile sensor for several years, using the thinnest films of organic light-emitting diodes (OLED) and photo sensors (OPD) to measure “soft touches”. Typically, OLED technology is used on TVs and smartphones. A new approach to measuring the sense of touch is based on the sense of touch of optical pressure. If successful, robots in the future will be able to get a sense of touch, currently available only to living creatures.
OLED elements (diodes or pixels) are usually completely reversible. This means that in addition to the ability to produce light (as is the case with a TV screen), these pixels can also determine it. Using this principle, you can create a tiny, light-tight, flexible dome with a reflective coating placed on top of several OLED pixels. If you do not disturb the dome, the light emitted from the central pixel is evenly distributed among the other pixels under the dome.
However, if you press the dome while touching something, it deforms as a result of the uneven reaction of the pixels used to determine the reflected light. By combining the reactions of dozens of such domes in the contact area, it will be possible to evaluate the applied pressing force.
This approach is an important step towards the creation and use of smart skin. It is possible that very soon we will see robots that can feel touch, being not only in the air, but also under water.
Your website is the first thing that many of your customers will see when they encounter your brand, so it is important that it looks good. A website that is slow to load, hard to read or difficult to navigate will drive away a lot of potential visitors before they have even read a single page.
Google understands the importance of mobile friendliness, and rolled out some significant updates to its algorithm on April 21st to reflect that. This update prioritises mobile friendly websites in the rankings for users who are conducting searches – in particular local ones – on mobile devices. Websites that do not cater to mobile users will still rank well in the SERPs for searches conducted on desktops, but given that desktop web traffic is actually now lower than mobile web traffic in many parts of the world, no business can afford to ignore mobile users.
What does mobile friendly mean?
The mobilegeddon update, as it is being called, covers several things. Google looks at the content provided by the site to make sure that mobile and desktop users are both being served the same kind of content. If you redirect a user who clicked a deep link to a specific page on your desktop site, so that they land on a mobile homepage, this is considered bad practice. If your site takes more than eight seconds to load, you will be driving users away. In addition, if your site is hard to navigate because it is designed with menu links that are close together, or small form elements that are hard to activate on a touch-screen, then Google will identify this, and will prioritise other more user-friendly pages in the search results. Simple changes, such as bigger check-boxes and more spacing between links can make a huge difference to the end-user experience.
You may also like to read, how to make a compass in minecraft. To know more visit our Tech blog https://uphilltechno.com/.
Focus on usability
A good mobile friendly design will be user friendly and look good on all platforms, not just on mobiles. Modern, responsive designs such as those offered by web design house, a company that offers web design in Newport, are built to offer all of the features you would expect from a desktop website, but to also scale in a flexible and fluid way for mobile users. This means that users can get the information they need, without too much hassle.
Google believes that users interact with the web based on certain moments – the times they want to ‘know something’, ‘do something’ or ‘go somewhere’. Google provides users with a service – the ability to find the information they need during those moments. If the search engine provides users with poorly designed pages, the user’s won’t remember that Acme Co’s website has purple links on a red background, they’ll remember that they searched for information and Google presented them with a page they couldn’t read. To avoid this problem, Google is rewarding webmasters who have good designs – and that’s why you have to invest in great design for your page.
Being a computer science major is a daunting four years of study. It encompasses a wide range of skills and subjects that will all come together to prepare you for what is hopefully a very lucrative and satisfying future. If you’re accepted to a program but aren’t sure what to expect, check out these five tips for incoming freshmen. Continue Reading
Tech jobs. In today’s world where computers are constantly evolving and growing, shaping how we do just about everything, these career opportunities are everywhere. The industry is more in demand now than ever before, and the earning potential to work in the field is incredibly promising. A degree in technology is one perfect way to better your odds at achieving that dream job, and many of today’s top tech careers are impossible to land without one. Here are a few examples. Continue Reading
