Technology

This Dinosaur Contraption Is Proof Engineers Make the Best Costumes A Dutch engineering student constructed a dinosaur costume with life-like movements. By Jennifer Leman In her free time, Esmée Kramer, a network and engineering systems student at The Hague University of Applied Sciences, constructed a fully mobile raptor costume. The body works like a seesaw—both the neck and tail are roughly the same weight—and she acts as the fulcrum. The most challenging part to build, she noted in a  LinkedIn post , was the head. The costume looks like something out of Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks. A network and engineering systems student at The Hague University of Applied Sciences named Esmée Kramer crafted a giant, mobile raptor costume made from PVC pipe and foam. She posted a YouTube video titled “Project Raptor: My mechanical dinosaur costume” about the design. The skeleton of the dinosaur is made from a combination ⅝ and ¾ inch PVC pipes,...

It’s that time of year again — fall is here and packs of robot dogs are frolicking in the leaves Just listen to the scuttle of those tiny metal legs By   James Vincent   Share this story re this on Twitter (opens in new window) All sharing options There’s nothing I like more on bright and cold autumnal days than heading down to the park and watching the robot dogs playing in piles of leaves. To hear the scuttle of their little metal legs! To imagine the joy in their tiny silicon brains! Ah, what bliss. If you’ve not experienced these delights before, then the video above from MIT’s biomimetics lab will give you the basic idea. The bots you can see are the university’s Mini Cheetah: a lightweight and modular quadruped that’s been under development for years. We saw the Mini Cheetah earlier in 2019 when it  learned to backflip , but the biomimetics lab has obviously cranked up production and now has at least nine of these littl...