Disney Invents a One-legged Robot That Hops Like a Crazy Pogo Stick

Disney’s research branch just revealed a crazy robot that can hop on a single leg. It doesn’t need a tether either, and has an on-board power source and controller. Now they just need to scale it up and give us a cool pogo-stick robot for personal transport.

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That leg uses a technology called a linear elastic actuator in parallel – or LEAP, which uses both an electromagnetic actuator and two compression springs. The position and real-time adjustments made to its leg to remain balanced are handled by a pair of standard servo motors.

As it is, this hyper robot can hop around for up to seven seconds before falling. I still like my personal transport idea. Make it happen Disney.

[via Gizmodo]

These Shoes Could Keep You from Falling

Footwear hasn’t exactly been a hotbed for true technological innovation, but these shoes change that. Israeli startup B-Shoe Technologies has developed some new shoes that incorporate some really helpful features. Like, helping you to not fall.

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In the United States of America alone, one out of three people over 65 has fallen and suffered injuries as a result. By age 80, almost every older person has fallen and hurt themselves. This lowers their life expectancy and costs us all billions of dollars. So how do you keep them upright? When these shoes detect that the user has lost their balance and is about to fall backwards, the motorized heel drives the shoe back, restoring balance.

It is an ingenious and simple solution. It performs a corrective maneuver faster than an elderly person might be able to. The company has produced three pairs of B-Shoes so far and they’re being tested in hospitals in Israel.

[via Inventorspot via Neatorama]

BlackBerry Secure Work Space due in Q2, divides work and play on Android and iOS

BlackBerry Secure Work Space due in Q2, divides work and play on Android and iOS

BlackBerry acknowledged that we live in a bring-your-own-device world with BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10, which oversees platforms beyond Waterloo's own. It's reinforcing that support through new details for Secure Work Space for iOS and Android, an expansion of BlackBerry Balance to rival mobile devices. The upcoming offering will blend a BES10 update with a locked-down suite of apps, letting those of us without a BlackBerry easily check our corporate calendars, email and notes without requiring a VPN or other elaborate gateways. Whether or not you think the company is giving away the keys to its kingdom, the expanded Secure Work Space should put up a (frankly needed) wall between our corporate and personal lives sometime in the second quarter, or before the end of June.

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Source: The Next Web