Soft Jumping Robot Using Soft Morphing and the Yield Point of Magnetic Force

In this paper, soft-morphing, deformation control by fabric structures and soft-jumping mechanisms using magnetic yield points are studied. The durability and adaptability of existing rigid-base jumping mechanisms are improved by a soft-morphing process that employs the residual stress of a polymer. Although rigid body-based jumping mechanisms are used, they are driven by multiple components and complex structures. Therefore, they have drawbacks in terms of shock durability and fatigue accumulation. To improve these problems, soft-jumping mechanisms are designed using soft polymer materials and soft-morphing techniques with excellent shock resistance and environmental adaptability. To this end, a soft jumping mechanism is designed to store energy using the air pressure inside the structure, and the thickness of the polymer layer is adjusted based on the method applied for controlling the polymer freedom and residual stress deformation. The soft jumping mechanism can transfer energy more efficiently and stably using an energy storage and release mechanism and the rounded ankle structure designed using soft morphing. Therefore, the soft morphing and mechanisms of energy retention and release were applied to fabricate a soft robot prototype that can move in the desired direction and jump; the performance experiment was carried out.

Investigating motivational aspects and psychobiological stress responses in high-risk sports combining Virtual Reality to a wing-suit flight simulator: study protocol of the project StressVR

Over the last decades, the prevalence of high-risk sports activities including skydiving, base-jumping, and wingsuit flying has co-developed with a modern globalized lifestyle. The practice of such extreme sports with a risk-taking and even life-threatening character shows continuously increasing popularity and participation rates have grown exponentially. Interestingly, the precise motivational aspects of high-risk sports and their psychobiological underpinnings have been rather hardly characterized. This limited knowledge is attributable to the fact that the possibility to investigate high-risk sports in a laboratory setting was relatively limited. The central methodological aim of the presented project StressVR is to use groundbreaking new technology in high-risk sports research by implementing Virtual Reality (VR) technology into a psychobiological research environment. Using a first-of-its-kind VR wingsuit-flight simulator, StressVR will identify and characterize the kinetics of psychobiological reactions in the context of high-risk sport behavior, also considering critical and traumatic life events, personality traits, attachment representations as well as biomolecular readout variables including cortisol, beta-endorphin, alpha-amylase activity, and pH in saliva. Additionally, peripheral stress markers including heart rate, respiration rate, and skin conductance will be assessed during the VR experiment. The results of StressVR will not only help to improve the current understanding of why individuals do high-risk sports: This could also mean that risk sports athletes do not act “headlessly” and “carelessly” but do follow their metabolic needs as a mechanism of emotion regulation. Here, we summarize the concepts of StressVR and provide the study protocol to address the aimed scientific questions.

Lifestyle Sports in East Asia

“Lifestyle sports” are not the preserve of occidental cultures, even though late capitalist Western nations dominate them commercially and ideologically. Examples of these sports are snowboarding, BASE jumping, freestyle BMX, mountain biking, bouldering, skateboarding, kiteboarding, rock climbing, parkour/free running, windsurfing, and surfing. Non-occidental cultures—such as those in Asia, Latin America, and Africa—also influence lifestyle sport institutions, commodities, values, and practices. Arguably, this influence is expanding and is accelerating as the populations of non-occidental cultures champion their interests and perspectives. This article makes a modest proposal for the starting of a targeted discourse among those interested in the cultural politics of lifestyle sports in the region of East Asia, an area with its own unique international and intra-regional interactions and concomitant needs, desires, and perspectives. In specific regard to this region, we argue it is worth asking: What are the stories being narrated and what forms do they take? How are complex social, political, cultural, and economic relations of this region being negotiated through lifestyle sports?