Swimming

TomTom is a name that sometimes gets lost in the GPS market amidst the Garmins and Magellans. The company is hoping that it will stand out against those names in a new segment of the market: fitness watches. Its new range of GPS-powered fitness monitors is designed to provide a sleeker look and fit while giving athletes all the information they need to perfect their training.  Read More

Last year, a team of researchers from the Virginia Tech College of Engineering unveiled RoboJelly – a robotic jellyfish in development since 2009, that’s about the size of a man’s hand. While the squishy little robot is certainly an impressive feat of engineering, the same team has now created a bigger, better jellybot, known as Cyro.  Read More

A new species of robot fish has been spotted in the Kalamazoo River in the state of Michigan, where more than a million gallons of oil spilled in July 2010. Developed primarily by Xiaobo Tan, an associate professor at Michigan State University (MSU), the robot's sensors detected crude oil at various sites along the river.  Read More

We see a ton of new gear here at Gizmag. Less often, we see gear that empowers people to experience the world in new ways. ÁETEM is a German company that was created by a group of people passionate about experiencing the world in a new way. That new way is called seatrekking, and ÁETEM's upcoming line of rugged waterproof packs is designed to meet its demands.  Read More

A lot of people like listening to music as they exercise, and swimmers are no exception. For them, there are waterproof MP3 players such as the UWaterG2 and the Speedo Aquabeat. For some people, though, nothing says “MP3 player” quite like “iPod.” Those are the people who Waterfi is targeting, with its waterproofed iPod Shuffles.  Read More

Well, we shouldn’t be surprised. Scientists have created swimming robotic versions of the cow-nosed ray, the jellyfish, the sunfish, the tuna, and just the generic “fish,” so why not the sea turtle? That’s what a group of scientists from the ETH Zurich research group are in the process of doing, and they’ve named it naro - tartaruga (the original naro was another robotic tuna). As it turns out, a couple of the sea turtle’s natural features make for a pretty good robot.  Read More

Previously, we’ve seen swimming robots inspired by the cow-nosed ray, the black ghost knife fish, and the jellyfish – to name just a few. Now, the engineers at AeroVironment have taken it upon themselves to replicate the mola (also known as the ocean sunfish), and the result is an ocean-going robot that gathers its own solar power.  Read More

With the swimming program of the London Olympics now completed and medals awarded, many will now be casting their attention to Rio in 2016 and how competitors can be helped to swim faster, how they can be made stronger, and what swimwear can be developed to improve their performance. Researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology are hoping to answer these questions by developing a humanoid robot able to reproduce realistic swimming strokes.  Read More

Having roamed the seas for at least 500 million years and holding the title of the oldest multi-organ animal on the planet, jellyfish have certainly stood the test of time. So it’s probably not surprising to see various research groups looking to the gelatinous, umbrella-shaped animals for inspiration in a number of areas, including the development of ocean-going robots. Now researchers at Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) looking to gain a better understanding of how biological pumps such as the heart work, have created an artificial jellyfish from rat heart muscle and silicon.  Read More