Making a robot can be an incredibly rewarding experience. It’s the perfect combination of creativity, engineering and problem solving. However, if you’re just getting started in robotics, it can also be overwhelming. To make things easier for those who are just starting out, we’ve put together some tips and tricks to help makers bring robots to life! From the basics of assembling your robot to software implementation, these pointers will give you everything you need to get started on your robotic adventure!
Natural disasters like the earthquake in Haiti and man-made tragedies like soldiers or civilians losing limbs to explosives drive the need for better prosthetic limbs. Improved treatments are on the horizon in the form of novel foot and ankle prosthesis which behave energetically more like the human body than existing technologies. These powered devices can […]
Two reflective sensors are included in the kit (useful for line following and edge detection projects), and you can order additional components both from TinyCLR.com and other robotics sites. Many construction parts are included in the kit so it is very easy to attach additional sensors or other parts. As you can see on the picture above, I already added a Sharp IR distance sensor in front (so I can teach the robot to not bump on walls). I also added an Xbee expansion board on the back so one day I can control the robot remotely (and my Holy Grail is to connect the robot to Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio).
Solarbotics has posted some video from its vault, portions of the 1995 BEAM Games, with BEAM inventor Mark Tilden talking about his VBug 1.5 (built from little more than a couple of Sony Walkmans and an Oven Timer Unit). I bought a BEAM VHS tape back then (I think of this event), which included this […]
On Wednesday morning, Evan Ackerman over at BotJunkie posted about MIT’s Flyfire system. The idea behind the system is simple and very exciting: Swarms of tiny LED-carrying robot helicopters arrange themselves in the air to make 2D or 3D displays in which each bot serves as a single pixel. Evan linked to the project’s homepage on MIT’s SENSEable City Lab server and embedded a video posted by the group to YouTube showing the individual prototype swarmbots, which already exist, and some computer renderings of what the working displays would look like. Exciting, eh?
Tim O’Keefe, Michael McIntyre, and Brock Roland of San Francisco State University’s School of Engineering created MARV, here. That’s “MIDI Actuated Robotic Vibraphone,” of course. Which is a nested acronym, really. Crank it all the way out and it’s “Musical Instrument Digital Interface Actuated Robotic Vibraphone,” or MIDIARV, which is not nearly so catchy. Each […]
One problem with the cocktail robot genre is — at least until recently — everyone’s trying to make money off these devices so no one is willing to go open source. Well, trust our friends the Evil Mad Scientists (Lenore and Windell) to do it right. Their beautiful Drink Making Unit pumps liquids from three […]
We have covered other robotic Rubik’s Cube solvers before, but the CubeStormer is a little different. It’s fast, really fast! Apparently it’s able to solve any 3x3x3 Rubik’s cube in less than 12 seconds. Then again, maybe it isn’t that fast compared to Erik Akkersdijk
