Robotics

Looks like the Robosapien folks will be adding the Segway balancing technology to their product offerings. Press snippet – WowWee Ltd, parent company of WowWee Robotics, the #1 consumer entertainment robotics company, and Segway Inc., maker of the Segway Human Transporter (HT), today announced they will co-develop a range of WowWee products that will incorporate Segway Smart Motion technology. The best part of this will be picking up a fairly low-cost toy robot that uses Segway Smart Motion, and making something with else with it. Link.

Make Flickr photo pool member Lepow finished his LCD belt buckle and it turned out great. In the latest set of photos he notes “The belt buckle on display at the Jessica Murray Projects gallery up till November 12, 2005”. See our previous coverage of the project here and here. Link.

Filed under the “don’t try this a home” Maker project. Someone seems to have replaced some of the hand electronics in a Robosapien robot and added a flame thrower, since that’s exactly what it was missing. [via] Link.

These pages are a little hard to get around, but this site has some interesting mods and hacks for the new WoW Wee robot, the RoboRaptor. This project tutorial shows you how to add a new color LED to the controller and how to add a stealth mode by turning off the green LED, you know, so you can have your robo dino buddy sneak up on people. Link.

I, for one, welcome our new waffle making robot overlords – Jesse Klein is in no rush to get to the patent office. His invention – a robot that toasts, butters, pours syrup and spreads whipped cream on waffles – is both ingenious and absurd. It’s a contraption in the mold of Rube Goldberg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist known for his drawings of inventions that make simple tasks agonizingly complex [via] Link.

Go Stanley! Three driverless robotic vehicles led by Stanford University on Saturday crossed the finish line of a $2 million Pentagon-sponsored robot race across the rugged Mojave Desert. The race announcer did not immediately declare a winner because 22 out of the 23 robots left the starting line at staggered times at dawn, racing against the clock rather than each other. Link.