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!
17 year-old Anika Brandsma, of the Netherlands, (known as Anika Vuurzoon in the LEGO community) built this excellent take on the LEGO Friends Olivia’s Invention Workshop set. To bring Olivia’s enviable robotics workshop to life, Anika added motors, sensors, and the micro controller brain from a Mindstorms NXT set. She hid the mechanisms below the […]
This cool robot is inspired by the way slime mold moves, and consists of a balloon serving as the protoplasm, with real-time tunable springs and friction control units surrounding the balloon. [Technology Review via Beyond the Beyond]
GeekDad Robert Ferguson is playing around with Lego WeDo, a robotics system intended for kids too young for Mindstorms. He tested it out the best way possible, by building a Lego Most Useless Machine! It sounds like Robert’s post is the beginning of a detailed exploration of the system, so be sure to check back.
Boxie is a semi-autonomous robot that roams through its surroundings until it finds a willing human participant to answer its questions and star in a movie it films. It was designed and built by Alexander Reben at MIT’s Media Lab.
Most of the Barbots and their teams are returnees from previous years, but as with the DARPA Grand Challenges, the…ah… bar raises very quickly from one event to the next as the innovations pour forth. This year’s bots were all beautiful, with gracious interfaces.
The WALL-E Builders Club is getting ready for this year’s Maker Faire, to once again show off their loveable real-world analogue to the Pixar film favorite.
A group of UPenn Engineering students have taken several quadrotors and turned them into robotic musicians. We’ve seen the great swarming abilities of these machines recently, but now using various instruments and noisemakers, these aerial drones manage to plunk out a fairly convincing version of the “James Bond” theme.
