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!
Basically, microscale 3D printing the same way a popup book creates a three-dimensional shape. The Harvard Monolithic Bee is a millimeter-scale flapping wing robotic insect produced using Printed Circuit MEMS (PC-MEMS) techniques. This video describes the manufacturing process, including pop-up book inspired assembly. [via Ponoko]
This robot, developed at Cornell, can travel along beams and modify them. BuildBot! [via Beyond the Beyond]
By now most of you have probably seen or heard some version of Animusic’s digitally animated musical concerts – specifically, their “Pipe Dream” video which has over 1.1 million views on YouTube. Well, Intel went ahead and made a real-world version of that concert!
“Now I’m having trouble sleeping at night as I lie there thinking of all of the cool things I can build.”
Everyone loves a soft robot, and I’m fond of the marine variety. This bioinspired prototype tentacle, made of silicone rubber, not only curls and extends in eerily squidlike fashion, it’s also got pressure sensors embedded beneath its suckers so it can grasp objects, like a cephalopod should.
Last March, roboticist Eric Brown and co-workers at the University of Chicago made headlines with their new, unconventional robot gripper design: a balloon filled with coffee grounds or other grainy material and fitted with a vacuum line. At atmospheric pressure, the balloon is squishy and can be “mushed” around an object—even traditionally hard-to-grip stuff like […]
The clever designers at Chicago’s Tanagram adapted code developed to recognize those little black-and-white augmented-reality markers (“fiduciary markers”) for target acquisition on a DARPA-funded robot that can autonomously deliver humanitarian aid and other supplies to 20′ square markers unrolled on the ground. What’s great about fiducial marker tracking technology is that it is pre-built to […]
