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!
Double-Taker (Snout) by Golan Levin was created for the Robot 250 Festival in Pittsburgh. I really like how it is programmed to make “double takes” of the people passing by. I wonder if I can get a giant robotic Snout for the top of my house? “Double-Taker (Snout)” (interactive installation, 2008) deals in a whimsical […]
This is a cool little self-balancing robot that doesn’t use any fancy accelerometers or gyroscopes. You might even have all the parts needed to make one of these right now. This is a very simple robot that uses a simple switch as a sensor and stands on only two wheels with inverted pendulum mechanism. When […]
The “Heart Robot” was created by a team of Bristol UK researchers and artists in order to investigate the effects that a seemingly emotional machine can have on humans. The puppet responds to changes in sound, light and movement through automated control of eye movement, a virtual heartbeat and breath which inflates his belly and […]
Our pal I-Wei Huang, of Crabfu Steamworks, has issued a challenge on the Trossen Robotics Forums. It’s a contest, judged my I-Wei, to find the most “characterful” robot. He writes: To bring a bunch of hardware the illusion of life and character. This is NOT about AI or fancy software or hardware. It’s not to […]
GRIP (Group for Interdisciplinary Psychology), a multi-professional workgroup at Otto-Friedrich-University Bamberg, Germany, has several detailed tutorials on adding a “spycam” to Pleo, to create a facial recognition system (via off-bot processing on a PC), and an XBee Module for RF communications to/from Pleo. Working with the Pleo Platform [Thanks, Robert!]
On RoboCommunity, Grandlarseny37 has done a preliminary take-apart on the new WowWee Alive Cub robo-critter. Inside the WowWee Alive Cubs: Part 1 [Thanks, Robert!]
(Nope, it’s not a glimpse of an alternate reality where LEDs never came to be.) The “Stonehenge” clock-bot is more art than appliance – it uses a single robotic arm with a set of numbered cards to convey the time – Stonehenge uses a CrustCrawler Smart Arm and a Parallax Propeller chip to display the […]
