Drones Doing Good
Check out the winners of the Drone Social Innovation Award, and a few interesting runners-up. The Drone User Group Network established this prize to promote use of drones for the public good.
Robotics
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!
Crouching Phoenix, Flying Dragon
A phoenix, dragons, a flying Jesus with accompanying angels, and a flying wizard (not to be confused with Harry Potter) are among the menagerie of creations you may see this year at Maker Faire. It sounds a bit crazy and maybe it is, but I loved it last year and I’m sure I’ll love it again this year.
La Princesse
200,000 attendees (or victims?) of La Princesse witnessed five days of nigh-Lovecraftian horror back in 2008 during Liverpool’s Capital of Culture event and it has remained in my nightmares ever since.
The ChalkJET Writing Machine
“Way back” in 2009, students in the UC Berkley “ME 102” class came up with this excellent automatic chalk-spraying machine. It uses 8 cans of spray-chalk to spray the message of your choosing onto the sidewalk or street as you push it along. This device is controlled by two Arduino Duemilanove boards, which apparently base […]
Resistance is Futile: Harvard’s Kilobot Swarm Keeps Fellow Robots in Line
If you’ve ever made your own Bristlebot, you can appreciate how pared down and elegant is the category of artificial life know as vibrating robots, or vibrobots. Well, it turns out that when it comes to vibrobots, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In 2011, researchers at Harvard came out with […]
Cooler Robot Delivers Cold Beverages On-Demand
A robotic cooler that uses an Arduino for brains and serves drinks from an RC wheelchair platform.
A $100 Origami Robot That Folds Itself Up and Walks Away
I have a thing for low-tech robots, especially when they’re made from everyday stuff. The body of this new little robot bug from MIT and Harvard, described last week in the latest issue of Science, is made from a five-layer sandwich of copper traces, paper, and shape-memory polymer — the stuff you know as Shrinky […]
