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!
Here’s a one-motor coat hanger walker I spotted on Flickr. It uses the same single-motor hacked servo and BEAM bicore circuit as the Jerome Demer’s project I featured in my book, Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Building Robots, but the leg configuration is different than Jerome’s and my bots, and the center of gravity is shifted […]
This Instructable details a number of tiny robots (e.g. a cubic inch sumo and a pager-bot that fits on a quarter) built by the author. If nothing else, it’ll give you an idea for just how difficult it is to build autonomous, programmable robots on this scale. Building Small Robots: Making One Cubic Inch Micro-Sumo […]
We’ve written about Lockwasher’s rayguns before – he has some great junk robots, too!
Certainly a unique take on robotic kits, the Twitchie awaits your creative ‘touch’ – Twitchie is an open source multi-purpose robot kit. It has the capacity to frighten and scare, but also the power to love and care! It’s a regular pathos-o-matic! Grown men scream! Maternal instincts long dormant, suddenly activated! It’s a robot unlike […]
Scientists from the university of Reading have created a simple wheeled robot with distance sensors that is controlled wirelessly by a network of cells from a rat’s brain. The sensor data is fed to the neurons which reside in a nutrient/antibiotic solution – the cells output is then transmitted to the ‘body’ as control commands. […]
An Arduino, model bulldozer, servos, and sensors can be hacked together to make a sub-$100 robotics platform, appropriately named Ard-e. While certainly nowhere near as fancy as this Wall-E replica, the price is right and the Arduino’s got a huge body of pre-existing code for working with sensors that the aspiring roboticist can build upon. […]
The “CotsBots” are inexpensive, modular mobile robots created from off-the-shelf components. The bots are “meant as a platform to investigate algorithms, cooperation, and distributed sensing in large robot networks.” Each bot includes built in radio communication, and are written in TinyOS, an open source system for large-scale distributed sensor networks. Pretty cool idea that we […]
