By now most of the people affected by winter storm Nemo have unburied themselves from the snow. I’m sure many of them won’t want to see snow again for a very long time, let alone shovel it. Which is why now is the perfect time to start building your robotic snowplow just like these three industrious makers.
Got a robot on the web? Consider adding it to Livebots.cc, which aggregates UStream feeds from multiple robots that allow visitors to control them through the web. The “hand” robot in the image above was built by the site operator, Navic, who documented instructions on how to build the hand-bot. [via Guilherme Martins]
Affordable and hobbyist-friendly manufacturing tools that convert polygons into physical objects have been available for more than a decade. Although new technologies such as ABS extruders are different in many ways, it’s reasonable to suspect that the prospects of home manufacturing may have relatively little to do with the choice of a particular tool.
Seventeen-year-old Easton LaChappelle has created a 3D printed robotic prosthetic arm controlled by brainwaves that he hopes will bring an affordable, functional artificial limb to the masses. Oh, and Heineken wants 5,000 arms for serving beer.
What has 6 legs, 19 servos, an Arduino for brains, and ultrasonic sensor eyes? It’s Hexy the Hexapod robot from Arcbotics, and it’s available in the Maker Shed just in time for the Holidays.
This modular robot made up of <1cm components, can fit together with its cousins to form more complicated structures, building on a concept where proteins could one day do the same thing to form minuscule machines.
DARPA, in collaboration with Boston Dynamics, has created a variety of fascinating robots in the past, including one that can outrun Usain Bolt and another that has a surprisingly human-like gait. Here’s a short clip of DARPA’s Pet-Proto robot accomplishing autonomous decision making and navigation through three obstacles.
