Robotics

Party with Barbot the bartender robot

Party with Barbot the bartender robot

This Saturday, let a robot serve your booze at NYC Resistor’s Barbot party. Barbot, the bartender robot knows how to make a variety of mixed drinks. Like all great hacks, sometimes it gets its drink mixing protocol confused. Last time, my gin and tonic was 4 parts gin 1 part tonic. Date: Saturday July 11th, […]

Simple bot with breadboard body

Simple bot with breadboard body

I love the very BEAMish practice of using the components themselves to create the bodies of your robots. Here, a standard 2-column breadboard, a battery holder, and two hacked servos create the body of the bot. The RBBB, from Modern Devices, is the brain. A Sharp IR sensor, a regular servo, some wheels, wire, and […]

Jessica’s “Field Studies”

Protozoan Flagellates from Jessica Field on Vimeo. MAKE subscriber Rob Cruickshank sent us a link to the site of Canadian artist Jessica Field. Jessica makes these wonderful, funky little robo-critters, some BEAMish, others more sophisticated, with computer-control. I like how she “programs” failures/shortcomings into her robot creations. (Wait, don’t most robots do that on their […]

Contests on Let’s Make Robots

Contests on Let’s Make Robots

Let’s Make Robots is a popular site for robot hobbyists. They’ve been running two build contests on the site which are now in their finals. Rik, a community member writes: The LMR Dagu Mr. Basic Challenge invited makers to create any robot from a basic four wheel platform (provided by community sponsor Dagu Electronics). Entries […]

Rodney Brooks at Maker Faire

Rodney Brooks, of MIT’s AI Lab and iRobot, is one of my all-time heroes. His work has had a huge impact on how I look at technology in general, robotics in specific, approaches to problem-solving, and more. So I was bummed that I missed his talk (and meeting him) at Maker Faire. Thanks to FORA.tv, […]