Category: Robots

According to a story on the gadget mag T3’s site, the next gen Robosapien, the color LCD- and SD-card-equipped Robosapien RS Media, has been designed to easily interface with the Lego Mindstorms NXT microcontroller. The NXT computer brick will allegedly fit perfectly into the backpack designed into the RS Media. While the T3 article also has some tidbits about the Robosapien AFTER the Media model (which will, according to the piece, have Segway-like legs and be Net connected), let’s hope that the addition of the NXT MCU on the RS Media means that we won’t have to wait for the 4th gen to get ol’ Robosap online.

And is it just me, or does the RS Media look a little bit like Robocop with his head on backwards? “You have the right to remain silent.” Blam!

Geeks.com is selling the Parallax Boe-Bot, a really nice starter robot experimenter’s platform that uses the Basic Stamp 2, for only US$64. Considering that the Boe-Bot retails for $150 and the Basic Stamp 2 cost $50 by itself, this is a great deal.

Parallax was kind enough to send me a Boe-Bot kit when I was writting my robot book. I never got a chance to play with it. I gave it to my intern for helping me with the robot projects. The kit looked really good tho, easy to assemble, with great docs, lots of ideas for experiments and using the built-in breadboard, etc. For $64, this is a no brainer.

Thanks, Tim!

When we started blogging about steam-power robots a while back, they seemed little more than a cool curiosity. But we keep seeing builders showing off new steam-powered creations (okay, so many of them are from the same guy, but still…).

And now, two steam-powered bots have brought home the gold from the recent RoboGames. The Trilobite Tank (pictured left) won gold in the Best in Show category, while the Steam Walker got a gold medal in the Kinetic Artbots category. Images of both bots in action can be seen on the Crabfu website. Congrats to Crabfu’s I-Wei Huang on the victory. BTW, we recommend watching the NBC Tech Now vid linked from his site for background on this fascinating hardware hacker.

As you may have already heard, yesterday, Microsoft announced its foray into the robotics marketplace/hobby community with the release of their free (for now) Windows-based environment for creating robotic control applications. Concurrent with the Microsoft announcement (at RoboBusiness Con 2006), Carnegie Mellon University announced its plans to open a Center for Robotics Innovation (with funding from Microsoft). The Center will maintain a website for hobbyists, academics, and commercial companies to share robotics ideas, technology and software.

At Street Tech, we’ll reserve judgement on whether this is ultimately a good thing for robotics or just another area of technology where good wares and real innovation is going to be paved over by the MS juggernaut. The fear is that robotics could be the next area of technology to fall victim to Microsoft’s tendency to “embrace, extend, and extinquish.” It’ll be interesting to see what roboticists (who aren’t on Microsoft’s payroll) think of these new tools as they make their way into the real world.

Here’s Robot Mag’s coverage of the announcement.
Here’s the MSDN Site
Here’s where CMU’s Center for Robotics Innovation will end up.
Here’s an article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
And last, but not least, here’s a video from Channel 9, an interview with Tandy Trower of the MS Robotics Group.

Doing a search on Flickr, to see if anyone else had put up pics of the two BEAM projects in Make, I found this builder’s amazing BEAM creations. He does really beautifully designed critters, most of them fashioned from techno-junk. After the jump, you’ll find his take on the two types of bots I covered in the Make piece, Symets and Solarrollers. He made his Roller out of parts from an old Walkman and the Symet from a CD-ROM drive.

I used a picture in the Beginner’s Guide to BEAM article of Harold Ilano’s incredibly cool Black Vermin, his take on Mark Tilden’s infamous VBUG 1.5, built from a Sony Walkman and an oven timer (among other parts). Harold has a bunch of other cool bots on his site, including the recently built Hermit, a wee-little four-legged walker that uses five micro-servos. Check out the vids of it in action.

This Make reader did a really nice job of building the three-cap Symet (a.k.a. a Trimet) from my BEAM projects piece in the latest Make (No. 6). His build is almost identical to mine, but his discharge time and the amount of spins he gets is a bit less. Mine got a pretty satisfying rotation on each charge. Not sure which value of voltage trigger he used. His is so neat and beautifully soldered. Mine was messy and I solder like crap. Maybe that had something to do with it. I had more weight in lead shot. Here’s a link to a few more Flickr pics, and here’s a link to a YouTube vid showing the little robo-top in action.

Here’s another builder’s bot. He ingeniously added little flange/fin thingies and it looks like a ball on the bottom (known in a BEAM trade as a motivator) to the motor axle. I’d like to see this one in action.

The always thoughtful wireheads over at Solarbotics have put together a couple of parts bundles for my two BEAMbot projects in the latest issue of Make. Each bundle comes with a solar cell, a cassette motor, and all required electronics. All you need to add are the structural pieces (paper clips and other buildy bits) and the wheels (for the Roller).

We blogged about the new Wow Wee robot, the Roboreptile, earlier in the week. Today, PC Mag has a hands-on review of the little mecca-godzilla. Their verdict? It’s cool, fast moving, and true to its BEAMish progeny, it achieves a “startling effect” with its simple, largely analog, electronics. But they also found it be one pissed off bot that’s a little hard to tame and maybe too much of a handful for the youngins. As they point out, each robot in the line has a distinct personality: the Robosapien is a big goofball and Roboraptor is playful and aggressive, like a dog. Roboreptile is… well “irate.” Cool. A REAL candidate for feral robotics.

The latest Make podcast is video from the recent Seattle Dorkbot meeting where SMART (Seattle Mindstorms and Robotic Techies) showed off a bunch of collaborative bots built with Mindstorms, some with the upcoming NXT system. The bots use line-following (among other sensing) to travel from one bot to the next transferring a load of balls as they go.

Our pals over at Nxtbot.com bring us news of a new addition to the highly successful line of Wow Wee robots. They link to a new site for the bot (currently sans content), a critter known as the Roboreptile, and they quote from a Sci Fi Channel blog item by a writer who got to see the US$120 robot in action:

“You can control the toothy robot directly from the remote control, but it’s more fun the let the little guy (2-1/4 feet long) roam around, relying on its infrared sensors to guide it. Set loose on the kitchen floor, Roboreptile will run speedily along on all fours, avoiding obstacles, until it encounters a potential threat (Fido, perhaps), whereupon it’ll switch to biped mode to ‘attack.’”